Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and upon his return to earth he had a profound mystical experience. Being able to see the earth from space expanded his worldview about human’s role on the planet and the nature of human consciousness. Other astronauts also reported being profoundly affected by seeing the earth from a third-person perspective in space, and Frank White coined this phenomena as the Overview Effect. It’s described as “a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Ryan Holmes was so inspired by this vision of the Overview Effect that he wanted to see if it’d be possible to recreate it for everyone through the power of virtual reality. After a number of different iterations, SpaceVR announced at SVVR Conference and Expo that they have raised a $1.25 million seed financing round led by Shanda Group with participation from Skywood Capital.
I had a chance to catch up with Ryan at SVVR to talk about SpaceVR’s plans to eventually bring live VR feeds from space, the logistics of launching a satellite with VR cameras, and some of the educational and experiential offerings that they plan on providing in the future. Today’s podcast also features an interview with astronaut Edgar Mitchell that I conducted in 2009 at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conference, which is the frontier science research institute that he founded in 1973 to study the anomaly of consciousness.
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Here’s the brief Overview documentary about the Overview Effect that inspired Ryan to start SpaceVR.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. On today's episode, I have Ryan Holmes, the CEO and founder of SpaceVR. So Ryan is going to be sending a satellite up into space so that we can have, eventually, a live virtual reality feed of the Earth as the satellite is orbiting around it. That's their long-term goal and their first step is to be able to launch a satellite up into space with all the virtual reality cameras so that we can at least get short clips of the Earth from a world-centric perspective. So we'll be talking about some of the logistics in order to make that happen as well as the underlying motivation that Ryan has in order to do this in terms of trying to recreate the overview effect. And also on today's episode, I'm going to feature an interview that I did with astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who is the sixth man to walk on the moon. And he tells the story of coming back to Earth and having a little bit of a mystical Samadhi experience that then inspired him to go off and try to explain what happened to him scientifically and started the Institute of Mnemonic Sciences. So we have lots of great stuff on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Unity. Unity has kickstarted this virtual reality revolution by making these easy tools set available for content creators to be able to take their dreams and make them into reality. There's no better way to learn about virtual reality than by getting started today by creating your own experiences. And it's easy with Unity. To learn more information, check out Unity at Unity3D.com. So this interview with Ryan Holmes happened at the Silicon Valley Virtual Rally Conference that happened in San Jose at the end of April. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. My name is Ryan Holmes. I'm the CEO and founder of SpaceVR, and we are launching the world's first virtual reality camera satellite into orbit so that anyone can experience what it's like to be in space. Great. So this is a project that's gone through a number of different iterations. Tell me about how this first came about and then how you got to this point that you're at now. Absolutely. So I was doing software development. I was making pretty good money, but I wasn't happy with what I was doing. And I wanted to do something that mattered. I wanted to do something that after I spent eight years on it, that it would be something huge, something that really mattered and changed people and made an impact. And so when I was looking for things to do, I came across this documentary called Overview. And in Overview, there's a ton of astronaut interviews, and they all talk about this life changing experience they experience in space. and it became known as the overview effect. The overview effect is basically when you look down at the earth and you see something that you know very intimately, like your hometown, and something that you know all the back roads of, and then you compare that against the infinite universe and it just shocks you into this realization of like, the reality of who you are and where you live. And it kind of freaks astronauts out because they start thinking about the policies that we have and they start seeing like us polluting the air of the only thing we have in this entire universe. And they become very, very, very environmentally conscious and become very focused on sustainable policies. And so once I understood that that experience could be had, I set out to communicate it to the world using virtual reality. Yeah, so I've actually had a chance to interview Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, and he told me about his experience was that he was spinning around and seeing the earth and seeing the sun and seeing the stars and seeing the sun, seeing the earth and seeing the stars, and he just had this realization that everything was just fundamentally connected and that he had this mystical samadhi experience and that from that he started the institute of noetic sciences to look at consciousness research and so the point being is that being able to see the earth knocks you out of that ecocentric or the nationalistic perspective and you do get to see that there is this global world community that we're all connected in this certain way. So is this kind of what they were talking about in that documentary? Yeah, exact same thing. And Edgar Mitchell's in the documentary talking about the exact same thing you just said. Yeah. So from a technological perspective, what's next? Like, when does it get built? And then what are people going to be able to do? So we just got the money in. So now we're going to start making the real, real satellite, the real satellite parts, real X-band radio that communicates to the ground, real star tracker that gives it data on where it is, and real reaction wheels that position it so it's always pointing down at the Earth. And so we have to build a real satellite now. And we're targeting an early launch date of early 2017. And so then are you going to do data links that people can then download and watch a segment? Or is this a live stream that people can just hop on and see everything? As a company, we're focused on creating cinematic live virtual space tourism, and so that's our main focus. This first satellite will not be able to do live. Live is actually quite a huge undertaking, and this is the first step towards live. This satellite will downlink using X-band radio, and when it's right above a ground station, it's 10 megabits per second. And so when it gets closer and farther away from a ground station, it varies. Like the data gets less the farther you are away. But effectively what we're looking at is two two-minute sequences per week uploaded from the satellite. And we'll use a mode that we're calling scouting mode, which is where we look for really interesting things by taking photos here. over the Earth, and we'll use, like, look up trends online to find, like, locations that are, like, really trending, like, what's interesting right now, and make sure we capture, like, really compelling stuff. And so how long does it take for the satellite to go around the Earth as a complete revolution, and would you eventually be able to put out a video to kind of go around the globe? Yeah, absolutely. So the satellite goes around the Earth every 90 minutes. that equates to like 16 times a day. And it's going at 17,500 miles per hour. So it's going pretty fast. And so I guess this is the point where we don't even know what this quite looks like because we're not an astronaut and we haven't been into space. So what's it like for you to have this dream and to work on it and to be working towards this image of what in your mind you think this might feel like? Honestly every day almost I'm just like this is awesome That we are able to do this like I had this idea a year or so ago and now we have 1.2 million dollars to literally launch a satellite as a 25 year old CEO like that's amazing thing like that would never happen 20 years ago I feel so lucky, really, to be able to do this. And we have a great team of people. And I think it's like any startup. You just, every day everything crashes and you have to fix it. Well, I think that we had a very brief 10-minute conversation. And by the time I got around publishing it, it was already so far out of date. Things had changed that I actually took it down. And then you had a second iteration, where then you did a Kickstarter. And now you're in this kind of third iteration. So maybe you could track, what are these different phases? I know of at least three that you've been through in terms of trying to carry out this vision. Yeah, absolutely. So the first public one was a 360 3D GoPro rig on the International Space Station. And we launched that on Kickstarter, wanted to go for 500k. And then we vastly overestimated the VR market. And so then that didn't work out. Then we restarted the Kickstarter with a much smaller goal. It was a 360 camera, a small one, like three GoPros. We funded that for like $130,000. And then while processing that information about launching that, the logistics of the astronaut taking it to the cupola, would the cupola even be that awesome? I mean, you're just looking out a window. You don't see anything else. like how many people are interested in seeing experiments being loaded in and loaded out. Certainly there's people that are interested, I'm interested in that, but how many other people are? And so we looked at that and we looked at the opportunity to do CubeSat and we chose CubeSat because it sets us up for a much more sustainable path as a company. We launch one CubeSat, it gets constant content for six months, then we launch another one that's better. And we don't have to ask NASA if it's OK, as long as everything on it is safe. And so having that complete control and that ability to iterate rapidly is key. And so why six months later? What runs out? The satellite actually burns up every six months. Oh, wow. So you relaunch it. OK. But that allows you to upgrade and change things then? Yeah, absolutely. So we have a forced iteration cycle. Great. And so I guess, you know, what do you foresee some of the applications? You know, when you're trying to tell the story of this, you know, I think there's going to be plenty of people who just want to fly around in space. But are there other areas that people have come to you and say, oh, actually, I do such and such, and this would be an amazing application to be able to, you know, whatever they want to be able to visually look at the earth for whatever reason? Yeah, so there's a bunch of different business models we're looking at. There's super premium, which is where we do parabolic flights that allow you to feel weightless and you experience the space content while being weightless. So you get the closest as you possibly can get to space without going there. And then there's premium experience on the ground, which we're looking at incorporating like headsets that you can never afford in your own home and allowing people to come to a physical location and trying like really high resolution experiences. And then there's the just general consumer, which is $30 a year. And you get access to the constantly updating content stream. And then we have an enterprise side of things where we create curriculum for schools so kids can learn about geography by like flying over it in space. Kids can learn countries by picking them out, you know, with their hands while they're flying over them rapidly. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for educational experiences with this. And it's something we're actively looking into. So what was the story that you told your investors to get them to believe in this project, to be able to invest in this? So what we're creating is an experience that no one in the world can have. We're creating a way for everyone in the world to have it. And we're doing it with content, which is essentially software. So with one satellite, we can scale that software to the whole world. And so at the bottom line, you're investing in a valuable software product. And so what are the biggest next steps from here on out before launch? What are the big milestones that you have to reach in order to actually get this thing up into space? So we have to buy the parts. They have to come here within a reasonable time. We have to integrate it into the satellite. We have to test the satellite several times. There's like eight different tests that need to occur. And then we have to make sure a lot of regulation papers are filed properly. And we need to make sure that NASA safety is completely OK with over-launching, which I guess goes into the governmental papers that we have to file. And yeah, make sure we don't spend all the money before we launch it. And have, you know, money left over after is right. Is there any kind of governmental organization that has to approve the footage that comes out? Or is this something that... So what is that process like? It's called NOAA. It governs all satellites. All CubeSats have to get NOAA's approval. It's been described to me as kind of like a homeland security front where they want to know everything that's up there. But our resolution currently isn't anything close to what they would care about. I don't think they will for a while. And so do you get to see it and then you submit it or do they just get to see it before you even get to see it? No, we haven't made any sort of agreement as far as like this has to funnel through the NSA before it comes to you or something like that. No, it comes to us directly, but the resolution of it, it's not high enough to be a threat. Like there's satellites that are very high resolution. I mean, they can see centimeters on the ground. And so we see 400 meters per pixel, like where they're seeing centimeters per pixel. So ours isn't really a problem. I guess just to kind of like wrap things up here, what do you see as kind of like the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable? So I'll just take it back to how we started this conversation. And if we're successful in what we're doing, and we establish an extremely high resolution means of everyone experiencing space, and then that content is integrated into schools and kids across the entire world grow up seeing things happening in space, they see events happen in space, they see pollution spread across the world from forest fires and from factories, and they understand the world is like this global system. will fundamentally change how the entire world makes decisions and what the entire world prioritizes. And I think that's pretty powerful. Great. Well, thank you so much, Ryan. Yeah, thanks for having me. So that was Ryan Holmes. He's the CEO and founder of SpaceVR. And he's going to be sending up a satellite into space so that we can potentially recreate this overview effect. So a number of different thoughts about this is that, first of all, it's pretty amazing that we live in a day and age that we could even think about doing this, of sending up a camera into space and seeing what it actually looks like. I think for a lot of people we don't really know what to expect. We've seen some footage of satellites going around the Earth, but to actually viscerally feel like we're there in space flying around the Earth I think is pretty awesome. I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the clips that come back from SpaceVR. And I think it's also interesting to all the different tie-ins they have in terms of education and being able to actually put people in this parabolic space flight so that you could literally be in zero gravity and then on top of that be in a virtual reality experience where you're in space. I think that's gonna be really cool. I'm looking forward to seeing if they're able to actually pull that off as well. So the other just thing that I kind of take away from this is, you know, they're a little bit of a scrappy startup of a 25-year-old founder's dream to be able to send cameras up into space and to make everybody an astronaut. And I think that a lot of people that I've actually talked to in the VR community, they actually talk about drones and other things going up into space and that going into space is something that they've always wanted to do. But, you know, working in virtual reality is actually the closest that they're going to be able to feel like they're recreating that experience of going into space. And so just another interview that this reminds me of is an interview I did with NASA's Jeff Norris, who talks about sending telenaut robots out into space that are able to do world exploration, but actually have cameras so that scientists here on Earth can virtually teleport into these robots on another planet, which really sounds like science fiction on a certain level, but is actually we're not that far away from that. So pretty exciting times we're living in. So I wanted to move on to this other interview that I did with astronaut Edgar Mitchell back in 2009. Edgar Mitchell is one of my heroes for being able to create the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and it's a pretty remarkable organization that's been doing a lot of frontier science research into consciousness. So if we take a step back and look at what Ryan is talking about with this overview effect that he mentioned within this documentary that really inspired this space VR experience. The overview effect is essentially this process of moving from one paradigm to another. So Thomas Kuhn wrote this famous book about the structure of scientific revolutions and the big insight that he had from that is that the way that science progresses is actually through anomaly. And that there's actually another sociological element to science in that it has to be peer-reviewed and this new worldview has to be widely accepted by the social dynamics within a group. And so whenever you're transitioning from one paradigm to the next, it usually starts with some sort of anomaly that can't be explained by any other existing scientific theory. And so for Edgar Mitchell's perspective, he is coming back from the earth and he's having a visceral, mystical experience. So Edgar essentially thought, well, if I'm able to experience this and other people have experienced this, then we should be able to measure this scientifically. So that started him on this path of creating the Institute of Anecdotic Sciences that has been researching the nature of consciousness and how consciousness really is this anomaly that can't be fully explained yet. It's kind of encapsulated as the mind-body problem. So this interview happened in Arizona in 2009 at one of the Institute of Noetic Sciences conferences. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:17:34.836] Ryan Holmes: After finishing all the work on the moon and starting home, and having this magnificent view of Earth, moon, sun, and a continuous 360-degree panorama of the heavens on the way home, being a bit more relaxed than when going out and anticipating all of this, the thing that occurred to me was that from my studies of astronomy at Harvard and MIT, was I realized that The molecules of my body, the molecules in the body of the spacecrafts and my partners, were created in some ancient generation of stars, which is how matter is created in our universe. And instead of intellectual knowledge, I suddenly was a visceral, personal, emotional feeling, and accompanied by a high state of excitement and bliss. I didn't understand what that was all about, and it was an experience I'd never had before. And this continued all for the three days coming home when I wasn't working, which was a good portion of the time. It was an easy flight coming home. And I realized in the part of all of that that we humans had asked the question forever, who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? What's this really all about? and thought that now that we were the first generation of spacefarers, that perhaps we ought to ask that question all over again from a new point of view, particularly since it was fairly clear that cosmology as described by our sciences was incomplete, certainly incomplete, and perhaps flawed. and that our cosmology, as described by our cultural traditions, and normally rooted in religion, was archaic and perhaps flawed. And perhaps we need a new approach to this. I also realized that in the Western world at least, for about the last 400 years, science had arisen under what's called the Cartesian duality, with Rene Descartes made the pronouncement of body, mind, physicality, spirituality, belong to different realms of reality that didn't interact. And that served a very nice purpose of getting intellectuals out from under the inquisition of the 16th and 17th century. And it allowed science, as we now understand it, classical science, to arise in that period of 1600s or 1700s. But I had the downside that science arose without any consideration of mind, consciousness, and these things we consider today and recognize today as very important to science. And that continued for these almost 400 years until quantum mechanics came along. at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, and continued throughout most of the 20th century, because the paradigm of consciousness being a study of religion and philosophy, rather than science, was pretty well steeped in the scientific community. And on the way home from the moon, I realized that was a flaw. We had to understand why we're conscious how we got to be conscious that that was probably one of the major things that science was missing at this point in time and so after I came back to the moon and Could not find anything in the science literature and anything in the religious literature pertaining to this subject and started to dig around a bit more and and had some anthropologists working with me that came up with this notion of salva capa samadhi, which was in the ancient Sanskrit literature. That was the impetus at that point in time, and I was interested in parapsychology, psychic things, intuition, that aspect of our mind consciousness matter. So I decided we needed an organization to bring the tools of science into these studies, which is what I did.
[00:21:32.585] Kent Bye: I've seen you said that going to the moon was also about learning about ourselves, our humanity, and also the Institute of Noetic Sciences seems to be very much about learning about ourselves. So maybe you could sort of talk about that and what we've learned over the last 20 or 30 years.
[00:21:47.983] Ryan Holmes: Well, I frame it all in terms of understanding of how mind works, because throughout most of history since the Roman or Greek times, what we observed and what we think has been taken for granted, that's reality. But what we've realized as we've studied it more here in the 20th century, was that no, we could have facts but people could interpret facts differently. And so that was the real impetus here that what we see and what we think has to be properly interpreted and we can use the scientific method to establish facts and to show the evidence of a postulate that we might have. But then science progresses by anomalies you find anomalies that don't fit your prior postulate or your theoretical work and you have to have a new one and So here we throw in consciousness and mind into the mix and understanding from the early work that mind affects matter that we do affect reality was just the way we think and and that is quite different than classical science of the early years and Newtonian science and putting a whole different face on research into the nature of reality.
[00:23:06.902] Kent Bye: And so what's sort of your current take on the nature of the universe in terms of like evolving or conscious or
[00:23:14.655] Ryan Holmes: Well, I use a rather lengthy set of phrases for that. That we live in a universe as intelligent, creative, self-organizing, learning, trial and error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. And that more than likely that the very simple fact of quantum correlation, which was only discovered in the early part of the 20th century, is the most basic and fundamental aspect of awareness that we can demonstrate in science. And since awareness is the most fundamental definition of consciousness, we are now looking at defining consciousness as an organization of awareness into ever greater measures. As molecular complexity increases, generally so does the level of consciousness and awareness increase. So that we have in plant life and simple animal life levels of awareness, but we come up the line to animals with a brain and we have self-awareness because animals can distinguish themselves from the environment that they're in. And we get to the primates where they start to have a certain amount of internal introspection or reflection. And we get to ourselves, which clearly we are self-reflective. And that's a different level of awareness and consciousness than these other manifestations. And we've only really started to learn that here in the latter part of the 20th century.
[00:24:54.302] Kent Bye: You've talked about the dualism model, but you have kind of a dyad model in terms of the energy and the information sort of like... Well, it's showing that information is pretty fundamental to the structure of our universe.
[00:25:09.175] Ryan Holmes: It's a universe that exists because of its matter, which is compressed energy. and we know anything because of information which is patterns of energy. So the universe we live in exists because of matter and is intelligent because of information.
[00:25:30.053] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could just, reflecting on how far IONS has come, and just reflecting on like everything that you've seen that the institution has grown into and moving forward.
[00:25:42.206] Ryan Holmes: Certainly. NUETICS began with the notion of taking some of the work of J.B. Ryan and other parapsychologists. And by the way, I don't like the word para-anything. It's all very normal stuff. But taking that early work and demonstrating that telepathy exists, psychokinetic phenomenon exists, and that's very natural stuff, and it's rooted in the quantum world. It's due to the fact that our mind-body stuff is basically rooted most fundamentally in the world of quantum mechanics. And that we should call intuition our first sense, not our sixth sense, because it's primarily a quantum phenomenon. And noetics has gone from that early work of studying the anomaly, namely parapsychology, demonstrating that that is a quantum-based phenomenon. Moved up to where we're really oriented at this point in time Toward what is the nature of transformation? What causes the type of experience I had in space where you go from suddenly changing your worldview about things to? and generally moving toward a new love of nature and a big picture process where you see it in quite a different way than you did before. And being able to develop that and help people learn how to do that is what noetic is all about these days. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome.
[00:27:09.300] Kent Bye: So that was Edgar Mitchell. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and he was the president and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and he actually recently passed away on February 4th, 2016. So I just wanted to share that interview with Edgar Mitchell, telling his own personal story of what happened to him as he was going up into space and looking down onto the Earth. Now, I think the biggest open question that Ryan and everybody else has is, are we going to be able to recreate this kind of visceral, mystical experience by going up into space and having a virtual reality experience of it? I am a little bit skeptical. I think there's going to be a little bit something different about physically being up in space. what I do expect is that it does have the potential to break us out of this more egocentric or nationalistic perspective and move us more into a world-centric perspective where we start to see the earth as a little bit more of a interconnected singular place where we're all living. So I think that's the hope of SpaceVR and it's hope of Ryan Holmes and I'm super excited to see where this goes and see what my own personal reaction is to being able to see the Earth in an immersive virtual reality experience from SpaceVR. So I just wanted to really thank you for going on this little journey with me today, talking about journeys into outer space, as well as journeys into inner space. And so if you enjoy the podcast, then please spread the word, share this or any other podcasts with people who you think might enjoy it. And yeah, if you do feel inspired, please do consider becoming a contributor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
