Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about how the principle of embodied cognition explains how our memories are tied to geographic locations. But right now Google Earth’s resolution at the human scale is really uncanny, and you can’t go inside.
That’s where Hassan’s project tries to fill the gaps by enabling people to share 360 videos of places that are meaningful to them, while being able to navigate between them using a model of the Earth. This is quite an intimate and effective way to get to know someone, but it’s also the type of content that’s going to be a lot more meaningful to the creators in 10-20 years from now because it is so effective at evoking memories.
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Hassan Karaouni is also one of the co-founders of the Rabbit Hole VR student group at Stanford. They’ve held a number of events, and have deep philosophical discussions about how VR can impact human life and the human condition. So Hassan and I go down the rabbit hole in this episode by exploring the deeper philosophical implications of simulation theory and our relationship to fate and free will. In the wrap-up, I talk how a recent sci-fi film helped me gain some more insights into the differences between chronos and kairos time and how a VR experience is a non-linear portal that tips the balance towards creating more kairos time type of experiences.
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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. So, on today's episode, I have a discussion with Hassan Karouni, who was one of the 11 winners of the Oculus Launchpad Scholarship. He talks a little bit about his My Home project, which is a project that's using 360 photos in order to explore memory and identity. Hassan is also the co-founder of the Rabbit Hole VR group at Stanford, where they have deep philosophical discussions about the future of virtual reality. And so Hassan and I go down the rabbit hole of talking about some of the larger philosophical implications of what VR means for human life and the human condition. And at the end, I'll be tying in some science fiction metaphors in order to ground some of the ideas that we talked about. So, that's what we'll be covering 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 the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you in the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So, this interview with Hasan happened at Oculus Connect 3, which was happening in San Jose, California on October 5th to 7th. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:47.747] Hassan Karaouni: My name is Hasan Karony, and I've worked on a lot of different VR projects, most recently on one for the Oculus Launchpad, and that project was a browsable virtual world where you could browse different 360 videos of people showing you their home and what was most important to them. So, for example, I have a 360 video in the project I submitted of my own home in Vacaville, California. I grew up on a farm, so I'm showing all the animals that we take care of, the street that I used to run on when we grew up, how across the street there's a bunch of farms, and different people that grow crops and sell them to the grocery stores. So I thought it would be really cool for people to get to do that too, invite you into their homes.
[00:02:29.773] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's really interesting because, you know, it's a very formative time of our lives and to be able to give someone in a 360 immersive experience of where you grew up seems like you'd be able to just communicate so much just by looking at how your room was decorated or the things that you used to do within your neighborhood or within your home. Was that kind of like the idea? Was a way to kind of express yourself and share a little bit more about yourself to other people?
[00:02:55.943] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, totally. I mean, we all know that VR is really good for that, for connecting with people and seeing places that you might never see otherwise. I also think that with it being a new space, sort of as you mentioned, one cool thing is that there's going to be a lot of people looking to make content as, you know, 360 capture becomes more affordable. And, you know, something that you could do is you could try to go to really awesome places and capture content there and travel around the world. But I thought it would be a lot cooler for people to just stay in their own home and be able to make meaningful content. And I think that this is a way for them to be able to do that in an easy way. And like a good starter project, or if you get enough contributions in this virtual world, like you could see some really cool homes. It could come together into a really cool collection.
[00:03:41.880] Kent Bye: Yeah, and to me, it really goes into that identity and expression of yourself. And after showing an experience like that to someone, I'd imagine that they'd be able to understand you in a different way. And you mentioned that it's browsable. So I imagine what I think of when you say that is that you're talking about 360 videos or photo spheres, but there's a geographic component to that, whether it's a neighborhood or places that you used to go to. And so can you talk a bit about that interface a little bit more of like how you kind of navigate between these different videos?
[00:04:11.850] Hassan Karaouni: Sure, so I kept it simple for the launchpad. Didn't have too much time to work on it and couldn't flesh it out as much as I wanted. Definitely down the line, having browsable neighborhoods and actual, like, real aspects of the world that you can walk through would be really cool. For now, it's just a globe that you can kind of rotate in virtual space and you see these different light points for where people have submitted videos of their home. So for example, you could spin the world around, go to Asia, and see one of my college roommates wanted to submit a story about the apartment that he grew up in Nanjing in China. So you could spin the world and see that, and you could spin it back to Vacaville, California, which is where I grew up, and then step into that. So right now it's just a rotating globe, but depending on how the grants for the launch pad go, maybe I'll get to develop more of it.
[00:05:01.998] Kent Bye: And can you talk a bit about what's happening at Stanford with what you've been doing there with VR?
[00:05:06.015] Hassan Karaouni: Totally. So at Stanford we have Rabbit Hole VR which we started, it's about a year ago now. So we're in our second year and this year we're really looking to get some cool projects going. We've been talking about some partnerships with a few different companies to get us some equipment. And we're excited this time around because we really want to drive some meaningful content out of our group. Last year it was just a place of people really getting started, learning about the industry and the space. But this year we want people to start building out some projects, so it'll be an exciting time.
[00:05:40.761] Kent Bye: And for you, what is it that gets you the most excited about VR?
[00:05:45.863] Hassan Karaouni: Really, just philosophically, what's exciting about it is that in developing VR, we learn a lot more about how the world works and how our lives work. We start to see what are the subtle details of our vision or what we perceive that matter the most, because those are the things that we need to get right in VR. So philosophically it's cool just because when I'm thinking about VR a lot of times I find myself actually thinking about what it's like to be alive and that's really cool. Technically it's awesome because you just need so many skill sets like you need engineers, designers, artists, creative directors, all sorts of stuff. So of all the spaces that I've worked in technically there's just like the most creative collisions in VR and that's so exciting to be a part of.
[00:06:33.698] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's for me as well the whole cross-disciplinary aspect of it in terms of all the different domains that have to come together. You know, I know that Michael Abrash has called VR the final medium in the sense that it encompasses all the other mediums because it's in a lot of ways trying to replicate reality. And so because of that, you just have everything from architects to engineers to audio and design, environment design, artistic creativity, all these different dimensions that are coming together from all these different domains that have been fairly siloed. And that's the most exciting thing to me about VR is that every person and perspective has something to add and contribute from what their knowledge base is and how that could be applied to a virtual world.
[00:07:16.303] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, completely. I totally agree that everyone has a way to contribute, which is really exciting. Also, to the, like, diversity perspective, because with a lot of other avenues in tech that I've been interested in, you know, there's not as much diversity of skill set, but also, like, ethnic background, even gender. I mean, it's really cool to see that we're starting off the VR space in a really great way, and I hope that we continue to do that. Like, it requires everybody contributing. The one thing I also wanted to bring up is the final medium. I think it's an interesting way to put it. For a bit of a story, I was going to Alaska, which I think was one time called, like, the last frontier, and I was flying on a plane there, like, space and the sky was also thought of as the final frontier, and I was using my VR headset during the flight, which people are calling the final medium. So I'm hesitant to say that it's the final medium, just because throughout history we've always said, oh, this is the last frontier, this is the last medium. I mean, it's crazy to think about 20 years from now when VR or AR are very common. Like, what are we going to be thinking about next?
[00:08:20.630] Kent Bye: I'm not sure. I was actually pretty hesitant to it as well, because I agree. I do think these things come in cycles, and that there's going to be new, new innovations that we can't even imagine yet. I think it would take a lot of hubris for the filmmakers to say, oh, this is it. We've captured it all. When I was talking to people about that, the thing they said was that I was kind of thinking of VR as purely head-mounted displays. But they're like, you know, it's this is like virtual reality which could go to like the next iteration which could be direct neural inputs or other ways of synthetically generating perceptual input into our body and whether it's always called virtual reality or there's something that comes after that I actually think that you know augmented reality is next and I Getting into the realm of actually starting to embed technology within our physical body I think is like the next logical step after having something go through our eyes and to me That's something that I just get afraid of and I thought that was like really far out but it seems to be happening sooner and sooner in terms of being able to implant different chips within the eyes that can if someone who's blind they can start to see two by two pixels to be able to start to see a little bit and so then is that a sort of virtual reality that they're able to use technology to generate signals to our brain that is detected as our vision in different senses and what's the possibility of expanding the number of senses we have by embedding different technology into our body and So yeah, I think in the long run, I get a little afraid because I feel like a lot of times when people think about biohacking and stuff, it's like, well, I kind of trust evolution. If we try to hack evolution and try to move things too quickly, there could be all sorts of unintended consequences. And so from the different discussions I've had with people, it seems like there's going to be a choice point for people as to whether or not they're going to go down the route of trying to embed technology within our body or whether or not we're going to sort of be the more naturalistic. perhaps if that continues to the logical extreme, we'll have some sort of split within the species.
[00:10:16.850] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, totally. I definitely see more of the implant type of trend happening. It'll be interesting to watch how people kind of react to that as you're talking about, you know, there might be more naturalist perspectives. I guess that will be us. Maybe like 20 years from now, we'll be super conservative about it. And all the kids who are just being born will be really excited about these new games or movies or experiences that they can have with the implants. But I mean, that's totally right. Like, when we're talking about final media or frontiers, I mean, we just don't know, like, where are implants going to take us? What are all of the other developments and trends that are going to pop up? Like, the future is pretty wild, but that's what makes it exciting, too.
[00:11:00.009] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think for me... the thing that you were saying earlier about the more you're kind of looking at virtual reality the more that allows you to reflect on life and living and I think ultimately we're all human and that's what I think both virtual reality and artificial intelligence for me the reason why I like looking at those so much is because it is a lens into ourselves in a mirror in a different way and that the more we study virtual reality the more we learn about our perception and the way that we kind of experience the world and how we attain presence. And perhaps we can take away the different dimensions of presence by going into a synthetic reality. And then as we add the different levels of presence and one by one, we're able to then become more and more present in that way. And then we are able to be more present to life. And so for me, I see the same thing with artificial intelligence. The more we look at how to replicate human intelligence within a computer, then the more we realize how amazing humans are and the things that we can do. And so by looking at these technologies we can figure out and reflect, you know, what's it mean to be human? What's it mean to be alive? Who are we and why are we here? These are like the deep philosophical questions for me that kind of keep me really interested into these topics.
[00:12:07.685] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, totally. And I also think, I mean, even going further back, like virtual reality in some sense has been around for a long time. And I mean, even before like Ivan Sutherland and like sort of Damocles stuff. And I like to think about Jeremy Balanson at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford does a lot of VR work. And something that I've heard him say is that it's something along the lines of all realities are virtual, like everyone has their own perception of reality in the real world. And so in that sense, VR has been around forever. But you can also think about how over time, like people have always been trying to escape and have different types of experiences, you know. through storytelling, through like early forms of drugs and things like that. Even through daydreaming, having dreams, watching a movie, all of these things are sort of augmenting like your reality. For a while you're stepping into something else. It's just that now we have this way of doing it in a consumer way that involves an HMD. But yeah, it could totally change in the future. It's exciting to see where it goes.
[00:13:15.913] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's the thing about VR is that it has the ability to kind of hijack your perceptual system and directly input an experience. I really think of, you know, looking at the cycles of history, looking at the Gutenberg press, that was kind of like a revolutionary tool that was able to capture information and knowledge in a new way. And I feel like computers are the Gutenberg press of the 21st century in that through virtual realities and artificial intelligence, we're able to capture intelligence and human experience. So we're able to capture these experiences in a new way that we're democratizing experience and be able to give experiences to people who wouldn't have access to them before, just as books were able to bring information and knowledge to people who may not have access to that. I think the implications of that are very vast and big and I think to me being here at the Oculus Connect 3 and watching the keynote, you know, the thing that was the most poignant was standing there and listening to Michael Abrash saying, look, you know, like these technological revolutions, they don't come along that often and this is sort of maybe once in every 500 years that a technology like this comes along that is able to change society in this deep of a way and that everybody in this room that was here at the keynote for Oculus Connect 3 is helping create that new reality and to put a stake in the ground in terms of really exploring what this new medium is and what it can enable.
[00:14:34.841] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of directions that we can take it and I like that you bring up what a brush talked about. I remember he had a quote, something along the lines of like huge technological revolutions, like require a lot of smart people working on the right problems at the right time. And I totally agree that we could be on the brink of one of those really big revolutions, which again is why, like, the diversity piece and getting a lot of people involved, having everyone here build, and then also teaching other people what VR is about, it's super important. Because if this is going to be something that's that big, like, we want to have a lot of people contributing. And like you're saying, I think that this actually could be pretty huge. Like, one of those game-changing things that does happen only a few, like, hundred years.
[00:15:20.744] Kent Bye: Awesome. And what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:15:27.730] Hassan Karaouni: So there's tons of applications and lots of potential. You know, we've heard about like education, travel, enterprise types of applications and potential. But really what I'm most excited about is, again, that piece of better understanding life and The human condition, like the condition that we're in here on earth, like if I could do anything, I think the coolest thing would be to simulate like the whole world in a virtual reality, like a thousand times over, rewind it back to the big bang and like see where it actually goes. Like, do we both still end up here talking to each other, like having this interview or like in some realities doesn't end up a little bit different. You know, I see it as ultimately giving us the potential to run this like huge science experiment on ourselves. And that's what gets me excited about it. And I think that that is the ultimate potential because once you start to study that, you really do understand a lot more about like this life that we're living. So that's what I'm most excited about. But we need to do a lot of more work before we can do anything along those lines.
[00:16:37.677] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that comes to mind is that, you know, well, we already could be a part of that experiment. We could already be living in a simulation. And I think, you know, I've been thinking about that a little bit, because I think when people hear about that, the possibility that we already live in a simulation, it really freaks a lot of people out. I think part of it is because it kind of gets to this combination of free will and predetermined fate that we have in our lives. And to me, I think we always have some sort of combination of the fate that we're given in this world and what we're given with in our genetics and our upbringing, where we live. all these aspects of power and privilege that we may have coming into this world and then there's our direct experience that we have control over and the choices that we make and you know and Viktor Frankl says we always have the choice to be able to make the meaning and tell the story of what's happening in our lives and so that's the one thing that no one can ever take away from you and so We always have some degree of being able to tell the story and make sense of what's happening in our lives. But there's always, to me, this blend of this fate and this free will. And to talk about the fact or the possibility that we might be living in a simulation, I think it speaks to the bounds of our free will is not infinite. We can't control everything. And so there are things that are set, whether it was through evolution, whether it was some creator or God, or whether it was from the fact that we may be living in a simulation. These are things that are perennial philosophical questions that we can't necessarily ever pin down. But with Elon Musk popularizing it in a way, I think Nick Bollstrom is the philosopher that really started to think about the philosophical implications of simulation theory. And if we're already living in a computer simulation, But to me, it just reflects as to whether or not you want to take the red pill or the blue pill. And with rabbit hole VR, I think that some people, if it is that we are living in a simulation, I think some people just want to take that blue pill and say, even if we are, I don't care. I'm just going to make the most of what we have. And other people that want to take the red pill and with the risk of breaking out of the matrix and seeing whatever that reality is, or maybe we are all living in the matrix and there's some sort of like, lies and disillusionment that we're being propagated against by the powers that be and that we want to be able to have some sort of truth and freedom and that, you know, I think there's an element of that of people having control over our lives. And so, and these are all just metaphors to me that get back to these fundamental question of fate and free will and how much agency we have in our lives versus how much is set for us. But at the end of the day, to me, maybe I'm just saying I'm taking the blue pill. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts?
[00:19:12.458] Hassan Karaouni: Well, I mean, gosh, there's so much. I think that you mentioned, like, being able to craft the story. I mean, I think that that's totally important. Like, regardless of what is true, we all need to be able to find the meaning, and that involves being able to have a story that we're following and sort of telling through our own life. So that's very crucial. And then on this idea of whether or not it's a simulation, you know, I am totally open to the fact that we might be living in a simulation. It is tough to come to terms with, you know, because it's different than what I've thought for a long time. But I will also say that if we're not in a simulation, it's to be expected that one day we will create a simulation and things in that simulation will be having these same thoughts. I like to think about how writing programs as a computer scientist, like you press play and everything comes to life in a way, at least for a brief amount of time, and then you hit the stop button. So we're already starting to make simulations in a way. They're like somewhat more basic than what we're talking about right now, but it's totally reasonable to think that one day we will get to that point. So then it becomes the question of Why wouldn't we be the ones in the simulation? Like maybe we are the simulation, or if not, we're going to create it. But we'll see.
[00:20:31.684] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:20:32.865] Hassan Karaouni: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:20:35.107] Kent Bye: So that was Hassan Karouni. He is the recipient of an Oculus Launchpad scholarship for My Home, and he's also the co-founder of Rabbit Hole VR student group at Stanford University. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all the whole connection to place and memory was really brought home to me recently with Google Earth and being able to go back to places where I grew up and to get kind of a low fidelity representation of all these places where I grew up and that was enough in order to trigger all sorts of different memories. And that really changed my relationship for when I went back home for Thanksgiving, I was able to look at the emotional architecture of where I grew up in a completely different way, just from my explorations of what I was able to do in Google Earth. And so I think Hassan's project of allowing people to express themselves in terms of their peak emotional experiences of where they grew up, I think is an extremely powerful way in order to get to know somebody. So there's quite a lot of deep ideas that we were discussing here and I just wanted to pull out some of them and kind of connect them to some other science fiction movies that are out there. So I just last night had an opportunity to see a science fiction film that really blew my mind. And I don't really want to talk explicitly about it. It's called Arrival, and I highly recommend everybody go see it. It's one of those films that just really is amazing. And the less I talk about it, the better. So I'm not going to spoil anything explicitly. And if you're the type of person that doesn't want to hear anything more than stop now and just go see the film and come back and pick this up later. But for the people who have seen it, I think you'll be able to kind of read between the lines of what I'm saying here. So virtual reality is a new language that is being introduced into our world that has the ability to give us a full 360 degree circular experience where we're actually able to have a bit of a nonlinear portal where we step into it and we're able to break the linearity that we're normally presented with. I think of the concepts of Kronos and Kairos time, and I think it's really instructive to plot some of the qualities between these two different qualities of time. So Kronos is very objective and rational, and has a lot of mental thoughts. It's left-brained, it's language, and it's the passing of time, and it's very quantitative. So that's kind of the language of books and language where we can kind of just communicate in a linear fashion and it kind of creates a certain mindset. Now the other sense of time is called Kairos time and that's much more subjective and qualitative and right-brained and more in the realm of imagination and intuition and story. And it's about perceiving the world and kind of post-symbolic communication with myths in the meaning that we make from our lives, from our memories. All of our memories are kind of connecting us from the past into the present and into the future because the past is our memories and we're able to project ourselves into a story or into any experience based upon what we've experienced before. And those memories help create our expectations of what to expect. We are constantly making predictions as to what we think should happen within an experience. And that is the process of projecting out into the future. And whenever those expectations are matching your sense of reality, then you actually think that that world is plausible. And that plausibility is what allows you to actually be present and in the moment. So in a lot of ways, Kairos time is connecting the past, present, and future because it's like this internal subjective process that we're going through. And virtual reality is really enabling that. It's allowing us to create these synthetic experiences so that we can cultivate this sense of Kairos time in our lives. And the thing about the Kairos and Kronos time is that they're actually kind of always happening at the same time. You can kind of favor one or the other, but you always have your external objective quantitative reality, but you also have your internal qualitative and subjective feelings and emotions and stories of your life that you have going on at the same time as well. It's just a matter of what you're focusing more on. And I think the traditional media has biased this kind of linear storytelling where it's a sequential fashion and you don't actually have a lot of free will within that. You're given an experience where your objective reality is kind of dictated and it's universally the same for everybody that sees it. But yet, your own internal state, you still have control over that because you're constantly projecting yourselves into the story and you're relating to it based upon your previous experiences. And so I really like that quote from Hassan where Jeremy Bailenson said that all realities are virtual. And that's kind of what I'm getting at in terms of that subjective process of taking in all that perceptual input, making sense of it, and weaving all that input into a story that you save as memories. And that story becomes the story of your life. And so that process is a synthetic virtual process. And the thing that that makes me think of is that Viktor Frankl quote in The Man's Search of Meaning is that the one thing that no one can ever take away from you is your ability to make the meaning of your situation. So you always have that choice to be able to construct the story of what's happening to you and why. And so in that context, when you think about simulation theory, when you think about being in a situation where you have the fates that are beyond your control, you always have the control of how you're reacting to that situation. And so that's why I think, you know, looking at other science fiction films that really explore that, we have The Matrix, we have The Truman Show, we have HBO's Westworld. Each of these shows feature characters where they're living within this synthetic reality in some way. It's contrived, whether it's a VR experience, a reality TV show, or this whole amusement park that's being scripted and controlled by game designers and storytellers and artificial intelligent programmers. And so the thing that Hasan is talking about, like in the future we are going to be creating these simulations and we are going to be creating these artificially intelligent agents and at some point they probably will be asking the question, are we living in a simulation? Which begs the question, are we already living in a simulation and how do we deal with that? And I think that it gets back to this trying to resolve your own worldview around fate and free will and how much control you have. Because even if we are living in a simulation, then would you want to take that red pill and be able to get out of it and get into what would be quote unquote base reality? Or would you want to just accept your fate with your lot in life with where you're at right now and to be able to make the most of it, but, you know, eventually become as highly empowered as you can be to be able to find your deepest gifts, to be able to give into the world, which gets to the deeper question of how you answer the question of who you are and why are you here? So there's this prayer called the Serenity Prayer that I just wanted to read out because to me, this is how I kind of help resolve this existential crisis of whether or not I live in a simulation where my fate is bounded in different ways. And it goes, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. So there you go, you know, we always have some things that we just are beyond our control. We can't change them at all. They're faded. And we have things that we can change. That's our free will. And I think virtual reality as a medium is able to shift the balances in a new way in order to create experiences for people that actually tip the scales from what's been available historically. Historically, we haven't been able to give anybody any free will to change anything within an experience. And now we have that capability to find that new balance of giving an experience where it's a nonlinear portal. We are giving up some of that control of linearity when we're trying to foster that Kairos time, the magic of Kairos time, where it's more about your own subjective quality of just being present to the experience that's unfolding. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor to the Patreon. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
