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Brainstorm
I got an Oculus VR rig for Christmas, so my involvement with the actual, real, physical, tactile world has now come to a conclusion.
Kidding! Somewhat. It’s not the holodeck. Yet. The headsets are still a bit too heavy, and the illusion of seamless 360 vision is not absolute. Bandwidth and the problem of the progressive lens can make the experience of your New Digital Home a tad less convincing. You see a nook you’d like to visit; you can’t walk there. You see a landscape outside your window, and you can’t walk out and smell the flowers. But you can call up a big pane with lots of buttons and options, right in front of you, floating in your digital space that is suddenly much, much more compelling than the room you were in before you strapped on the headset.
I went to Rome to take a tour of the Pantheon. It’s a 360 view; as you walk alongside the guide, you can turn around and see the square, watch all the tourists pass. You can look up at the massive doors and capitols. Once inside, you can look all around the ancient structure and think: A) this is incredible, and B) if I had a better Internet up to my office, this might be less pixilated.
So within a half an hour of entering the new world, you’re already thinking about how it can be better, how it will be better. Today, a blurry Pantheon. Tomorrow, 6K resolution with interactive characters in the room who look fully human but can interact with you, answer questions, tell stories, flirt.
I customized my avatar to look like me. It doesn’t. But it’s close! Except it isn’t. The options for customization are surprisingly scant, almost Sims 2.0 level. I’d expected more. This has the effect of channeling individuality into a limited number of manifestations that nevertheless provide great diversity — I might meet someone who looks just like my avatar but has an earring and a different hairstyle. However many combinations exist, they’re still defined by a look, a set number of polygons, a style.
“Meet?” you say. Yes: There are social events in the metaverse. I decided to join one to see what was on the other side of the hermetically sealed apps and videos.
You begin in a room, which is yours. It’s intentionally unreal, with stylized plants and furniture, but it’s a transition place to get used to your online social existence. There’s a mirror. You can look at how others will see you. A tutorial explains the buttons that appear when you raise your left hand: there’s the microphone button and the shield button. The former lets you talk to people. The latter keeps them from getting too close.
You wonder what it would be like to assume a female avatar and walk into the room with shields down.
You know that 83% of the people in the room will be male, and of the 17% who look female, 84% of them will be male, as well. In the social spaces of the metaverse, a female avatar with the voice turned off and the shields down is probably a dude.
Or so I assume. I could not figure out how to open the door to get into the party and gave up. I went back to Rome and walked around for a while. I rode a rollercoaster, which was unimpressive — the visual experience was total, the physical forces completely absent.
That will change. Eventually people will shrug on haptic T-shirts and pants so they can get tactile feedback. When you shake someone’s hand in the metaverse, you will feel it. The estates that control the images of famous dead actors will license them to the metaverse so you can walk hand-in-hand with Leslie Caron down the streets of Paris.
Most people will use it for meetings, or play golf or tennis, or watch VR videos their grandkids shot. The League of Hapless Onanists will link their headsets to their Bitcoin accounts.
It is an inevitable technology, but it comes along at the absolute worst time possible. There is no COVID in the metaverse. No empty downtowns or boarded-up shopping areas or no-go zones, no spaces teeming with the Unsafe. The people on Reddit who flood r/coronavirus to talk about their social anxiety and PTSD and hatred of leaving the house will settle into this world, eventually, like people lowering their scabby, raw bottoms into a warm bath, and imagine, in having left the real world for the metaverse, that they are on the vanguard of a new world. Lesser in some ways but better in so many others.
It all began with the first quarter dropped into a Pac-Man console.
Last note: I found a VR view from the International Space Station. You appear in the capsule that looks down on Earth. You look left, right, up, down — you see out of all the windows, see the rest of the station. It’s not a recreation. It was filmed up there. It was absolutely beautiful. I ended up on my hands and knees in my studio, wearing the machine, lost in the view and grateful for it. Something I would never otherwise see like this.
What else can I see like this? There’s the promise. And oh man, there’s the problem. And vice versa.
P.S. You need a Facebook account to use it, so of course everything is sorted and stored. I stay far away from Facebook and created a burner to use the rig, but I still expect my online ads to offer discounts on trips to Rome.
Published in Science & Technology
Agreed. You can get a program that lets you walk around the Flavian Amphitheater. But you have to go there to feel for yourself how the steps seem oddly unmatched to human gait, and how people must have tumbled down the stairs in great clumsy clumps after every event. Likewise Pompeii. It’s one thing to look up at virtual Vesuvius. It’s another to be there, and see the smoke curl from the mountain, and feel a slight rill of fear. It’s not like I wasn’t warned.
I attended an event at the IBM offices in Albuquerque in 1981, during which the original IBM PC was introduced. It came with one of two different video cards, one a respectable green character display, the other a raster color display. I, a serious sort, favored the former: I wrote banking software at the time and didn’t see a need for graphics.
A very few years later — I wish I could remember exactly when — someone came out with an add-in board that would allow you to display television or a video on your display. I remember commenting at the time, though perhaps only to myself, that I just couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever want to watch video on their computer screen.
Finger firmly on the pulse of the popular culture. That’s me.
I suspect VR will be huge. I think AR (augmented reality) will be useful, and ultimately very useful and even ubiquitous. But VR will be huge, seductive, inevitable, and awful.
PS/2 is the first time I remember that. Then it was VGA grayscale and color options.
An answer for everything I suppose. As long as I get to keep my skepticism for the same. Thank you, James.
I think you’re right, in that AR will be persistent, useful, and so ubiquitous that it’s not consciously noticed, in the way that I don’t notice when the podcast who which I’m listening transfers without effort to my car or computer. But VR will always be a place to which you have to go, and that will make an important psychological distinction. For a while, anyway.
VR is one of the recurring ideas that seemed to be on the cusp of transforming entertainment, a quarter century ago. It’s never totally gone away, and for several years Oculus and other VR headsets have kept the idea alive. Until now, it hasn’t achieved what was predicted for it, largely because the early implementations were too crude. (We’ve still got a Nintendo VirtualBoy that looks like a plastic 3D toy of the Fifties but is, in fact, from forty years later.)
Now VR may be finally reaching a popular price point and an acceptable quality threshold. Like continuous speech recognition, self-driving cars, self-landing rockets, and robots that can walk on two legs, it’s one of those seemingly pie-in-the-sky problems that turned out to be do-able-after-all, though it took two or three human generations to solve.
BTW, VR’s early Nineties New Media Age sibling, Interactive Storytelling, hasn’t fared as well. Outside of a handful of experiments, this choose-your-ending format never really made it outside of the gaming world. It’s surprising only for people with a long memory, because for years Hollywood expected it to be a really big deal, a force to reckon with. What if audiences could choose to change the ending? It made people nervous.
We all know that guys are waiting to have virtual sex with Hollywood starlets . . .
All that will matter is that the certification boards were properly paid off with Zuck Bucks.
Ray Bradbury is an interesting case of an author who could both celebrate such technologies and warn about their dangers.
Though critics mostly focus on the anti-censorship message, his warning about VR was firmly embedded in Fahrenheit 451 in the sad (and suicidal) character of Mildred Montag, who spends her days in a room where the four walls are all television screens.
And while it’s true that the firemen burned books, the salient point was that people simply stopped reading them anyway.
Dennis Miller used to say that (more or less verbatim) “when a regular guy can sit in his Barcolounger with a Budweiser and (have sex with) Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it’s going to make crack look like Sanka.”
Aside from the hilarity of showing that brainwaves etc could be sent over POTS wiring to a pay phone yet, and using an acoustic coupler!, the biggest flaw of Brainstorm was the portrayal of an “out-of-body” experience, life-after-death etc, while people ignored that the device could only record what was happening INSIDE HER HEAD. Basically, illusions/delusions as her brain shut down.
Brainstorm had a sense of real-life product engineering. The first mindreader/recorder was a laboratory apparatus that took up several workbenches and had a helmet the size of a 1950s beauty parlor hair dryer. The next version had a much smaller, lighter helmet and the machinery had been reduced to the size of two large suitcases. The final version had a minimal headset and the rest of it fit into the size of an attache case.
Yeah, the idea that they’d be able to reduce human bandwidth to 10000 Hz does seem pretty ridiculous. But the prop guys had a smart idea on the recording media, two or three-inch wide iridescent “tape” that implied extremely wide bandwidth, equal to the electromagnetic frequency of light.
Brainstorm could also be the subject of a post: what can you do when an actor dies in the middle of production? It also happened to Giant (1956?) and Gladiator (2000).
As I recall, they reduced the size of the “user-end” recording/playback equipment, but it still depended on the laser-type recording equipment back at the lab. It’s similar to the Oculus VR headset in the OP, which is all the user is aware of but still relies on data being fed to it from computer systems that might be distributing the work across more than one continent.
I have to say, no, I dont want, and wont want it. Ever.
But good try.
The League of Hapless Onanists is my least favorite Sean Connery movie.
Actually a fair amount of rowing is lower body and core. I do rowing primarily as a cardio work. I find it easier on my knees than cycling or running. There are some rowers that have virtual video integrated with them; however, I found them too expensive for what I was interested in. Also I was unhappy with the subscription model the ones I researched used. I went with a good quality rower and then looked into VR as an option to keep it fun. It is interesting because normal rowing of course you would be looking backwards to your direction of travel while most of the VR translates the motion into a forward looking experience, so less of a simulation of reality and more a pretty place to explore in a naturalish way. There are options in the VR app I use for classes and competitions; however, I tend to just do solo exploring.
Thanks for the info. Would you mind telling us which system you chose?
The Sistine Chapel:
https://m.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani-mobile/fr/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/tour-virtuale.html#