VR Reader
Selected Articles and Commentary
I am 72, which I consider to be semi-old, and I am very active in social VR.
This article is a brief collection of readings, set in an overall commentary about virtual reality, primarily intended as a backgrounder for semi-old friends and colleagues who may be interested.
VR is growing but it is still a niche area, within which the non-gaming social platforms are another embedded niche. Furthermore, my involvement is primarily confined to one particular social VR platform, AltspaceVR, owned by Microsoft, making most of my experience the product of a niche within a niche within a niche.
I am not an objective and comprehensive journalist, nor am I an evangelist, (even though I am enthusiastic). I am a loving critic. I see many possibilities, many futures. Some futures can co-exist, some cannot.
Virtual Reality is a medium, or a media technology. As a medium of expression, it is comparable to video, which it surpasses with its third spatial dimension. As a medium of distance communication it is not comparable to anything because it successfully ignores real distance by creating a new shared presence.
There is a spectrum of relationships between the consensus reality we commonly share and various synthetic ‘realities.’ What is often called ‘Augmented Reality,’ or AR, is just a bit of synthetic stuff laid on top of the world we’re used to, like, Pokemon Go.
The goal of Virtual Reality, VR, is the other end of the spectrum — full immersion in a synthetic world with no input from the other one.
Everything from AR to VR, with a bunch of MR in between, is collectively referred to as XR, or XR Technologies.
A newer term is Spatial Media. Whether it’s Pokemon Go or the Virtual Angkor Wat, the common thread is that virtual media exists in three dimensions, unlike media on a page, a picture, or a screen. Because ‘Virtual’ has grown to mean anything your physical body isn’t present for, such as a Zoom birthday party, more precise language helps.
Trending AR VR Articles:
1. The Possibility of AR on the Urban Space
History
I attended the 1990 SIGGRAPH conference in Boston where Dr. William Bricken made a seminal speech and delivered a spectacularly quotable line:
Psychology is the Physics of VR
“The Year of VR” was declared. It was all amazing. It would be widely adopted very soon.
Well, that was wrong. But Dr. Bricken’s statement is still at the core of the medium. The overall presentation is a classic itself, and so I begin these readings with:
Virtual Reality: Directions of Growth, Notes from the SIGGRAPH ’90 Panel.
The famous line is in Part VIII and is part of longer statement:
Psychology is the Physics of VR.
Our body is our interface.
Knowledge is in experience.
Data is in the environment.
Scale and time are explorable dimensions.
One experience is worth a trillion bits.
Realism is not necessary.
There are other versions of VR History of course. Flight simulators are VR for some people, and military funding to train pilots better is deeply involved in the origin story, which goes back to the 1920s according to some sources.
If you can’t be in a flight simulator, the next best thing would be video. Microsoft has been very active in this area for years and their video on the history of flight simulation is a good introduction.
Here is one more good straight ahead historical layout for folks who like a timeline with capsule summaries of key moments in the development process, from an excellent blog titled, Virtual Speech.
People, like me, who loved the idea of new shared worlds we could make were disappointed for the next twenty-five years and many of them still are.
I’m not. We’ll get to that.
To me, modern VR started when Google released the Cardboard App in 2014 basically for free to a world that basically scratched its head and said, ‘huh?’
That was 24 years after ‘The Year of VR.’ It is still far from clear what Google was thinking but it sent a kind of signal.
Most of the virtual action in the roughly 25 years between SIGGRAPH 1990 and Google Cardboard was in gaming. Sure, it was on-screen but gamers controlled the action and felt like they were part of the action. Segas and Commodores and Amigas helped condition us to believe that immersion is best put in service of something interactive and action-oriented, something game-ified.
That ancestry influences the way spatial media is emerging in the culture now. Virtual Reality is presented as a game, something to be played. The potential for new forms of social interaction, new networks created and held together through the social presence of spatial media, is largely ignored.
In the years since SIGGRAPH 90, VR has grown in an increasingly market-driven environment. Value must be demonstrated in dollars. High-Value enterprises, like medical education, have also benefited from funding, which advances the field overall.
VR had always been linked to computers — until Google Cardboard showed it didn’t have to be. It could be linked to apps running on mobile devices.
The dynamic has changed since 2014. It is assumed that XR-Technologies will become an important part of the culture, although many predictions have already gone wrong about how and when.
Use Cases became the way the field was discussed; concrete applications, doable now, for a defined need. I currently subscribe to six VR e-newsletters and podcasts (I will list them all at the and of this piece) and Use Cases is still a primary form of discourse.
As a result, much of the recent writing, thinking and development of XR-Technologies has been task-oriented. This link to Science Daily’s succinct definition of VR also includes a list of recent VR articles showing the context-specific nature of current coverage.
It is the broader social dimensions of spatial media that have drawn me into active engagement with people and a form of world building. I write about these experiences and include selected titles and excerpts, with links to full articles, later in this piece.
For those who would prefer to review respected academic research on Social VR prior to or instead of personal journalism, there is one source that stands out for the depth and breadth of their published work.
That source is Virtual Human Interaction Lab, at Stanford University.
One research area has been the relationship between VR and empathy. VR’s possible ability to facilitate Empathy has been a major theme since 2015, when Christopher Milk’s TED Talk produced another seminal moment for VR.
The VHI Lab’s ‘Publications’ page is informative, even just browsing to take in the range of questions investigated — from the 2021 ‘Zoom Fatigue’ study to ‘Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior, (2013).’
Another excellent survey and discussion of the topic, Virtual Reality and Empathy Enhancement: Ethical Aspects, was produced by Open Science publisher, Frontiers, November, 2020.
A missing link in the literature is any useful description of current implementation. Beyond case histories, how many nursing homes are using VR with elderly residents? How much and what kind of medical education is now delivered virtually? Or if your interest is simply social or collaborative, what is needed and where is the best place to do it?
In brief:
— today’s state of the art consumer products are standalone headsets that cost less than $500
— a company owned by Facebook makes the current top-rated best seller, the Oculus Quest2
— Apps are downloaded onto the headset. Most are solo games. Some are games designed to be played with others
— A few are open ended social or collaborative platforms for gatherings, discussions, parties, or educational events
It is hard to find a good overview. This article briefly describes a few of the most popular social VR apps. The same author’s First Day in VR with an Oculus also gives a sense of some of the basic things that happen.
And of course, the pandemic has had a tremendous effect on VR, accelerating the growth curve and bringing new kinds of non-gaming people into the userbase, reasonably well-summarized by CNBC.
I say I am not an evangelist because I am not interested in selling or persuading or promoting. But I am an advocate.
I advocate using spatial media as an instrument of personal connection and relationships, not just as a vehicle for selling stuff to consumers.
The way I advocate for a way of using media is to use media that way myself. When video cameras capable of recording a full 360 degree image for less than $500 appeared in 2016, I bought one and started using it. When the Oculus Go headset appeared in 2018, I could load it up with my own immersive video.
Oculus Go for Old People, Part One, June 28, 2018
I began writing this series on Medium in the hopes it would arouse the interest of other old people. I wrote ten of them, until the Go was replaced by the Quest.
The articles were very popular and helped me gain many Followers. I’m not sure if they got anybody into VR.
I’m not so old that I need virtual reality because I can’t do anything in the actual one any more. Maybe I will someday, but for now, VR is a way for me to stay engaged, an endless source of projects that interest me, that I can work on by myself or with others, both of which I am doing.
VR Isn’t What You Think It Is, August 23, 2020
I had a plan to produce great 360 video in Cambodia and show it to supporters of Cambodian Living Arts and anyone else in VR.
Then the pandemic happened.
Instead of traveling to Cambodia, I began meeting with my Cambodian friends in VR. Pretty soon we figured out how to produce musical shows on a new virtual stage.
I also began hosting events within my son’s VR community, EvolVR, finding a level of openness and sharing that VR really seemed conducive to.
Right now, Virtual Reality is still becoming. Right now, you could have an idea for a VR event you’d like to run or a show you’d like to produce in VR and just do it. People will come. My son wondered what VR meditation would be like — now he leads meditation groups with people from all over the world three times a week in three different VR places.
There are no gatekeepers. It will not always be this way.
I think that most people vaguely see VR as something like 3D TV. Wherever TV shows come from now, that’s where VR will come from, only they’ll be 3D, which is cool.
It is cool, but it’s actually even cooler. The 3D part turns out to be a second-level matter. That’s not what keeps me going back. What keeps me going back is people. Not stories about people, elegantly crafted at professional billing rates. Just people.
VR Is Not Stalled, October 20, 2020
By October, 2020, I had been leading sessions on death and bereavement for months — and we were producing live music from Phnom Penh for a worldwide audience. Possibilities that I had not imagined in 2019 were daily life in 2020.
When people say VR is stalled, what they are really saying is, there is no sufficiently aggregated mass market, yet (because it is assumed to be inevitable), that can be objectified and commodified and targeted in order to sell stuff.
Aw, too bad. What a disappointment.
You can see it in the headset packaging. Logos of the familiar brands, implicitly telling us as we unbox our new device that we are meant to consume content from the same old same old, and pay for it.
Virtual Reality Is Not a Game, November 10, 2020
Early November, 2020 was a peak period in the United States, or at least it seemed that way at the time.
Many new people were finding VR every day and they were also finding comfort in the social gatherings and meet-ups.
I wrote my most explicit piece yet about the serious new worlds and social relations we are building in virtual environments. Calling it a game is insulting.
The gigantic hierarchical institutions that once organized our world are losing influence. The stories they tell to keep things on track aren’t working very well any more.
New networks are forming, new ways of organizing, driven by new narratives of what can be done. Virtual Worlds are where we will go to be with people from anywhere, to build trust, and consider things that matter with others.
Burners, Death, and VR, September 3, 2020
Mortality has been a central aspect of my life for over tens years. Continuing the training and education I had been doing before the pandemic in VR felt like a natural step. We’d been having Death discussions every week in VR since early March. It was a revelation every time. People just opened up and talked.
Then one week, the Burners joined. It was obvious in a second who was there because of Burning Man in VR this year. They are members of a thriving and successful community, out on the margins of western culture, and they sound like it.
Death has a higher profile than usual. It’s tough for some people to keep it tamped down. Maybe they need to talk about it. That’s what our event is for.
Six months we’ve been having the discussion, and then this week the Burners came to Death Q & A.
The Virus that drove a lot of forward-thinking people to online and virtual environments also drove a significant number of Burning Man people, Burners, to buy a damn headset or download the app to a PC and at least do something.
Remembering RBG in VR, September 23, 2020
I didn’t want to remember Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the way I knew I would be told to remember her … I wanted to reflect on my own and then talk about her appreciatively with others when I was ready.
Fortunately, Virtual Reality now provides the perfect opportunity for the second part, the social part. Thousands of people from every demographic imaginable have found VR during the disconnected time of Covid and discovered a level of connection there they never expected.
Raising Funds in VR, November 29, 2020
We sold tickets to a free event. Not obvious, but it worked. I’m including this article in the Reader because I believe it’s idea that is scalable and transferrable.
The Khmer Magic Music Bus is a project with a purpose, a defined social benefit. Setting up the shows through Eventbrite provided a platform for describing the KMMB and for fundraising.
Making ‘The Khmer Magic Music Bus in VR’ a ticketed event made it feel different than a guitar player stepping up on open mic night. I love guitar players stepping up on open mic night, but very few of them are genocide survivors like KMMB’s co-founder, Arn Chorn-Pond.
Ways to Get Your Business into VR, January 11, 2020
I have now been paid for services rendered in my avatar form. It was a good rate too.
In order to get started, it is not necessary to answer all the important questions. In fact, it may not be possible to begin answering them without getting started first.
It might be necessary, however, to at least select Who — which department, which individuals — and that can lead to problems.
Or maybe not.
Why not everybody?
Maybe someone could have embraced the whole field of synthetic and immersive realities back at some point to make a set of readings that would have been comprehensive at that time. I can’t do it now and I don’t think anyone can. There are too many aspects of spatial media.
I have focused here on what I hope will be of interest to semi-old people and maybe others. Semi-old people are probably more interested in socializing and chillin’ than developing the next ‘killer app’ to transform an entire enterprise. But there’s always exceptions
Please use the Comments and private communication to let me know about other candidates for this collection of material.
For those of you open to e-content as an instructional vehicle here are some of the important newsletters and podcasts I follow on VR:
- VR Scout — Tends to have more slightly in-depth articles, weekly
- Road to VR — Two or three brief articles daily
- Topio Networks — Daily focus on industry use cases
- Inside VR — Daily, very industry focused
- UploadVR — News and articles
- VR Focus — News and articles
- Voices of VR Podcast — Weekly, with an archive of hundreds of informative interviews. The link goes to Kent Bye’s Top Ten for Getting Started with VR.
- Reddit VR — You want to know what’s really going on? Read Reddit.
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