The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell within the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UNDPPA) as a translation of a UN report titled: The State of Global Peace and Security. The report was a result of UN General Assembly Resolution 72/243: Nelson Mandela Peace Summit passed on 22 December 2017, which “Calls upon the Secretary-General to submit a report on the state of global peace and security in line with the central mandates contained in the Charter to the General Assembly at its seventy-fourth session.” The report was first presented 6 April, 2020, turned into a book in June 2021, and then translated into an immersive experience in order to leverage the immersive storytelling and data visualization affordances of virtual reality to help summarize the major takeaways of the report for world leaders.
The State of Global Peace is available via the Oculus App Lab after it’s Sundance debut, and it’s worth checking out to see how they’re using the conceits of immersive storytelling to contextualize these issues. As a viewer, you’re making a speech at the United Nations when students hack into your augmented reality device and start talking about the larger trends that are blocking progress towards achieving global peace. There’s cutaways to immersive data visualizations that elaborate on these blockers to global peace.
Here’s an excerpt from the report that provides an overview of the seven “major trends related to global peace and security:”
Preventing and addressing conflict and violence constitute both a tremendous challenge and an urgent priority. Nevertheless, efforts to promote peace and security are interrelated with and complicated by other factors – some causing conflict and organized violence, some, at least in part, being consequences of it, and others undermining collective efforts to prevent, manage or resolve it. The General Assembly and the Security Council have on different occasions recognized the connections between peace and security and human mobility (Assembly resolution 70/1),11 economic relations and trade (resolution 70/262 and Council resolution 2282 (2016)), inequality (resolution 70/1), civic participation (resolution 70/168), digital technologies (resolution 74/29), climate change (resolution 63/281) and the proliferation of weapons. In turn, it is necessary to comprehensively address these and other drivers of, and contributing factors to, conflict in order to achieve the 2030 Agenda (see A/73/890-S/2019/448).
Of these seven major trends, the immersive experience symbolically translates the issues around wealth inequality, proliferation of weapons, ecological devastation, and global climate change. Many of these issues are also addressed within the UN Secretary-General’s report on “Our Common Agenda,” which sets forth some of the broader agenda of the work at the United Nations.
I spoke with UNDPPA’s Daanish Masood Alavi, who served as the director and project lead, as well as Super Bright co-founder and creative director Igal Nassima, and the head of Production at Super Bright Erica Newman about their journey in producing this experience on January 22, 2022.
Also be sure to check out this half hour artist statement that goes into a lot more details for how the UNDPPA is using virtual reality technologies to potentially help bring armed conflict to an end through dialogue, negotiation, & mediation between armed actors, and preventative diplomacy.
You can find more of their experiences that the UNDPPA has been producing to brief UN diplomats and world leaders at their website at FuturingPeace.org, and you can find the State of Global Peace on Oculus App Lab.
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More context on the Innovation Cell at the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs:
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on in my series of looking at the Sundance 2022 New Frontier selection, today's episode is about the state of global peace, which is a really interesting production because it's produced by a special unit within the United Nations. It's called the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. Their mandate is to help to bring armed conflict to an end through dialogue, negotiation and mediation. There's also an innovation lab that's using new and emerging technologies and using art and neuroscience to try to advance the purposes of peacemaking. In this mandate, they've produced a number of different reports. Back in the General Assembly of 2017, on December 22nd, there was a resolution, 72243, called the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit. And in this, in the last bullet point, it called upon the Secretary General to produce a report on the state of global peace and security. That was delivered on April 6, 2020, and in that, they outlined seven major trends when it comes to global peace. Some of those are human mobility and refugee flows, economic relations and trade, general wealth inequalities, civic participation, digital technologies, climate change, and peace and security, and then disarmament and regulation of arms. Of that, they produce these reports. Sometimes they produce these reports and they pretty much get put on a shelf and never really looked at or talked about beyond the session. The mandate of the United Nations, of this particular unit, is to use emerging technologies to try to find new ways of telling the story of these data and this report that are being made. Danish Masood Alavi is working on this. U.N. Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, and brought on these immersive storytellers from Superbright, Eyal Nasima and Erica Newman, to start to translate this report into an experience for world leaders to be able to look at. So, this experience is available if you want to download it and check it out before you listen to this podcast. I'll have some links down in the show notes. After you listen to the podcast, there's an additional half-hour presentation that they gave as a part of the Sundance New Frontier Artist Statement, where they took that as an opportunity to talk about some of their further work that they're doing, which they mention here briefly, but they go into a lot more detail into that video. I'll be summarizing it here at the end. Lots of really interesting applications of how VR can start to be used to advance the purposes of peacemaking in the context of the United Nations, in the context of these world leaders who are very busy in finding the affordances of immersive storytelling to start to translate some of this work that's already being done within the auspices of the UN. So, that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Oasis of VR podcast. So, this interview with Danish, Igal, and Erika happened on Saturday, January 22nd, 2022. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:02.470] Daanish Masood Alavi: My name is Dhanush Masood Alavi. I work for the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and I help run the innovation unit inside that department and that's a part of the UN. most concerned with bringing armed conflict to an end through dialogue, negotiation, mediation between armed actors, as well as analysis and what we call preventive diplomacy. And my job in my unit is to deploy new and emerging technologies, but also design, art, neuroscience in the service of peacemaking. My background is in conflict transformation, conflict resolution, but I also have a background as a VR maker, including with Be Another Lab, which is a VR collective that I was a founder of. We were using a combination of neuroscience and virtual reality to get people to swap bodies with each other. So now the two sides of my life have converged into one unit at the UN. Yeah. And that's my story.
[00:04:04.388] Igal Nassima: Hi, I'm Igal Nasima. I'm the founder and creative director at SuperBright, where we work with emerging technology and storytelling and practical tools. We do a lot of collaborations with organizations like the UN, where we build technologies, infrastructure, as well as creative projects to help the mission of those organizations.
[00:04:28.941] Erica Newman: So hi, I'm Erica Newman and I work with Eagle at Superbright. I'm the head of production there. And like he said, we really focus on partnering up with collaborators who are interested in building unique tools to expand their core mission in the immersive world and beyond.
[00:04:48.228] Kent Bye: Great. And I'm wondering if each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:04:54.249] Daanish Masood Alavi: So I started off initially in the aftermath of 9-11 looking at identity-based polarization and identity-based violence between host communities and immigrant communities, but also sectarian violence in different parts of the world. And about 15 years ago, I started working for the United Nations in the Office of the Secretary General for a special project that had actually been launched by Secretary General Kofi Annan, looking at identity-based violence. And in working in different parts of the world, I began to see and understand how often what informs polarization between communities are histories of trauma between different groups and And that trauma often is embodied, meaning it takes place in the body or has a bodily or somatic manifestation. And because of that, I became interested in looking at how we can transform it and generate empathy and get people to see and feel themselves in their own bodies. And strangely enough, I became exposed to working with different neuroscientists that were working on intergroup neuroscience in particular. I became exposed to the work of Henrik Ersson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who was using VR-related experiments to give people the immersive experience of seeing and feeling themselves in another person's body. And that combined with some other work that was going on at MIT, where I later became a fellow for a few years. I thought to myself, well, why don't we build a setup where people can easily swap bodies with each other using this experimental neuroscience setup that's called the body transfer illusion. And that was my point of entry into VR. That was the beginning of Be Another Lab, where I was a founder. And essentially what we started to do is work with artists to engage in these sort of techno-shamanic performances where someone would come into our lab at a film festival like Tribeca, for instance, and put on some gear, some maybe haptic devices, some fancy cameras, et cetera, and they'd open their eyes. And from a first person perspective, they'd see themselves in another person's body. And then we'd use bone transducers and different types of speakers to also use audio and give people the immersive experience of hearing the other person's voice as their own. Bone transducers, as you may know, are specific types of speakers that use your body as a device to transfer sound. Now we did that with, as I said, in the artistic context, but also in the research context, working with intergroup neuroscientists. We also started working with communities that would invite us in, in order to use this as a device to engage with other communities. And I was doing this while working full time at the United Nations. So it was kind of moonlighting as a VR artist and researcher. And then in continuing this type of work, what I realized is that A couple of things. One, of course, this could be used in a more serious peace building context. But in order for that to happen, more research needed to be done. Because if the UN recommends that a community uses this type of technology, then we have to have good evidence on the basis of which to make such a claim. But separate from that, I also realized that immersive experiences and immersive technology can also be used to brief decision makers that are making consequential decisions about conflict settings. For instance, you have members of the UN Security Council, which is the main body, which is charged with overseeing international peace and security. that makes decisions about these things. And often members of the council are unable to travel to conflict zones because of cost or logistics or the global pandemic. And so how can we use immersive materials to brief them so that they have an objective feel for what it's like to be on the ground? So I started making the argument internally within the human bureaucracy. And people, you know, took a leap of faith on me and basically I got funded to build prototypes, et cetera. And we did, we built our first immersive experience actually on Iraq. It was called Iraq 360. And really what that was about is post ISIS in Northern Iraq and Mosul, but also other parts of the country. How is the country recovering from the retaking of territory from the armed Milton group ISIS? And what kind of transformation is afoot and how is reconstruction happening and how are people recovering? How is evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity being gathered, et cetera, et cetera, all those things. And so we made an immersive experience and indeed we briefed expert members of the UN Security Council using that. And that became a hook that eventually led to the creation of a special innovation unit that I now help run that creates these types of materials. I can say more, but I'll pause there.
[00:09:48.989] Kent Bye: Just a quick follow-up question, because I know Gabo Aurora was working on a number of different pieces and positive Sudra, and I didn't know if that was a part of your purview as well as your time at the UN?
[00:10:00.053] Daanish Masood Alavi: No, Gabo's work has been separate. Gabo was working with the Millennium Campaign. In a way, there are three main pillars to what the UN does. There's the human rights side of things, there's the development side of things, and then there's the peace and security side of things. The peace and security side is focused on conflict, right? And conflict transformation, how do we get people to not fight? It's one of the core things that the UN was created to do. The development side, of course, is an important aspect of what the UN does also, but it's a slightly later development from when the UN was first founded. Gabo was working on the Millennium Campaign, which was primarily focused on the development side of things, but he was telling important stories and of course, represented the use of a novel medium at the time inside the United Nations.
[00:10:47.330] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thanks for that follow-up. Yigal, go ahead.
[00:10:51.450] Igal Nassima: Yeah, it's nice hearing that Danish, the whole story. I have a more classical computer science background and I worked in tech for a period of years. And then I did the ITP program at Tisch, where I really transformed my tech background into more new media, emerging technology. And I met Erica actually, we're both from the same program. And a lot of the focus I am interested in is how, if technology is accessible at a prosumer level or at different levels, it can help creative communities flourish. So a lot of the work we do at the studio is at the R&D level, where we explore new technologies, find tools, build tools, and make it available for other people to use them in their projects or collaborate with them a lot. You know, it's like the idea that you don't need a fancy camera to shoot a good movie, right? Like handheld phones and early cameras changed everything. And for me, the entry to VR actually came much later, where I met a filmmaker. So I really got into VR when I got 6DEF VR. I got into AR early on. And when I got my hands-on wife, 6DEF headsets, I was blown away that now embodiment was truly possible and avatar. So I did a ton of work in the social VR space. That's what I've been teaching at ITP actually for the last three years, which I'm very, very, very interested in this idea of bringing people in VR, theories of embodiment, early projects like Second Life and all the theories that emerged from there. And it's a continuation of that now, it's skyrocketing. So the studio itself is really focused on multiple tiers. So we're not really just an immersive studio. We focus on machine learning, infrastructure, VFX, computing, graphics, computing. But we try to put all these things together to the projects we do at different scales. We find technology to be our medium, and we find it very fluid and very nice to work with. And then every day we're trying to make projects that we feel like can tell a really compelling story, but doesn't have to be incredibly high production or super expensive. Finding there's like a really nice niche between medium as an experimental output for us. And then we do a ton of projects around, you know, storytelling, activism, journalism. So we try to like cover different mediums and try to stay in the cultural space as much as possible. But at the core, we were genuinely excited about all the things happening in tech on a daily basis.
[00:13:26.785] Kent Bye: And you've worked on previous VR projects before. Did you work on Zikr or maybe you could just mention briefly some of the other, your journey into VR as well?
[00:13:34.881] Igal Nassima: Yeah, so I designed the social VR of Zikr, the whole ritual of bringing four people together in VR. It was one of my early experiments. I worked with Ken Perlin at NYU for a little while when they were working with HoloJam and doing experiments at NYU. And then I also built The Day the World Changed, which was another social VR memorial for the Nobel Foundation based on a documentary story on the bombing of Hiroshima at the Tribeca Festival about three years ago. So we have a body of work around the space that is in the festival and storytelling circuit. as well as we're working with now with Erica about with 180 galleries and 30 museums and large social VR platform for galleries and museums to publish exhibitions online in VR. So we have like multitudes of projects that we work on at some really large capacity and some of them are shorter projects that you might have seen in festivals before.
[00:14:33.928] Kent Bye: Thanks. And Erica.
[00:14:38.233] Erica Newman: Yeah. So my path to immersive technology specifically, I think has been a bit circuitous and in parts happenstance. In undergrad, I actually studied linguistics, which in a lot of ways, you know, I had no idea what to do with, and I didn't really have any understanding of where I was going to go with it. I just loved it. And I think at the core of that is human identity and communication and expression through language and other forms. And I think that is kind of a thread that I've realized has carried me through to technology and immersive technology. So I sort of fell into the experience marketing world and digital, a lot of web early on, a very long time ago. And I loved creating experiences for people that enhanced whatever people were doing in the real world and connecting across divides that not necessarily could happen in person. But I didn't really feel that I was doing much in that for sort of that thing. Like, what am I doing in the world? So I kind of came across ITP as a program where I met Igal, and as he kind of spoke about earlier, And there was just kind of a magic in the community there that pulled me in the second I walked through the doors. And I was like, I just want to be part of this community. I don't even fully understand what everybody's doing with all these new technologies, but I don't care. I'm just going to start and learn. And it really was a transformative experience for me. And I tried a lot of things there and I wasn't necessarily super into VR there. It was really early days of it becoming more accessible to consumers. But I was really into accessible technologies, whatever form that took, giving people who knew experiences through other sensory experiences that you can create with technology that they couldn't necessarily experience just using their human body. And that's something that's really interesting to me. I worked in experiences after ITP and then kind of through a friend, a mutual friend, put Igal and I back in touch. And, you know, we talked and I started working at Superbright and it just immediately felt like this really good fit. And that's where I really, really started digging into VR and immersive technologies was with Igal at Superbright. And I think the The social VR aspect of it and the heavy focus on that in the studio and OpiCalls is something that is really important to me and keeps me wanting to explore that space further.
[00:17:09.629] Kent Bye: Nice. Nice. So I think that helps to really set the context for, for this piece in particular, because it's a piece that's really trying to address these big global issues to leaders of the world. And so you said originally that you were moonlighting into VR and then now you're working in this innovation unit producing these pieces. And so is this piece produced under the auspices of the UN or is this another personal project that you produced? And I'm just curious if you give a little bit more context and background to how this piece came about.
[00:17:38.110] Daanish Masood Alavi: Absolutely. So indeed, this piece was produced under the auspices of the United Nations by our unit, the Innovation Unit inside the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. And generally up to now, our approach had been to produce immersive briefing materials for the Security Council. we actually had the first ever in chamber, in the official Security Council chamber, use of virtual reality to brief members of the Security Council on the situation in Colombia two days ago. We are making excellent progress on that front as well. Prior to that, we'd been briefing them in kind of more informal settings, but we'd never actually used head-mounted displays inside the chamber. Now, with this particular piece, State of Global Peace VR, we took a slightly different path. Essentially, we had produced a report as the UN, for which my division was the penholder. And this report was produced in honor of the legacy of Nelson Mandela. The General Assembly of the UN had passed a resolution that was co-sponsored by the South African government, asking the UN Secretary General to talk about, in a report, the state of global peace and security. And so this report indeed was written and it highlights a number of issues having to do with income inequality and inequality across communities, across genders, regions, etc., around militarization, weaponization, loss of biodiversity, sea level rise, among other issues. And what happens, speaking bluntly and honestly, with a lot of our reports is that you know, they get talked about for one session, and then they get put on a shelf somewhere. And maybe they're cited by academics and researchers that are writing about those things, but not much more than that. So the challenge we took on was how do we take something like that and create a story around it that has the potential to engage a broader audience using virtual reality, right? And that's kind of the idea that we started brainstorming around. then it occurred to us that really what this report is talking about essentially is the future. And it's talking about the responsibility that we have to future generations, because really what's happened up to now, frankly, is that we've stolen from our own future, which is basically saying we're stealing from future generations. So we decided to take that idea and to try to create a somewhat transgressive story around one that involved young people hacking the General Assembly as a prime minister is about to give a speech. And so we started playing and storyboarding with that idea. And eventually we came up with this whole concept where literally from a first person perspective, you are the prime minister of a country. And the backstory in our minds, you're kind of someone who's not really maybe a big believer in some of the issues that we're talking about. And you're facing a political crisis at home, which we say explicitly at the beginning of the experience, and you get briefed by your chief of staff. And then you go in and you're about to make the speech, and then it gets hacked. And it's happening in a near future scenario where people are also using augmented reality headsets. And I mean that diegetically, meaning within the experience itself, you're wearing an AR headset. And then essentially the students then school you in the things that I talked about, loss of biodiversity, sea level rise. weaponization and income inequality. But each time they talk about those things, you have a very, very immersive experience of what they're talking about, where they actually visualize for you so you can experience it in a visceral way. And I say all this because what we wanted to do is just use all the affordances that come with the technology to tell the story in a powerful way to, of course, reach a larger audience, but quite honestly, to also communicate internally within the UN that maybe there's a better way for us to get our message across when it comes to these global issues that affect the entire planet and entire species. Yeah.
[00:21:52.606] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought it was really effective of being able to take these abstract concepts and then to try to spatialize them out into these data visualizations. And I'm imagining that's where Superbright came in to not only help flesh out this story, but to implement all the other aspects of it. But I'm just curious if you got from Superbright's perspective, you could start to talk about as you're coming into this project, how you started to break this down and start to translate this idea and concept of this report into an immersive experience that's more of a narrative that also gives some data visualizations to amplify the scope of some of these issues and problems.
[00:22:30.541] Igal Nassima: Yeah, sure. You watched the piece. I think when we started talking about the project, it is a massive report. And there's a lot of things happening in that report. And there's a lot of quantifiable things that report is talking about. And it's quite serious. These are really quite serious issues. And they have a lot of implications. So taking that content and translating into something that people will see created a lot of friction and conversations on how we need to approach this challenge. And to me, a lot of things that we care about, I think with Erica too, is making things more experiential for people. Because a lot of our approach to data visualization is visual and analytical. Its purpose is to show us some visuals that we can digest as quickly as possible to get a message across. As is aesthetic, if you go to Google and search data visualization, there is an aesthetic to that medium. And we wanted to break that down a little bit to make it feel like much more experiential, where you are in the data, you are experiencing something that you should feel maybe something that shadows you and to talk about inequality, or you should feel the sound of armies when you're talking about militarization. It shouldn't be just like a visual understanding of a concept or reading data. So that was like a ton of iterations of trying to make that happen within the resources we have. And the whole production of the content follows the same principle. Like whatever we're using at that point, whatever is accessible to us, having conversations on Zoom with the students and directing them in a certain way that we're accustomed to communicating in that DNH. And then working with the data visualizations to feel like you're in the middle of it, rather than outside looking at that issue from distance. Right? That is the feeling that we want people to perceive that they are in it, right? I think that's why this medium is great because you're experiencing something and then once you put it in front of them, what we hope people will get out of it is like they have a moment to feel like what the implications of disappearing of bird species might feel like rather than seeing some numbers changing in front of them or some graphics changing in front of them.
[00:24:44.933] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear your, your perspective as well, Erica, as you're coming onto this project and you know, how you were starting to get oriented to this challenge of doing this translation.
[00:24:54.319] Erica Newman: Yeah, I mean, immediately we were, and I was just really excited about the prospect of creating a storytelling piece to bring to life something that, you know, even as reading it myself, there's shocking facts in there and people need to know them and people are not reading that. It's not really getting out into the world on a larger scale or we're being processed by people. you know, when they're reading it as facts on a written page. So I think it was just really exciting and definitely felt really challenging in that sense. One aspect that I found really challenging that it all sort of touched on was, you know, obviously, none of us are teenagers. But we're creating a narrative piece that includes those voices and felt it was really important to represent those voices in an accurate way that did them justice. So one of the first things we did when we had the concept and a late script down, but we ended up reaching out to the United Nations International School in New York. and connecting with students there. None of them appear in the actual piece, but they really were informative in those conversations. We did rewrite the script in a large way after having those recordings and those conversations. So I think that's something that can always be improved and be even more natural. But I think that was something that was really important for us to tackle and require the voices of real students to participate in the making of the piece.
[00:26:24.924] Kent Bye: Yeah, one thing that I found striking in watching the piece was, you know, this is a piece that's going to presumably have world leaders be watching this piece within the context of the UN. And then right off the bat, you're giving a provocation of how presumably so often the UN may be used as a political device to divert the attention away from what's happening in their home country. And so kind of make a lot of grand statements into an international context, but to really the purpose of that is to not actually do anything, but just to serve as a way to divert attention away from other things. And so just curious if that's something, if that's a deeper dynamic there that you face in terms of almost being discounted because it's for whatever reason, not being taken as seriously as it should. So I'm just curious if you could maybe comment on that because that's quite a provocation to start off the piece, you know, setting the context, trying to deconstruct maybe some layers of barriers that are preventing people from actually deeply listening and hearing some of the messages that are coming out in some of these reports.
[00:27:28.050] Daanish Masood Alavi: I think that one of the, I guess, metaphors that's useful here is to look at the UN Secretariat building itself, as designed by Oskar Niemeyer and De Corbusier. It's shaped like a mirror that faces east and west, and the idea being that it reflects the world. which put from a slightly different perspective, in my view, also means that the problems of the world are not separate from the problems inside the UN, right? It's really a reflection of the world. So whatever exists in the world that is skillful, unskillful, maybe informed by delusion, also comes to the UN, right? And that's a hard thing to admit, but it's true. It's hard to admit, I think, particularly because we are a norm-setting institution, and people look to us as a norm-setting institution. So, of course, member states use the UN for all kinds of events, and particularly when it comes to the General Assembly, all kinds of statements are made from that podium. That said, indeed, as you say, it's so important that we rise above those things and really stress what's important. It's not like a puff piece. It's not some kind of communication strategy. These things are real, and that's what these kids are saying in the piece. you know, if we don't address this, we're going to basically cross a point of no return when it comes to the climate, when it comes to species loss, when it comes to the future, when it comes to also climate-related displacement. I mean, some of the figures that are cited in the piece, they're all real. They're all real. Much of the script, actually, I wrote also from what's already been said by the Secretary General, by Antonio Guterres, our Secretary General, in different instances. And so, It's interesting at a deeper level, I think that just to connect this to an earlier part of my life and my own journey with Be Another Lab, I felt we were running a smoke and mirrors operation, using virtual reality, using neuroscience to get people to touch their own bodies and the bodies of others and connect with people, connect with people that they wouldn't connect with otherwise. In this instance, I feel that I'm running a smoke and mirrors operation using virtual reality to get people to give a damn about things that they should be giving a damn about.
[00:29:56.783] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. That that's a really provocative. Oh, I don't know if you wanted to jump in.
[00:30:02.871] Igal Nassima: I want to add one thing. I noticed that working with a lot of creators, VR is almost like a safe space to tell these stories sometimes. I find that a lot of stories get really honest and provocative in VR. And it's almost like more approachable for people. When we were doing Zik Peace, for example, there was a lot of religious context in there that we were like, is this going to be comfortable for people in America? And that project traveled to Israel, that project traveled all over the place. and we find that people entering VR as a medium and facing these issues or different concepts they might not be comfortable, suddenly are more open to hearing it. And I think this is a good example of us writing a script that is much more honest than just trying to promote something as a mission of the UN.
[00:30:51.377] Daanish Masood Alavi: I just want to add, just to elaborate this important and beautiful point that Egal is making, is that there's a suspension of disbelief by virtue of this medium, right, that we encounter. And what I'm interested in is this inversion of the subject and object inside an experience. So in the case of swapping bodies, I open my eyes and from a first-person perspective, I'm in someone else's body, right? So I, the person who's observing the experience, I'm also the object of the experience, right? And we tried to do something similar with this first-person perspective prime minister experience, right? Where you're going in there, you're the subject as well as the object in a way, and people are talking to you in this very direct way. And because they're through the immersive experience and kind of cutting off from the world, the dawning of a head mounted display, there is that potential. And there's also a kind of vulnerability that's there when you're cut off from the world. And that I think is extremely fertile and generative in terms of hopefully in my view, spurring action or at the very least changing how people see things.
[00:32:03.940] Kent Bye: Yeah, Erica, I'd be really curious to hear your perspective as your background in linguistics, because I feel like that there's almost like a new spatial language that is being developed here within virtual reality in terms of usually when we talk about communicating in the written word, but there's almost like a symbolic way of taking these metaphors or these meanings and shifting written linear culture into videos and photos and meme culture. I think with the advances of technology that we've seen certainly the shift from written cultures into more visual oriented cultures. And I feel like VR is an extension of that larger shift that we've been seeing. And yeah, I'm just curious as a linguist, as you start to look at the language and the grammar of storytelling, say from like film, translating some of those different concepts into the spatial medium of VR and how you as a linguist start to think about the medium in that way.
[00:32:57.078] Erica Newman: Yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting question. I'm going to do my best to answer it. I do think it is extremely fascinating to live in an age where there are a lot more mediums for expression besides the spoken and written word. And I think throughout human history, there are so many other intangible forms of communication that happen in person. But with the advent of digital technology, even just the telephone, you lose gesture, you lose micro facial expressions, you lose all these other visual and other types of intangible cues. And I do think modern times and introducing a lot more visual communication to the common lexicon for people gives more types of people a means of expression. It's a lot less limiting to people who have been trained in the written word or know how to articulate and express themselves through whether it's experience or education that not everybody has access to. I think it opens up a lot of different brain styles to be able to communicate with each other and express themselves artistically and just even on a basic social friendship or other kinship level. So I think that absolutely comes into play in VR. And there's a much deeper meta understanding of that now, tools that people are starting to use more actively and more consciously, but I think we've probably only scratched the surface of that.
[00:34:34.738] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I find interesting about this piece in particular is because it is more directly and explicitly talking about these big global issues and in the political context, you know, this is a piece that the intended audience are going to be people who are in charge of these governments and making laws in their regions, but also as a global community, trying to coordinate efforts to be able to address some of these big, complicated issues. A way that I've been thinking a lot about these intersections between all these different domains of collective action. Looking through the lens of technology, there's Lawrence Lessig, he's got this pathetic dot theory where he starts to lay out some of these different realms. I like to kind of think about it in this set of nested contexts where at the largest level you have the earth, And then you have people on the earth that form culture. And so in this instance, you're creating these media artifacts to be able to educate people. And so you're operating in that, that cultural level. I think the United Nations generally with a lot of human rights is above a lot of the aspects of the political context that you have within each of the individual countries. And so you have the earth and then the culture. where the UN I think is operating a lot of soft law, I guess you could say international law, soft law, human rights. And then you have the laws of each of these individual countries that are dictating what happens in the context of their country. And then within the context of that, you have the economic dynamics, and then you have the technological architectures that sometimes technology can have a feedback loop of communicating about all of these things. But in this case, I think it's mostly focused on trying to communicate the state of the earth of the global warming and all the stuff that's happening, but within an economic context that is driving different political things that are, you know, the wealth inequality that is having a small hands of people that are driving and dictating direct influence on the political context, which then is having all these other aspects of the priorities of how the reallocation of those monies are going into armed conflicts in a way that there's a lot more money being spent within the global military industrial complex than say, in funding different peacemaking missions within United Nations. So I feel like in some ways, this piece is trying to connect all those dots. And I'm just curious to hear you, as you think about bridging those things together, communicating that and then how to bridge all these different domains, because it's sort of like, maybe that's the the mission of your division within the UN is to just at least facilitate these as conversations. But then these questions are being asked by the youth in this piece. If I put myself into the shoes of a prime minister, I don't know what the solution would be to shift all of these larger dynamics that are operating within this context of the economy and the values of the cultures that are putting so much money in defense, as well as the unintended consequences of how all of our actions collectively are having an ecological impact on the planet.
[00:37:29.962] Daanish Masood Alavi: I mean, these are certainly not easy questions to answer or easy dynamics to mitigate because there are these big systems involved that have momentum, that have money behind them, that have different sets of actors who have vested interests in ensuring that they stay in place. And at some level, at great cost to many humans and to many species and the planet itself, the system seems to continue working with ruthless efficiency. Right? So it's not straightforward. For sure, it's not straightforward. At the same time, you know, human beings are electing governments where that's possible and creating pressure. And even where governments are not as such elected, there's still pressure that those governments feel based on the attitudes and views of the populations that they govern. And so the question for me often is, how do we shift things in such a way where that pressure begins to increase, where there is enough awareness and enough motivation for the governments to do differently? right? Because the cost is too high. I mean, we can't solve all the problems in one go. You know, you have to do with this, what you would do with a tricky problem in math or physics, right? In quantum mechanics, you know, for instance, or in astrophysics rather, when we want to model how universe would behave. or even how an iron atom would behave. All the electrons in an iron atom would require us to have, if we were using a quantum computer to simulate an iron atom, all the electrons in an iron atom, how they're interacting with each other. We'd need a quantum computer with as many atoms, as many entangled pairs as the entire solar system. The point is we'd need a very, very large computer, an implausibly large computer to be able to simulate just an iron atom's electrons. So what do we do? We break it down into simpler problems and we simplify and we approach those problems individually. And I think something similar needs to be done when it comes to these complex issues and these complex systems, when it comes to, you know, kind of defense, weaponization, militarization, spending on those things. I mean, there are complicated dynamics, of course, but, you know, for instance, one of the things that happens in the EU is that a lot of the EU member states don't spend as much on defense. And one of the reasons why they don't spend as much on defense is because the electorates that elect those governments don't think they should spend as much on defense. Now there are complicated corollaries that come with that, that puts pressure on, of course, the United States, for instance, as an example, when it comes to global geopolitics. However, that's interesting, right? The fact that that is the dynamic is interesting to look at. When it comes to loss of biodiversity, I mean, one of the things we were trying to show with the visualization is, I don't know what the right term is, but like, the reticulate, maybe, nature of life on earth. Or, you know, as the philosopher John Muir would say, in nature, when you try to take anything apart, you find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken to everything else in the universe, right? And so that kind of understanding, I think, is something that can only come to individuals if we also create openings for them to experience nature and to have those mysterious, ineffable, meaning indescribable experiences in nature so that they feel more connected to it. I think the way we've designed the world and designed our experiences that is one of atomization and isolation. And we need to break out of that. I'm not the only one saying that. These aren't my ideas or new ideas. But I think these are important ideas that I'm citing. And I guess the overarching point that I'm trying to make, again, is approach each thing individually and see how we can create transformation within that, one by one, you know, and that has to be a collective exercise. And certainly, the United Nations, although it has an important charter and mandate, and the fact that it exists is very important because you need a global coordination body, also has a limited margin of maneuver. You know, we have to understand, as you all know, that, you know, the Security Council has the permanent five members, China, the Russian Federation, the United States, France, and the UK. And all those members have veto power, for instance, right? So what the UN can and can't do in different conflict contexts even is limited by that. And those pressures translate into what kinds of actions the Secretary itself can undertake, right? This is a reality. And so, yes, the UN is important. Yes, the UN should exist. But what the UN can do, we need to understand what it can't and can't do. And then we also need a broader community to mobilize and engage and address these problems one by one.
[00:42:16.178] Kent Bye: Yeah, Egal and Erika, I'd love to hear any reflections of the challenge of trying to be provided 15-20 minutes as a piece to be able to connect all these dots. You know, you have data visualizations around global wealth inequality. You have the amount of money that each of these nations are spending collectively on military defense spending. you have the ecological impact of the world and how it's destroying our biodiversity and our ecosystems, and then the threats of global climate change. And each of these, you've had a way of trying to spatially describe these aspects of that story and provide an embodied metaphor that hopefully will stick with these leaders to take the abstractions of these numbers and put them into an experience that then maybe changes their idea about the scope of the problems and the priorities. So I'd love to hear your process of arriving to where you got to, because it's quite a feat to be able to have such a small amount of time to be able to deliver as much impact as you possibly can through these spatial embodied metaphors.
[00:43:20.898] Igal Nassima: I think the hardest challenge is you have about like a minute for each of these really massive issues to visualize and express them. that actually the impact of it might not be even in my lifetime, right? Like the impact of climate change, I might not even know if I'm going to actually see the worst of it in my lifetime and our effects, you know, how we're stealing from the next generation. is something we need to tell in like 30 to 45 seconds and create an impact. And I think we want it to be accessible, right? We didn't want to feel like super high-end data visualization, like really shiny. I want it to be more like a child's toy and like something you can play with or would feel like you can access it and it's all around and you're part of it. And as sound is a big part of it, we've done a lot of work with spatial audio in the studio. So we worked a lot on the sound and sound effects, how things come in and come out, and keep the data to its bare minimum that we have to reveal in there to know there's a context to fall back on of what you're seeing. But we wanted you to look around and feel something rather than understand something about the numbers, which I believe a lot of people look and then forget, but maybe they'll remember the visuals. because the stimulation and the amount of information you take away from VR is so vast, like everybody can have a different experience. So within that, I think we tried to pick our battles of what we should leave people with. And we did a lot of deconstructing. Actually, we built a lot and we took away a lot among the way that we felt like it was distracting people from the core message we were trying to get across. It went through many, many iterations to feel, but I really wanted the piece to feel like accessible. like from, you know, someone working at the UN doing policy to someone who's 16 years old, that it should feel like something that's within their grasp, not some really fancy data visualization they might look at, and having to have an opinion to understand it.
[00:45:22.296] Erica Newman: Yeah. I mean, I think as you all said, it was extremely challenging and we went through a lot of versions and a lot of conversations about how to approach this and how to create content for it. And I think one of the more difficult parts of it was How do you balance getting people to digest facts? Because that is one of the core missions of the piece is bringing these actual important facts to life. But in any form, it's really hard to digest for people a lot of information. So as you all said, we had to kind of pick our battles on what information we were choosing to show and when. And I think We even landed, like, especially, you know, if you look at biodiversity, we had conversations about there's so much going on. And then we wanted to add more to kind of give more of a visceral impact. And I think oftentimes adding more can compromise the absorption of a simple piece of text or reading or hearing that piece of text. But I think part of the medium is really giving people an emotional takeaway from this piece is more important than remembering how many birds were lost or have gone extinct. It's more important that they feel the real horror of that and the impact of that on the world and on themselves and on the other people. in the world and the people, you know, the students you see in the piece. So I think focusing a bit on the emotional impact of a wall really high up towering over you or too many birds, you know, an overwhelming amount of sound and birds around you. And even just feeling the vibrations of that database, it feels like, oh no, it's, oh, it's just really overwhelming. Like there are too many things going on to process all of it. But I think at the end, it kind of becomes the point of that one. And I think that the emotional impact is kind of the most important takeaway for me in creating those.
[00:47:21.355] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm really curious to see how this piece continues to be seen by these leaders and then what impact it may have. I guess a follow on question in terms of the next steps is, you know, there's a piece that when you wake up to the end of the world that was talking about nuclear proliferation and produced by games for change and, um, is a piece that's showing here at Sundance New Frontier in 2022. But one of the things that they're doing with Games4Change is having a whole impact campaign so that they're trying to set forth, OK, if this is where you're at, here's what you can do to be able to take something where on the surface may not feel like we have a lot of agency when it comes to say nuclear proliferation. And it's such a global political issue, but to have the culture be able to take the next steps. And so I'm wondering, as you start to deploy this as a piece, what the onboarding is going to be what the offboarding is going to be, you know, what they're primed with before they go into this experience. And then if they're coming out of it, like have a select set of things they can vote on, or is there that tied to any specific legislation or is it like, here's the report where you can read more information? Or I guess when you think about the impact approach of onboarding and offboarding people onto this, I'm just curious how you approach that.
[00:48:37.350] Daanish Masood Alavi: So, I mean, I'd welcome, of course, my colleagues' thoughts on this. I'm going to break the question down into multiple parts. And in terms of what broader agenda does it connect to, it connects to essentially this thing that the UN, under the current Secretary General, has put out called the Common Agenda, which in his view, you know, and in our view, as a planet, we're facing our biggest test since the Second World War. Right? So either we break down or we break through. That's kind of the idea. And so the common agenda, of course, is this fleshed out, well thought through document that outlines what actions we need to take and sets forth a set of recommendations and a vision for the future. And that goes at every level, right? Governments, private sector, civil society organizations, citizens, et cetera. In terms of the onboarding and offboarding of this experience in particular, that's something that we're actually still working on. We're trying to see what are some of the ways in which we can engage a broader community, engage a bigger group. And, you know, some of the ideas that at least I have, have to do with finding ways to, you know, engage the specific community that's involved where we might be showing it. For instance, we're showing it in school, involving students, maybe even getting some of the students that helped us write the script initially to be part of the conversation if we're working with with leaders to maybe get them to also commit to having a dialogue with future generations. One of the things that we wanted to assert at the very end with the final section of the piece is, is the role that young generations need to have, that they have a central critical role in decision making about the future, because it affects their lives more than anyone else's. So we want that dialogue to be taking place and we want people who are decision makers to assume the role and responsibility that they should be assuming in the face of the challenges we're facing. That's definitely one part of it. And then another part of it, in terms of next steps in the future, from my perspective, is also our kind of entry into the metaverse, generally as the United Nations, and thinking about how will the UN moving forward engage with the metaverse. And in that regard, we've also been collaborating with Superbright in building a mini version of the UN in the metaverse that we initially believed can potentially be used as a space for dialogue when conflict parties are unwilling because things are too polarized or unable because of the global pandemic or cost or security to meet in person, that they can meet as embodied avatars in a virtual space and talk to each other and engage in different types of priming exercises in order to work toward intergroup alignment.
[00:51:25.998] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. That's really interesting to hear that. Eyal and Erika, I'd love to hear any thoughts. Because for me, as going to these film festivals, there's this process of building installations and trying to create a magic circle that people start to enter into this world. And then when they put on the VR headset, then they go into the next layer of the inception of the story that you're telling. And then there's the aftercare that comes when you come back out into that space. Before you go back out into the wide world, you have another opportunity to have a magic circle that transitions from coming out. And so I don't know if you've put any thought, have any ideas around onboarding and offboarding installations or rituals, magic circles when it comes to this piece.
[00:52:07.052] Igal Nassima: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think if the festival was IRL, we were probably going to have a presence in Utah, and we're going to think about how to onboard people. And we've done this so many times. All the pieces start with an onboarding. It's so important. And then who they speak to once they put the visor up and see the first person they're seeing and what they're greeted with. And we extensively think about these things on all the installations we do. And I feel like this project has now two paths. One is, it's going to go to different events and maybe call them activations or festivals and the piece can be fluid enough that it can fit different contexts because it's talking about a wide range of issues that it can target. So I think we're probably going to have multiple endings with multiple messages that can be transformative in these things and can be almost like a diplomatic educational tool that Danish can use for a long time for education and awareness. And then I would love to design an installation obviously at some point where for people coming to the Green Room, yeah? Like, you know, this moment of waiting in the Green Room is like the anticipation and hearing the crowd and the anxiety of presenting at the General Assembly. I was telling Danish, like, not many mere mortals go and do a speech there, right? iconic thing to be able to go up there so how do we reflect that anxiety of waiting and putting someone like hey you're about to go make this speech and like coming off that speech the adrenaline like you know how did it go and where did it go did i get my message across I think those are the things we would actually really work with. I don't know if you tried Zik, but we had people take off their shoes and there was recitation playing in the background. The day the world changed, there was a whole installation around and afterwards we gave people little tiny origami cranes. So we really think about extensively. I'm sad this project does not have an IRL component, but I do think we're going to have to figure out what Danish is saying, how this piece is going to live in now what people are calling, you know, the metaverse or the world of all the immersive experiences living online, and where it should link to after they finish the piece. And we're probably going to change the onboarding a little bit to give that emphasis on that. We aren't there to onboard people on, so they have to really get in that mindset. And I do feel like people have a pre-notion when they see a UN piece. I think there's an expectation of what they'll see, and this piece might be subverting that a little bit, I'm hoping. It's not just like a narrative promotional piece, there's a little bit more in there.
[00:54:41.396] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's got provocations and narrative that's different. Erika, I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have on that.
[00:54:48.374] Erica Newman: Yeah, just thinking about before and after, I think is especially at a festival is one of the most challenging parts. There's no way to fully mitigate the feeling of coming out of a VR headset, just the way that the technology affects your brain and your vision when you take that headset off. You know, lighting is a really important part of that as well, I think. And I'm not, to be totally honest, perfectly convinced in a festival environment where there's a lot of background noise and people walking around that there's ever going to be a really, really full solution for giving people that transition. But I think it's really important to do as much as we possibly can to give them a smoother come down out of the experience. it kind of reminded me of, you know, one of the more intense VR experiences I've experienced in a festival environment was called The Collider. I believe it was at Tribeca two or three years ago. And I do think there's sort of this advantage, at least for me, of being in either a social VR experience or in a room with people that you're experiencing something at the same time. I do think it bridges the gap from being in this sort of really solo space much better than when there are other people in the room or when you're in the experience with other people to help you transition out of that. And I think social VR kind of has an advantage in that sense. it's more natural, but the collider, for example, you know, the beginning, you, there's a set you're in a room. And then when you come out of this really intense experience with another human being, there's plenty of time and space, like literally a walled structure to keep you away from the other people because it's just too much. So I thought that was one of the better handlings of it that I've seen because it was a really emotional time where you could just take as much time in a, semi-private environment before you go back into this like crazy hustle and bustle. It's like, it's really overwhelming at festivals. But I think the literal layout and necessity of that is never going to fully be solved in that environment. And then at home is a completely other challenge because you don't have any ability to influence what somebody is doing before or after. So I think there has to be more thought about how those experiences begin and end when you know somebody is just, there are no variables in their real worlds that you can control around that. And that's a different question. Yeah.
[00:57:12.439] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. I, I look to say the museum of other realities and how they've handled the virtual showing of some of these festivals where you go into like a space and then you go into another space. And so it's almost like inception where you're going into a virtual world and then into, which I think is in some ways probably a good metaphor for the metaverse of what it may feel like of going into these various different spatial environments that allow you to go from one to the next in a similar way that I think that there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the film festival community in terms of the onboarding and aftercare that I think is, it'll be interesting to see how that gets translated into this overall experiential design to be able to communicate this. So I'm very curious to hear how this continues to progress. But just as we start to wrap up here, I'm curious what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtuality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:58:04.506] Daanish Masood Alavi: You know, in my view, what I'm currently interested in is how do we use immersive technologies broadly in order to essentially get people to really care. On the one hand, one of the things that we've been playing around with, for instance, is using augmented reality with actual physical reports. So for instance, when you work on a particular Security Council mandate, for instance, as I was working on Iraq, at the height of ISIL and the fall of it, I was producing a report from the Security Council every three months, every quarter, along with my colleagues in the mission, the UN mission in Iraq. And One of the things that I eventually built a prototype for was, you know, kind of using some kind of augmented reality thing that you would just put your phone camera on the physical report, the 40 page report or whatever, and you'd get a visualization of the key points. Why? Because often what ends up happening is that decision makers because they're so overloaded and oversubscribed like all of us, they don't actually have the time to read a 40-page report. What often happens is that people just use the find function to see if their country was mentioned and what context was it mentioned in. That's the unfortunate truth. And so how can we use augmented reality to visualize things and make them exciting? And here are the key decision points that you should be caring about, right? What this is asking you to decide on, that kind of thing in the simplest sense. But then more deeply, I'm also interested in how we can transform the internal ecology of human beings using immersive technologies. From those who have experienced trauma, from conflict, or from other forms of exploitation or abuse, getting them to reconnect with their bodies, reconnect with somatic experience, use body movement and embodiment that's non-verbal as a form of transforming that pain? And then in addition to that, how can we use augmented reality, ambisonic experiences, to get people to become re-enchanted with the physical world, with nature, with life, and stronger interspecies connection? right? In all kinds of environments, from the ocean to tundra to forests, whatever, right? And as a way of, again, transforming the internal ecology of people, you know, put differently and put rather succinctly, how can we use immersive technology to meet people precisely where they're at and take them on a journey? And I think Another important aspect of this is also some of the work we're doing with our metaverse play is also looking into the idea of biometrics and psychometrics, you know, in terms of getting readings and providing neural feedback as well to people as to where they're at and what we would suggest for them. Of course, they decide what they want to do, which of course is also a whole ethical conversation as well. But I think that's what I'm interested in, the direction I'm interested in going.
[01:01:06.781] Erica Newman: Um, I mean, you know, I hope I don't know what the future of the technology is and that people are way more creative and visionary than anything that I could say right now. But when it comes to the metaverse and other sort of virtual social spaces, one hope that I have is that we're not. as humans sort of pathologically do, trying to recreate everything that we already know and already have in the real world and design spaces and interactions in the exact same way. Because I think the magic of it and the accessibility of it to so many people will be not locking us into the norms and the patterns that we already have. So You know, I think core to that is how does the world make the creation of that technology more inclusive and more representative? You know, you don't always have to have imagery, which you don't always have to have sound. You can use vibration. You can use all of these other ways of communicating. Coming back to your question earlier that I think The people who have been doing so much creation of world infrastructure can't be the ones solely in charge of creating the metaverse. And I do think we're at danger of that happening very imminently. And that that is something that I really hope we find a way as a community to overcome and don't succumb to because the people who have access to creation is still very limited. And yeah.
[01:02:32.056] Igal Nassima: Yeah, just to add to what Eric is saying and to our mission, like to kind of like what we do on an ongoing basis, I think I'm hoping we're reaching a place where content creation and building and accessibility of technology and creation is becoming easier and easier, right? I think the growth of any medium, like the tipping point on the nets with all the net arts and every expression and emojis and gifts and everything else come at a tipping point that everybody is able to contribute content at such a extreme high capacity that we're amassing a language on a consistent basis. And I do hope that the same thing is going to happen in VR as well, that anybody can start creating content easily, access, contribute, and partake within the promise of all the things happening with Web3 technologies and exchange of currencies within the digital realm and exchanging content. And when they come together, I'm hoping that we're able to create a lot more content and it's going to be much more accessible to people. And then I think we're going to see a lot more interesting things happen. I think that is what makes it really exciting to me in the seeing like how much the technology has evolved since 2016, where these headsets started coming to consumers. I feel like a lot of technologies we're seeing right now, been around for 20 years, you know, Second Life was here like I don't know, almost two decades ago. I don't know, maybe a little sooner than that. We're seeing a repeat of that being adapted to the headset. Okay, great. But I think there's going to be a lot more happening now. 3D content is getting easier, deploying it is getting easier, AR is getting easier. I think that's where we're going to get really, really interesting to what Erika is saying. We're going to start getting beyond to what early storytellers are making or the first functional experiences in the enterprise happening and that we're going to move to a lot of different things that we have not thought that people would do now. And that's becomes really exciting for kind of the tech side of things.
[01:04:32.699] Kent Bye: Nice. Nice. Yeah. And is, is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:04:39.025] Igal Nassima: I think Danish was a catalyst to put a really group of amazing researchers to talk about UN's initiative as part of the presentation at the stage at Sundance next week. So I recommend everyone watch that presentation where we talk a little bit about our research into technology and things we're looking into from machine learning to social VR and content creation. all the researchers that are collaborating within this negotiations, like SAR initiative with the UN, they're all presenting their ideas and their research, which I think is a really interesting presentation that is about 30 minutes that will screen next week.
[01:05:18.565] Daanish Masood Alavi: On my side, I just want to say that we have a lot of stories to tell, and we're constantly on the search of skilled storytellers. Just within a six-month time horizon, We have a piece coming out about the war in Yemen. We have another piece coming about climate change and sea level rise in the South Pacific. And that one is wonderful because it involves looking at the world from the perspective of Indigenous communities and having Indigenous epistemology inform solution making. But, you know, just to give you a range, but we're constantly looking for storytellers. And, you know, we can solve the issue of resources, but we need to tell things in an incontrovertible and powerful way. And so think of this as an invitation to the VR community to come to us and to engage with us, to tell stories much more powerfully, because frankly, as the United Nations, we bring the world together. And so there are a lot of challenges that we need to be talking about. So please, and we want to hear from you.
[01:06:23.422] Erica Newman: I think that sums everything up. Egal touched on exactly what I wanted to add, which was the UN's and Danish's team and his approach to creating these stories and spaces is through collaboration as a primary way of working. And I think that's just an extremely important point to emphasize. And there's no type of storyteller or creator that's left out of that scope. It can really come from a lot of different angles and that's. Just key to making them powerful and telling important stories.
[01:06:58.031] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, this is a project that I'm, I'm really excited to see, you know, how it continues to evolve and progress. And then he's just a quick follow on question is, are some of these experiences that you're talking about, are they going to be made widely available for anybody to watch or how can people get their hands on some of these different experiences to see what you've been working on?
[01:07:17.509] Daanish Masood Alavi: So we have like a public facing website called futureingpeace.org, like futureingpeace.org, where we put up a lot of these experiences. And indeed, our aim is to make them public facing, even though they may initially be used to brief members of the Security Council. And some of our pieces have that intent in mind, to be more briefing material oriented, and to be frank, they can be a little more dry for that reason. But there are other pieces that are just trying to put out an important message and an important story and an important experience that needs to be talked about. For instance, this piece from the Asia Pacific region, from the perspective of Indigenous communities there. So please, you know, please connect with us and also that website is a good way to connect with us directly as well. And then our email is dppa-innovation at un.org. My email is masoodd at un.org.
[01:08:14.800] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. I just really excited because there's the hard data that you're producing in these reports, but then to use the medium of VR to be able to translate this into either an experience or a story, which I think is really for me, one of the ultimate potentials of VR is that, you know, to be able to use it, to be able to address our relationship to each other, our relationship to ourselves, our relationship to the world around us, and the relationship to all these other ideas and aspects of reality that we need to be aware of. And I think you're bringing all that together with not only this piece, but these future projects that you're working on. So yeah, Dinesh, Yigal, and Erica, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast to be able to unpack it all.
[01:08:52.890] Igal Nassima: Thank you for having us.
[01:08:54.463] Kent Bye: So that was Danish Massoud Alavi. He's the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, and he's helping to run the Innovation Unit. Also, Eyal Nasima, he's the founder and creative director of Superbright, and Erica Newman is head of production at Superbright. Also, I think it's worth mentioning that Danish was a part of Be Another Lab, which was doing a lot of really innovative experiments with the body swap, and you may have heard these different experiments that that from a neuroscience perspective, of being able to do perspective-taking across different perspectives and genders, really innovative and interesting work, and kind of moonlighting doing this, it turns out, while he was still maintaining his day job at the UN. I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. First of all, Well, this is probably one of the more exciting experiences that I saw, just because of who's going to be watching it. This is a challenge to try to take these big issues and try to symbolically translate them into an immersive experience. When I look at the report that this was based upon, number of stuff that is maybe more abstract. In the context of trying to do a 10- or 15-minute experience, it's hard to comprehensively translate all these different concepts into a spatial experience. But there are some aspects of the wealth inequality and the degree to which these different countries are spending on armaments and the amount of resources they're paying to be able to build up all these conventional weapons versus how much money is being put towards the UN peacebuilding initiatives that are there, as well as the climate change and the ecological devastation that's happening from both the species that are being destroyed, but then you're standing there in the United Nations and it starts to fill up in water to speak to these larger issues of global climate change. Lots of other things that were not necessarily included in the context of this experience in terms of human mobility and refugee flows and other aspects of economic relations and trade, although the wealth inequality starts to get to that, to some degree, civic participation, digital technologies. Other aspects of disarmament in terms of nuclear weapons and whatnot. This is a 30-page report. I want to look at the original report and see the immersive experience, just to see how there are some aspects of this report that are easier to translate into a spatial embodied metaphor. Also, just the larger context of this experience, you're standing there giving a speech to the UN, and you get hacked because you're wearing this augmented reality glasses, and then you have basically a floating Zoom call with all these students who are telling you various things about what they think about the context of these larger dynamics. So I think that it's very interesting to see how to start to create an immersive experience out of this content, and then the onboarding and the offboarding, and to maybe try to tie together some of the dots for how these big, large issues are getting collapsed into an individual experience, especially in the context of this report, which is at the state of global peace and security. And so there's going to be aspects of onboarding and offboarding. Just like there are ways that this experience can apply to lots of different contexts, there's going to be lots of different audiences that are going to be watching this and lots of ways to set the proper context before they go in and as they come out. So that's something that Superbright is going to continue to iterate on. And you start to think about the Sitting in the context of the floor on the United Nations, there's some photos that Danish has on his Twitter that is probably going to be the header image of this podcast that shows members of the UN Security Council getting briefed about the situation that's happening in Colombia. A lot of those different videos are available. You can watch them on thefuturingpeace.org. I'll have some links down in the show notes, you can start to dig into some of these, as well. There's also going to be a half-hour video that showed at the Sundance Artist Spotlight that I asked if they could make that available because it was such an amazing recounting of all the other aspects of what they're doing in terms of working with neuroscientists and using the virtual reality context for furthering aspects of peacebuilding and negotiation. You can imagine if there are two folks that are fighting, and if they meet on each other's land, then that may not necessarily be a safe neutral zone, and how virtual reality could actually provide these neutral zones where there's not going to be any imminent threat to people's physical security and safety, and they could have a context in which they're able to talk about some of these different peacemaking ideas. Talking about the umwelt and trying to establish the perspective-taking, and are there ways that you can design immersive experiences to start to do that? Especially from a neuroscience perspective and the body swap and be another lab. some of the most innovative, cutting-edge applications of neuroscience as applied to these virtual reality contexts. And so, the fact that Danish was involved with Be Another Lab and has continued to, I guess, innovate and push forward what's possible from both the research but also applying it at that level of the United Nations, to me, is just really astounding to see that this type of work is happening. I'm really curious to see how they start to take this latest research and dialogue and negotiation and mediation and Start to potentially use the immersive technologies to be able to advance that and that Sounds like that the super bright is actually working on a platform to be able to start to do that So the building these worlds to be able to facilitate this type of peacemaking and negotiation under the auspices of the United Nations Which is really really quite amazing So definitely check out that video to get a lot more details as to what's happening there. It's probably worth digging into a little bit more because it was a lot of new information that wasn't even included into their experience and they mentioned it here in this conversation but then that was before the premiere of their artist video and then I had a chance to watch it and I was just like absolutely blown away. I was like oh my god this is really quite amazing all the stuff that they're doing there. So definitely check that out and I'm looking forward to following up with more information because this is really a lot of exciting work that's happening here. Again, if you want to check out more information, definitely check out their website, FuturingPeace.org. You can see some of the different experiences that they're using to be able to brief different members of the General Assembly and the U.N. Security Council, and some of these other innovation projects that they're working on. That is taking the latest of emerging technologies and art and neuroscience and immersive storytelling and fusing them all together. There'll be a link to the App Lab State of Gold piece that you can definitely look at if you haven't had a chance already. Definitely worth checking that out, as well. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to 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 consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of support podcasts, and I do rely upon donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
