I gave a talk at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I attempted to summarize highlights from over 400 Voices of VR podcast interviews. This was a daunting task which forced me to synthesize the emergent patterns that I’ve been seeing, and create an underlying structure that could help tell the story of all of the ways that VR might impact humanity. What resulted from this process was a framework and model for understanding the VR landscape that I’m calling “The Human Experience of Virtual Reality.”
These twelve spheres are spread out across two main axes between self and other on the horizontal plane and your private and public experiences on the vertical plane. You can either watch the video of this talk, or read a brief summary down below while listening to my presentation. I’ve also included a list of specific episodes that I mention during the talk down below.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
VR Fund’s Tipatat Chennavasin’s made the following visualization of the VR Landscape, which was a snapshot that he created from his more comprehensive and up-to-date Trello board titled “Virtual Reality Industry 2016”:
I cross-referenced this visualization with my Voices of VR podcast interview backlog to discover that I had interviewed about 44% of the companies listed on Tipatat’s snapshot:
This felt like I had made a good start at covering the diversity of the VR landscape, but the thing that was most striking to me was that I wasn’t necessarily aiming to achieve a 100% completion rate. This caused me to look further to see if there might be a simpler approach to understanding the VR landscape that reflected what I’ve been discovering on the podcast, but also could guide me in the future in covering the evolving VR landscape. My next step was to visualized of all of the different guests on the Voices of VR podcast in order to see if there were any patterns that emerged:
I noticed that there were a lot of different topics and realms that I had explored that didn’t quite fit into Tiptat’s mapping of the VR landscape, which was very much motivated by the desire to track the start-up & established companies who are players within the VR space.
I wanted to have a more elegant, simple, and memorable system for helping me keep track of the virtual reality landscape, and so I came up with the following framework, which describes the different domains of “The Human Experience of Virtual Reality”:
The horizontal axis is between self and other. Some experiences are more focused on cultivate a sense of embodied presence where you can exert your agency and express your identity, while other experiences may be more about having you empathize with the story of another person and receive their story. My interview with Eric Darnell made it clear to me that there is a tension between empathy and agency. I personally don’t think that it will be impossible to eventually combine these two polar opposites within the same VR experience, but I do think that it will take some specific context shifts to move between a more passive and interactive mode of storytelling as I discussed with Devon Dolan in the four types of VR storytelling.
The vertical access is between private and public, represented by the personal experiences of connecting to a sense of home and family versus your public life and reputation, which is most often associated with your professional career. You can think of the private experiences as ones that are more of an inner type of meaning and experience specific to you, and on the other extreme are the more outer experiences that are shared with others.
It’s likely that virtual reality experiences will combine a lot of these different spheres, and I’d predict that the social VR and world-building applications that can incorporate as many of these different domains as possible will be some of the early winners in creating a metaverse that’s just as compelling as the full spectrum of the human experience in real reality.
I ask each of my guests to share their thoughts on the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and I often find that their answers can be mapped into one of the 12 different spheres listed above. It’s important to remember that “the map is not the territory,” and that there will be exceptions and imperfections to this model. But I hope that these spheres will be robust enough to encompass the major dimensions of the human experience, and help to orient and contextualize the full breadth of how VR might impact our lives.
The truth of the matter is that no one person can really see the entire spectrum of all of the ways that VR will impact us, and it really does remind me of the ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant.
Every VR developer and pioneer is like a blind men or women with one of their hands on this metaphorical elephant that represents the ultimate potential of VR. No one person can see the overall potential of VR, but if each of us focuses on one specific portion of the future, then perhaps we will be able to add some insight that gives everyone a bigger perspective as to where this is all going. My intention with the Voices of VR podcast is to talk to as many people as I can to get as many different perspectives and data points as I can in order to help us all paint a better picture of the ultimate potential of VR.
I believe that immersive technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality are going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the Gutenberg Press did in the 15th Century. We’re at the very beginning of a revolutionary time, and I’m looking forward to sharing more of the deep insights and speculation about the future that I capture at SVVR in the form of 25 different interviews and over 13 hours with reflections about the current state of VR, some oral history stories, and a lot of predictions about the future of VR.
Here’s the different podcasts that I either explicitly mentioned or was implicitly thinking about during the talk:
- The Four Different Types of Stories in VR (Devon Dolan)
- Kevin Cornish on The Future of Interactive Storytelling
- Rob Morgan on Narrative Design in VR & escaping the uncanny valley via interactive social behaviors in NPCs
- Storytelling in VR: Ambiguity and Implication in 1st Person Narratives (Rob Morgan)
- Explore the Psychological Impacts of Solitary Confinement in ‘6×9’ (Francesca Panetta)
- Storytelling in VR & the Tradeoffs of Empathy and Interactivity (Eric Darnell)
- Mel Slater on VR Presence, Virtual Body Ownership, & the Time Travel Illusion
- Richard Skarbez on Immersion & Coherence being the two key components of Presence in Virtual Reality
- Ross Mead on designing social behaviors & body language for virtual human NPCs
- Technolust’s Cloudstep VR Locomotion & Overcoming the Uncanny Valley by Coding Social Behaviors (Blair Renaud)
- Betty Mohler on Uncanny Valley Expectations
- Martin Breidt on the Uncanny Valley & Facial Tracking within a VR HMD
- Research into the Virtual Body Ownership Illusion (Domna Banakou)
- Yon Visell on Haptics research
- Rob Lindeman on the Challenge of Haptics
- Saadia Khan on Embodiment Theory & Embodied Cognition
- Rose Troche on the Vulnerability of a 1st-Person Perspective
- Nonny de la Peña on Empathy in VR
- Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Interactive Drama (Andrw Stern)
- Creating Meaning [with virtual goods] & Saving the World with CCP & Virtual Reality (Hilmar Veigar Pétursson)
Here’s a video of the full talk:
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. Today, I'm going to play the talk that I gave at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, which was summarizing 400 Voices of VR interviews. Now, this was a 20-minute talk, so it's a bit of an impossible task to really do justice to trying to either summarize or give a full range of highlights from the over 400 interviews and 125 hours of interviews that I've done over the last two years. So it really forced me to try to synthesize and come up with some sort of framework that I could start to understand the landscape of virtual reality. And what I came up with was a graph that kind of plots out the human experience of virtual reality, which is 12 spheres against two different axes. On the horizontal axis, there's the self to other. And then on the vertical, there's the private or inner experience to the outer or public experience. And so I'll talk about those different spheres within the talk. And it would probably be helpful to take a look at the graphic as well. So there's a video version of this talk that's also online on my podcast or also on Road to VR. Or you could just search for the human experience of virtual reality. I'm sure that the graphic will come up, and you can take a look at that. So that's what we'll be covering today in today's podcast. And so before we get started, let's have a brief word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Virtual World Society. The Virtual World Society was started by Tom Furness, and their goal is to become the Peace Corps of VR. They want to transform living rooms into classrooms, and so they're in the process of trying to recruit potential subscribers, as well as content creators who are interested in creating educational experiences that help solve the world's problems and help make the world a better place. So if you're interested, go to virtualworldsociety.org to sign up and get more information. All right, so just to set the context of this talk, it happened at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, which is in its third year now. And it happened on Thursday morning on August 28th. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. So hello everybody, my name is Kent Bye, I host the Voices of VR podcast. Today I'm going to do my best to try to summarize the highlights as much as I can from the 400 Voices of VR interviews. And I'll kind of walk through my process a little bit of how I try to approach this. First of all, I started my podcast back on May 19th, 2014. And so, SVR Conference and Expo is kind of like my anniversary, where I really just announced it for the first time that, hey, I'm going to do this. I had produced a number of podcasts before. And then across that day and a half, I did 46 interviews with a lot of the key exhibitors and speakers that kind of started and kickstarted this Voices of VR podcast. If you go all the way back and start from episode 5 or 6, that's when I started from the conference. I did a few episodes before that, and part of the reason was because there was no journalism that was covering what was happening in IEEE VR. There was a little bit of a split between the new VR and old VR, and so I wanted to start to cover the vast knowledge of academic research that's been happening in VR for 20 to 50 years. It was almost like the consumer VR was kind of ignoring that and that upset me so I just decided to do something about it by covering it. I started with some of those interviews and I came to SEVR and really kicked off the interviews there. So this is just sort of a graphic of the 400 Voices of VR interviews. I've only published 352 at this point but I've got a backlog that exceeds 400 and so as I'm looking at this I'm trying to figure out the patterns and how do I make sense of this and I've gone to different conferences so I cover gaming and storytelling and the education and academic research. So, the one question that kind of unifies this, though, that I ask all of my people that I interview is, what is the ultimate potential of VR? And it's an interesting little litmus test, if you notice. Some people have thought about this quite a bit, and they already have an answer. Or they've been a listener to the podcast, and they think about their own answer each time they listen. people either kind of give a generalized answer or they do something very specific to what they're working on, which I, that's my personal favorite, when they just take what they're doing and they just expand it out in terms of what VR can do to transform whatever they're doing. But I kind of see the answer to this question is a little bit like this thing where there's all these blind men who are touching an elephant, you know, and each person is touching different part of the elephant, but no one person can see the whole thing. And that's what I feel like we're kind of at right now is that No one really knows the answer to this, because things are changing so quickly, but you get enough people with their hands on the elephant, you get a little bit of a sense of where this is all going, and so that's what I'm trying to do with the Voices of VR podcast, is take those samples of seeing where people think this is all headed, and by you listening, then people are then going to get inspired and then go help create those futures, so that's kind of the intent of what I'm doing. So Tipitat Shavasan has this graphic that if anybody wants the details of this, if you go to my Twitter feed, at Kent Bye, you can see the details of this. Or just search VR Fund Industry Landscape and it should come up. But this is really from the perspective of a VC. So Tipitat started his own VR Fund and he's looking at like startups and companies. There's a whole range of companies that have been doing VR for ages that are not represented here. So this is really the new consumer VR that's recently emerged. And there's all sorts of different companies that are not represented. Tipitat has a Trello board where he tries to more comprehensively track all the different companies that are out there. But I did a little experiment to see like, okay, if this is a sampling of Tipitat's snapshot of the industry, then what have I covered on the voices of VR? And I looked at it and it was like around like 44% of companies that are on here. And so I've tried to cover a good cross-section, but then, you know, I realized it's not necessarily my goal to get to 100%. If I just get to 100%, then that's not why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because of something else. And, you know, this only represents like 50 or 60 of over 400 interviews I've done. So there's all different dimensions that are not covered in this. So that really led me to try to think about, well, how would I start to understand the landscape of VR? And so I came up with this, the human experience of virtual reality. So I think that when I ask people about what do they think the ultimate potential of VR, more often than not, I can start to categorize some of their answers into one of these 12 buckets. And I'll be kind of diving into some of these, but right now, the biggest one that I'll dive into first is entertainment. So, by and far, a lot of VR to start off is going to be gaming and storytelling. There's an element of cinematic VR, 360 video, pornography is in this realm. And when I look at the different innovations in storytelling and the challenges, If people haven't heard the interview I did with Devon Dolan, I think that's a really good overview in terms of like, here's the four different types of storytelling. You're either a ghost or you're a character in the story, or you have impact or you don't. Either you have some sort of agency within the world where you either control and impact the environment, or maybe you'll be able to walk around and see things, but you're not able to actually do anything of consequence. And so thinking about the narratives in VR and what VR enables in terms of storytelling I think is going to be something that I'm going to continue to look into and explore because there's just so many possibilities and really just at the beginning and Kevin Cornish is in the audience, Rob Morgan. I'll be putting together more like top ten lists as well to kind of dive into each of these. And of course gaming is a huge thing, you know it's hard to even pick out any sort of like thing but I've really been focusing on like the game mechanics and what are the things that people find fun, what's engaging, what's entertaining. And I think a lot of things that are being proved out in the gaming will feed into other aspects of VR and all the different dimensions because it's fundamentally an interactive platform. So back to this, I wanted to kind of give a little bit more of an overview of this by looking at the cardinal angles here of the two spectrums between either you're talking about your identity and your sense of self, or in the other extreme, you have empathy and partnership. So it's this axis between self and other. So, you can kind of think about it as looking at this axis from between self and other is that either you're having an experience of your own agency or you're empathizing with somebody else's experience. And so, it's really hard to do both. So, when you're thinking about storytelling or games, is it more about your agency and will within the experience or is it about telling someone else's experience? And so, Fran Pachetta had some of the really interesting comments about this in her 6x9 experience because You're in the experience of solitary confinement, and she was doing interviews with people who were giving a first-person account of their experience in solitary confinement, and she's like, you know, that didn't really work at all, because it's about your experience in solitary confinement. So she had people address you as the experiencer, as you will experience this, you will notice the cracks in the wall. Anything that increases your sense of presence and your sense of agency, that I think is going to be a big dynamic. On the other extreme, you can start to get into empathy and storytelling, but you may actually want less interactivity. So the gear VR that has limited capabilities of interactivity may actually be the best platform to do storytelling in VR. So that's sort of one insight here. And then the other dimension is your own private experiences versus public experiences. And so there's a lot of people who talk about how VR is going to connect them more to their family. So I'll be diving into that. And the other extreme is like you are talking about using VR in the enterprise for your career. It's applying to your reputation in the world. So it's either your private experience at home or in the world. And so roughly all the other different dimensions here are kind of fitting into that and we'll be exploring and unpacking that a bit more there at the end. But let's dive into identity because You know, identity, I think, is the biggest thing about virtual reality and something that the academic community actually has a lot of insight into in terms of presence research. So, Mel Slater and Richard Scarabez. And if you look at my top ten list of Voices of VR podcast episodes, I talk a lot about the place illusion and plausibility illusion. So, these are the two cornerstones of creating an experience that has presence, is that you have to give this sense of place, which the VR on its own can do, But then the plausibility is the key thing. That's the thing that presence is like a house of cards. And if you don't get the plausibility right, it can just collapse. And so, you have to do things like have believable social interactions and body language. There's a guy named Ross Mead talking about body language in VR and talking about the impact of eye contact. So, technologist Blair Renaud was talking about that in terms of the impact of what they're trying to do with adding subtle body language cues to overcome the Uncanny Valley. And then there's lots of different interviews that I've done in terms of kind of expanding on that possibility and place illusion dynamic. But one thing that I'll say, Richard Scarbez's interview where he talks about the uncanny valley is n-dimensional. And what he meant by that is that, it's kind of like the biggest mistake or trend that I see in VR is this trend towards photorealism. But the paradoxical thing about going towards photorealism is that the more that you go photoreal, the more that you expect everything in the experience has to match that level of fidelity. So if you don't get the haptics and the sound and everything, your mind is just going to be like, nope, I'm not in this forest right now. I'm in my living room watching a video of a forest. And so when you start to lower down the level of fidelity and start to do these art styles that give this sense of presence for people, then that can actually create a better sense of embodied presence, if that's what you're going for. You may be a storyteller that's more interested in other things. But this is a dynamic that it could lead to non-intuitive decisions where you decide to dial down the level of graphic fidelity in order to increase the level of presence. So another thing that I think is really interesting that we're going to see a lot more of when we start to do full body tracking. Right now we're just doing hands, so we're not even doing the feet. But when we start to get the feet into tracking, I had my first experience of the virtual body ownership illusion at Sundance when I had this fully tracked presence. And it's a world of difference when you start to really believe that your virtual body is your body. When we start to have room-scale experiences where the full body is tracked, then you're going to start to identify with that, and Mel Slater's research into this in terms of the implications of your identity, of being able to change your implicit racial bias with a VR experience. I think their early findings is that it has a short-term impact. They don't know the long-term impact yet, but the implication is that we've got to be careful. If you're going around and killing people in VR, then what's the implication of that in terms of your sense of identity? So there's all sorts of open questions there, but the virtual body ownership illusion, I think, is one of the most interesting ones. Uncanny Valley, I've covered in a lot of different podcasts. Haptics, I think, is going to be huge, and specifically to that mixed reality. So having mixed reality experiences that you actually have a sense of touch and presence, that's going to vastly increase the presence. And embodied cognition is another area that came up a lot at the IEEE VR. And that is essentially that the more that you start to embody One interview that I'll be putting out is teaching computational thinking through dance, for example. So, you know, doing a certain dance sequence and then breaking that down into an algorithm, and then that's how they're teaching kids. And so when they're trying to code it, then you're like, okay, if I, you know, move my feet twice and then I clap, and then that can be a conditional statement. And so they're able to put things into their body, and then as you put it into your body, that actually improves your thinking. So this is an actually huge field in psychology that I think that embodied cognition is something that virtual reality developers would benefit you a lot to learn more about that. So I've got a few interviews about that and more to come. So, empathy and partnership. For me, empathy is all about being able to carry multiple perspectives, and so going beyond the vulnerability of a first-person perspective. With Rose Trochet, there's a great interview that I did where she's talking about, like, we have our own pre-existing narratives and biases, and that VR has a capability of breaking us out of that. And so, this other dimension of the other, of empathy and partnership, is going to do a lot of that. There's a thing I talked about already with agency versus empathy. There's a tension there and I think that they're diametrically opposed to each other so that's something to keep in mind. Creating shared realities is I think the ultimate goal of empathy is that once you empathize with someone you're in some sense sharing the same reality as they are rather than someone Having their own experience, you're having a shared experience at that point, and I think that as VR grows, we're going to have more and more people sharing experiences and sharing context with each other, rather than people getting trapped into a fear state where it's their own personal experience. I think we're going to see a lot more about romantic dates, like your partner, your lover, your beloved doing things in VR. with your partner in that way I think is going to be a special niche where you're going out on a date in VR and it'll be interesting to see what kind of VR experiences that we have for that and we haven't really seen a lot of that yet but given this kind of model I think we'll see that. I think AI is interesting artificial intelligence because I think it is kind of a partner in some ways it's the other like we are feeding our collective consciousness into the AI and it's feeding it back to us with all this trained information so I would put AI in this field, which I think is a huge thing that's growing. Just quickly through this part, telepresence with your family, life capture, Tom Furness talking about, like, we're going to be able to connect with our ancestors directly, being able to capture yourself and then have your grandchildren and great-grandchildren be able to share an experience of who you are. We're going to have Ready Player One chat rooms with people who are creating their own sense of their home, their virtual home. In your literal home, we're going to have the Internet of Things that's going to have all sorts of tie-ins to augmented reality, and your AR is going to be the interface to your devices in the Internet of Things. There's going to be all sorts of relaxation experiences as well. And then just briefly in the enterprise and career, you know, there's a lot of people using VR in your job for training, for professional applications, and there's going to be a dimension of social capital and reputation as well. And so you have a reputation in your real life, but you're going to start to have these cultures where you have your reputation within certain virtual spaces that may or may not translate into real life, which I think is going to be interesting. So, just to close it out, as we have just a few more minutes left, I did my best to try to give you a story of this human experience of virtual reality, and I want to just expand on a few things. First of all, the technology and medicine here. So, first of all, the medicine, medical is going to be a huge thing, and all sorts of things it's going to enable, but the technology aspect is something that I've struggled with recently in terms of the voices of VR, because Sometimes I feel like, oh, it's interesting to really dive into the weeds of the technology, but am I really interested in it? And I found that there's a kind of a polar opposite relationship here between the technology and the imagination that is subconscious. The point is that the more that you learn about the capabilities of the technology, the more that you're going to expand what's possible to lowering the barrier from your imagination to making that happen within VR. Because the more that you know about these tools, the more that you're going to be able to actually create things. And I think that is kind of an interesting relationship that you have to kind of do the hard work. And if you are listening to the podcast, you are doing that by learning about the technology so that you can start to really open up your mind and have no limitations to what you want to do with tapping into your imagination and your subconscious. So there's early education, communication, and higher education, travel, spirituality. I've separated this out because early education is a lot about as you're developing and forming, there's kind of a set theory and philosophy around that. But then there's a certain age after that that you go into higher education. And I think that there's going to be a whole lot of areas of higher education in VR, kind of just casual education that you do. Just by listening to the voices of ER, that's one level of higher education that you're already engaged with. So just imagine the different possibilities of targeting adults for education for just their own curiosity rather than to try to help teach them to pass a test. It's just going to be something like, oh, I just want to learn about Roman history. Let me dive into this experience and go do that. And travel, there's a big part about exploration as well. And the virtual goods and resources, I think that there's going to be a whole layer of different aspects of this digital economy and making money, but also like goods that only have worth within a digital world. So that's going to be another element as well. And then the big other one in the upper left screen in the 11th position, the social and community. That's kind of the sweet spot of VR in a lot of ways of being able to connect to other people and to have this sense of cultivating your community and world building that you're going to be able to do where you're having shared experiences with your friends and being able to cultivate virtual community in that way. And death is something that I put on here because it's part of the human experience, you know, and there's not a lot of VR that's out there yet, but I think that this is an element where in terms of death and rebirth cycles and loss and impermanence, there's going to be a lot of aspects of that's just a part of human life and that I think VR actually is a medium that can explore the issue of death better than any other medium. I've done some of that early, just kind of doing a grief ritual on my own, and I think there's a lot of power there. And I think there's other elements there that will continue to get fleshed out. So that is my best effort that I could do to try to summarize 400 episodes and I know that it's a tough task and that I will be continuing moving forward to try to look at my archives and categorize things in different ways for people to kind of dive in into a deeper dive. Yeah, I just, I know that we're right at noon and there's lunch that's starting, but if people want to hang around and ask a few questions, I'd be happy to answer anything that may come up. Yeah. The question here was why am I recording these interviews as a audio podcast rather than a 360 degree video? Well, that's because it wouldn't be logistically possible for me to do the volume of work that I do, first of all. But also, audio has a different quality. People change when they start putting a video camera on them. It's a little bit more intimate, intimacy that you can get with audio. And frankly, I wouldn't want to have to deal with the volume of content that I have. I've done 4.6 days of audio. Also, in terms of consuming, nobody wants to watch a half hour or hour long video in VR, because it's really not adding that much. to the experience, like you actually have a better experience, I would argue, listening to my podcast than you would watching it in 360 because you're going to be doing other things anyway. You're going to be washing the car or running or doing your chores or commuting into work. And so you already have like partial attention, but you're able to really listen and kind of go into these really deep places. So I would argue that it's better to hear someone tell a story about a virtual reality experience than you to see a 360 video of it. And that's because it's kind of like the difference between reading a novel and watching the movie of Harry Potter. You know, like, you're having a director that's showing you what you should be thinking. Rather, if you're reading it, it's actually coming from your own mind. And so, one of the things that I did recently was listen to Alex Bloomberg's training on, like, storytelling in audio. And audio is a very visual language because it requires people to put the pictures together in their own minds. As I'm asking people to tell their favorite memories and their stories and what they want to see, that's putting the listeners of this podcast into a space where they're starting to really expand their mind in terms of envisioning it for themselves, and then they can go create it in VR rather than just trying to show them. So there's another dimension aside from logistics. I think just from a storytelling perspective, that audio for what I'm doing just works way better. All sorts of different reasons, but that's some of the big ones. So, yeah. The question here was that the Voices of VR podcast does seem to be bridging the academic VR and consumer VR. It's basically asking, how much are people trying to reinvent the wheel? Or if there's a lot of ideas that have been floating around for a couple of decades, so are we in an implementation and execution stage? Or are we still inventing the core concepts? Yeah, I think it goes both ways. There's a lot of innovation that's happening so quickly that in some domains that the consumer VR is going above and beyond what the academic VR is doing. But at the same time, there's a whole lot of arrogance and ignorance within the consumer VR community in terms of what's already been done. People will say statements like, oh, this is the first time that X has happened, and it's like, no, it's actually not. Or, more than that, that's more about ego, but more about the actual research that's been done. There's a lot to be learned. At GDC this year, there was a number of academics that came and gave a panel of what does the academic community have to teach the VR developers. at IEEE VR just a week later, they had a reverse of what can the game developers teach the academics. And so I did a couple of interviews, actually three interviews with the panelists, Rob Lindeman, Doug Bowman, and Anthony Steed, talking about those discussions about that specifically, like what they have to teach each other. And so, yeah, there's a lot of things, especially in terms of presence and the virtual body ownership illusion and Redirected walking. It's funny because the Void actually independently recreated redirected walking on their own. They just happened to have a magician who was an illusionist who figured out that you could do this perceptual trick and trick people into walking in circles and show them they're walking in a straight line. that's a technique that's been in the academic community for years, you know, so there's stuff like that as they're able to look at things and problems that are five to ten years into the future and do the basic research that's required and also we don't know about the long-term effects and all that stuff that will be, you know, we'll start to look at some of that stuff but overall I think that there's a lot to learn from each community and it's just a humility that I think is called for to be able to really be open to listen, because there's a perception that the technology was so old when they did things that it's irrelevant. And there's a certain element where that's going to be true, especially in five to ten years, when the level of quality of a grad student art, developer art, and experience when they can see something from a AAA studio, there's going to be a little bit of expectation at some point where the art that's coming from the academic community is not going to be able to match to do legitimate research into VR. So there's a lot of confluences like that, but that's kind of like my early take. So with that, if you have any other questions, feel free to come up and ask me. And yeah, I just wanted to thank you all for coming out and being listeners to the Voices of VR podcast. And yeah, thank you. So that was Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast. Yes, that's me. And that was the human experience of virtual reality framework that was talked about within the context of the talk that was titled Summarizing 400 Voices of VR Interviews. So a couple of quick takeaways from this talk is that first of all, there's a saying that I like to come back to whenever I see any type of framework like this is that the map is not the territory, which means that anytime you try to take reality and put it into some sort of model, there's going to be exceptions and it's not going to always fully work. The point of tools like this is to not necessarily map reality one-to-one, but it's to give some sort of framework and tool to be able to start to understand the landscape a little bit more. Oftentimes when I ask people about the ultimate potential of VR, they haven't really thought too much about trying to categorize the domain of all of human experience. It tends to be a little bit overwhelming in terms of trying to talk about how VR is going to impact every dimension of our lives, which I do think it will. But when you kind of ask people on the spot to articulate the full breadth of the human experience, it can be a little bit overwhelming. So this is kind of my take to try to start to understand it, both for myself, but also as I move forward. It's starting to help me start to see what I'm actually covering but also see what I'm not covering and dive more into. So one example is the resources and virtual goods I think is going to be a huge part of an expression of our digital identities. So these different virtual goods are going to be ways that we're going to be able to communicate our values to other people and they also reflect a part of ourselves. Some people were making the comment that they thought that the virtual goods and resources and the imagination and dream should be flipped from the axis of instead of the virtual goods and resources being on the private side, they should be on the public side and the dreams and the imagination and unconscious should be on the private side. So the thing I would say about that is that most people's virtual goods and resources are their belongings. They're something that belong to them. And so It is an expression of their values and of their identity as well, but it's just externalized into these virtual objects. And so to me, it's more in the realm of your private identity than it is public resources, which there are public resources, but this is more along the lines of your personal resources that you have in these virtual worlds. And also I think there's an argument that could be made about the dreams and imagination and the subconscious that makes it a little bit more of a public thing than a private thing. And the reason why I say that is because we live in a cultural context in which there's lots of symbols that carry meaning within different cultures. And I think depending on the cultures that we're in, that can impact your dreams and imagination and perhaps even your subconscious. So that's what I have to say about that. Now, there's lots more to say about this really expanding and talking about different dimensions of this framework that maps out the human experience of virtual reality, but I'm going to save it for the podcast because each and every day is, in some sense, a new exploration of one of these different domains. Like I said, when I ask people about the ultimate potential of VR, I can start to categorize their answers into one of these 12 different spheres. And so it'll be interesting to see, moving forward, how this synthesis that this talk really forced me to do continues to change and impact my coverage here at the Voices of VR. So just to wrap things up here, I wanted to send out a couple of shoutouts. First of all, to Hassan Kabraouni, who is from Stanford University and started a student VR group there called Rabbit Hole VR. They're meeting and discussing all the different potential futures of virtual reality. And Hassan said that there's a lot of people there that are fans of the show listening and discussing. So a couple things on that is that if you are in the Stanford area, go check out the rabbitholevr.org to check out their meetings. And I would like to start to have more virtual meetings at some point on one of the many different social VR groups. So if you're interested in meeting out and having discussions and networking with other Voices of VR listeners, then go ahead and drop me a note at Kent Byeand just let me know. Or you could also become a contributor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR and I'll be looking into starting to have different meetups and gatherings of Patreon supporters. And if that goes well, then start to branch out to having other more public meetups as well. So send me a shout out on Twitter at Kent Byeor go ahead and just sign up to be a contributor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
