Flashback to VRLA 2017 with Jacki Morie talking about her patented Scent Collar and VR history. Morie is featured in the 6th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri’s In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series leading up to the book release of The Land of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, this is episode number three of five. In today's episode, I'm gonna be talking with Jackie Mori, who I had a chance to talk to her at VRLA in Los Angeles back in 2017. And so she was presenting her smell collar, but there was some technical difficulties. So I didn't actually get a direct embodied experience of the smell collar. But there's lots of really fascinating things that she was talking about when it comes to integrating smell into virtual reality experiences. So, Jackie is featured a couple of times throughout the course of Lisa Masseri's book, The Land of Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, which is a really amazing, in-depth, anthropological look within the political ecology of XR, really focusing in on Los Angeles and 2018. And she's able to really unpack the deeper cultural context of virtual realities and emerging technology. So Jackie was working at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, USCICT. And so LA has this really interesting mix of entertainment, creative technologies, but also military contracting, the different types of technologies that could be used both in the creative context, but also in a training within the context of the military. And also there's her PhD that we talk about a little bit here that she finished in 2007. And she talks about the history of VR and at that point, having a little bit of a pivot. And at the end, I'll have a little bit more context for ways that Jackie is showing up within the series book of the Land of Unreal. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Wists of VR podcast. So this interview with Jackie happened on Saturday, April 15th, 2017 at VRLA in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:01.733] Jacki Morie: My name is Jackie Maury, and I am a VR survivor from the early days who has been doing VR pretty consistently since the 1980s. Great.
[00:02:11.418] Kent Bye: And so we're here at VR LA, and so maybe you could talk a bit about the project that you're showing here.
[00:02:17.465] Jacki Morie: What we are showing this time at VRLA is a prototype scent collar to bring scent to your VR experiences. So we call it RemniScent, and it is a Bluetooth-controlled collar that you wear, where you can address four individual cartridges, each that contain a specially designed scent for your VR environment. And then you can eventually, it's not quite finished yet, but you will be able to control the flow of air through those scent cartridges with a Bluetooth signal from your VR experience. Great.
[00:02:52.099] Kent Bye: So yeah, unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties. We're not able to actually have a direct demo of this yet. But maybe you could talk a bit about the process of how this actually works inside of each of these cartridges, like what's actually happening in order to disperse smell, like the elements of scent that can make it compelling within a VR experience.
[00:03:13.297] Jacki Morie: The individual cartridges contain a package that has a diaphragm that is basically an air blower, a miniature air blower. That forces air across a little receptacle that has a filter disc that has the scent oil or scent design soaked into it. So nothing is sprayed at you. It's all about the airflow across that piece of filter paper that's in the cartridge that is situated near your face. So the smell doesn't have to go far. It doesn't stink up a room. And it's very personal for the scents that you're smelling. We did have some challenges with being able to control this with Bluetooth, mainly because the game engines aren't up to speed on the Bluetooth signals for VR experiences yet. But we're going to crack that one. We've been talking to the game engine companies.
[00:04:06.119] Kent Bye: So maybe you could talk a bit about the motivating factors behind what type of applications are really driving this line of VR development. And maybe some of the, I understand you had some grants and some money and funding coming from the Navy for this. And what the applications of this are.
[00:04:24.587] Jacki Morie: The Navy was, I wouldn't exactly call it a grant or funding, it was a tiny bit of money to throw together a prototype last summer, and that was for incoming Navy engineers to figure out what was wrong on a ship based on smell. Somebody might have a burnt motor smell, somebody might have an electrical fire. And they would do this in a classroom training situation, so they didn't want someone sitting next to you, who's on some other part of the ship, to smell what you were smelling. So that was why they were interested. They haven't called us back yet, but we did give them a solution. This is a new, re-engineered, much more stable version of what we did for the Navy in three weeks last year. So I think this one will have a lot more staying power. We don't know what all the other applications are. Certainly just to have scents in a VR thing that make it more evocative, make it more memorable perhaps. If you do really well with the scents in a VR experience, you may not even know you're smelling them. But it's going to be more cognitively real to you and you might remember it longer when you come out of it.
[00:05:30.605] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's the thing that I see with the different senses in VR is that it's on a long trajectory of trying to hack all of the senses, potentially, but especially starting with the vision and the sound. And haptics are kind of in third place and maybe the most uncanny or low fidelity that we have right now of really doing haptics. But there hasn't been a lot of other people that I've seen and starting to look at smell and scent. And I think it's hard, first of all, but also I think in terms of immersive experiences, the visual field really dominates the experience, so there's been a lot of focus on that. The sound really can add another whole level of immersion, and the haptics. But I'm just curious to hear from your perspective of, like, the role of smell and scent when it comes into immersion, and, you know, why it's important to consider.
[00:06:21.177] Jacki Morie: I think it depends on the experience very much. So in some experiences scent might not really add that much and in some it might be critical. So I think there are people working on it but I haven't seen many solutions that are robust or easy to use. And I really have a problem with things that are sprayed at your face. So you don't want to be doing that. That's not very safe for a number of reasons. And I wouldn't do this. So this one just works on this kind of molecular drift theory, that it's just airflow bringing these molecules to your nose. So nothing sticks around, nothing sticks to your clothes, or your face, or anything like that. But I really think the power of the scent, we won't know until we get more experiences that use it. And maybe for things like therapy, there might be some better options. For training, I think, for medical, or for the ship maintenance stuff, I think there's some good possibilities there. And then we'll just see. We'll see where some of these experiences can take it, because, you know, it's just a starting point.
[00:07:24.953] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that I've been looking at a lot lately has been this principle of embodied cognition, which is just the sense that we use our entire bodies to process and construct our reality. And the way that we think is not just in our minds, but it is our entire body. And I've had direct experiences where I was on this high level platform and being asked to step off of it. And I've done it where I'm not on a motion platform that's moving my body. And I've done it on the motion platform where I feel like I'm actually on this crickety window washing at the top of this building. And there was something about activating the limbic part of my brain and unconscious processing that my mind was like, okay, you're safe. You just jump off. But yet my body was giving me a whole other signals. And I feel like smell is on that unconscious level of processing that we may not even necessarily recognize it. But yet, in terms of embodied cognition, it's creating this depth of presence that is actually kind of hard to quantify. But I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:08:25.552] Jacki Morie: The depth of presence is a great phrase. I mean, if our body is the interface in virtual reality, which I totally believe, think of it as having not enough buttons on your controller if you're leaving out some of these senses. So if we give people more ways to interact, and interact doesn't have to mean do something with that smell. It just means that the smell is there providing that cognitive realism and maybe emotional realism too.
[00:08:52.667] Kent Bye: Yeah, I have been starting to look at smell and taste and different taxonomies and ways to categorize it and these visualizations of the wheels. And to me, what I found really interesting is that there's a strong connection between taste and smell. But yet there's a whole range of smells that you're never going to taste because the smell has evolutionarily been evolved to the point to know not to eat that because it could be dangerous. And so it seems like when it comes to the palette of tastes that we can have is a lot smaller of a subset than the smell, but yet they're connected in some way. So maybe you could talk a bit about, you know, how you see the connection between Taste and smell but yet the function of those smells that we're not tasting but are important for immersive experience in some way I think they're important for different reasons.
[00:09:39.917] Jacki Morie: So the ones that are associated with taste are certainly talking to That evolutionary part of our body that knows what's good for us. What's bad for us the things we've evolved for things we haven't evolved for that, you know, sort of could be neutral but depends on your experience with those smells. Like, for me, a diesel exhaust smell is wonderful because I toured with a singing group and we lived on buses and that was a great part of my teenage years. But for other people, diesel smell is terrible. So, really, there's no absolute of what that smell is. We get a little more of it in taste just because the smells associated with taste. We know what's rancid, what's putrid, what's things that might cause us to have some kind of reaction or sickness. But with a lot of smells, especially modern smells, we don't have that. And it's the memories and the associations you have with those smells that make them either a positive or a negative effect of valence when you're smelling them. So the hard thing about that is we don't know exactly how smells are going to affect people. But then we don't know that in real life either. So if VR is a mirror to real life, then we're getting the same kind of experiences.
[00:10:52.054] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, anecdotally, I know that people taste something that tastes like their mother's soup that they grew up with. There's something almost like a direct line into our memories. Has that been proven out in terms of the neuroscience of smell being connected more in a direct way to memory?
[00:11:09.053] Jacki Morie: It does form very strong memories, and we don't exactly know how that trigger of smelling something triggers that memory. We don't exactly know how it works. Maybe there are some more recent papers I don't know about, but it is still kind of a mystery because there's some kind of smell memory, but it's not the chemicals of the smell. And so it's an interesting problem. You know, I'm not smart enough to say how it works, but it works.
[00:11:37.569] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so the mechanics of being able to use the scent collar in order to disperse smells, is this a matter of getting any number of essential oils and distilling the essence of a smell into a liquid and then putting it onto this little disc and putting it into your scent collar so that you can essentially create whatever smell that you want?
[00:11:55.710] Jacki Morie: It is a lot like designing fragrances for the flavors and fragrances industries. I design many of the ones that I've been using over the years. We also in Los Angeles have the Institute for Art and Olfaction that was started by Saskia Wilson-Brown and she is single-handedly democratizing the way people learn to create these scents. And so you can take classes there, you can get the real basics of what kind of odorants combine well and how they combine. It's quite chemical, so you're going to learn a lot, but it is an art form, I believe. There are ways to go out with a headspace machine and grab the smells of an area. Then you take that back to the lab and you can do analysis to see what components make that smell. But unless you isolate the smells, that's like the smell of an Afghan village or smell of the fair when you go. Although you can do caramel popcorn and the farm area of the fair. So, it's an art form, I think, right now. Designing smells has always been an art form. We take them for granted. We don't realize, to recreate something, how much you really have to put into that. Because you're not just recreating a specific smell, you're recreating something that people are going to have associations with, and you're triggering those associations. So, it might not be exact smell, but it might be.
[00:13:20.898] Kent Bye: So what are the fundamental component parts of concocting and creating a smell? What are your ingredients that you're using even to do this?
[00:13:30.021] Jacki Morie: Wow, I have a cabinet with about 30 to 100 different kinds of smell components. Saskia has many, many, many more. And she can tell you from the chemical name what it's going to smell like. And she can tell you how they combine. I'm not that good at it. She's really good at it. So it's chemistry, but it's not an exact science. And that's what the perfumers will tell you, too.
[00:13:58.305] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I kind of just got into this sudden realization that if I ate food slowly and I could really appreciate the different tastes and you know, is it bitter? Is it sour? Is it sweet? As well as salt and umami is like just being able to look at these different taxonomies of smells and how, whether it's the beer industry or whether it's coffees, and wine is a huge one as well, bourbon, whiskey, alcohol. So there's all these, you know, waiters and waitresses actually have to be able to describe the food in terms of the taste in different ways. People who are wine tasting also have all sorts of sophisticated ways of describing taste. But for you, as you think about the mental model of how you think about smell, do you have that categorized into large categories?
[00:14:47.094] Jacki Morie: No, I don't. And there are many taxonomy systems for it. So I just go with my gut. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in designing scents at all. Other people can do that much better than I can. I just hope to give people a good delivery device for these scents in their VR experiences.
[00:15:05.687] Kent Bye: So if people were to buy commercial off-the-shelf essential oils, could they use that with the scent collar?
[00:15:11.065] Jacki Morie: Yeah, these little filter disks that we use can be soaked with any kind of essential oil or mixture and different things that are not oil-based. And what you'd have to do is adjust the airflow depending on what kind of mixture you had made.
[00:15:25.795] Kent Bye: And you mentioned somebody who's democratizing the process of creating smells. What did you mean by that and what's happening there?
[00:15:32.435] Jacki Morie: The inventions and creations of perfumes and certain flavors were really tied up in very large companies, perfume companies that had a vested interest in never letting any of that information out, keeping it a big secret, a big mystery, because it's a multi-billion dollar industry. So it wasn't until recently that independent artisans started getting into the scent creation business. And then about four years ago Saskia started the Institute for Art and Olfaction here in Los Angeles. And that was kind of a galvanizing point for a lot of independent artisans who were trying to work in scent. So that's why I say she's been democratizing it. There's been a little bit of a movement of independent artisans who, they're never going to work for the large flavor and fragrance companies, but they're very passionate about making scents. And so they have outlets now that they never had before. There are award ceremonies every year for new scents that are created called the Golden Pear Awards. And that's a great smelling event to go to. So I would say there are more independent people creating scents today than ever, which bodes well for VR if you want to find a scent designer.
[00:16:44.709] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. That's really interesting. And what was the story of how you got into this?
[00:16:50.311] Jacki Morie: So it was about 1990, I think. I was at a SIGGRAPH conference in Texas. And I had to go get something from the car. We were all at an art museum after the conference. And I said, I'll run back to the car and get whatever it was. And I was going across this field, and suddenly I smelled something that stopped me in my tracks. And I don't know where I was, I don't know what the smell was, but I was somewhere else in a pre-linguistic state. So it had to be a smell that I must have smelled as a pre-linguistic child, baby. And I just went, oh my God, this is so incredibly powerful, I just don't even know what to do. And that's what started me being very interested in scent.
[00:17:32.024] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. And how did you first find the outlet of actually adding this into VR then? How did you start to actually integrate it then?
[00:17:39.029] Jacki Morie: I was working at the Institute for Creative Technologies, and we were doing our grand opening, and it was going to have a scene in Bosnia with a Humvee in a kind of a Bosnian town. And I thought, well, let's put smells in this, because I'd already for 10 years been really interested in smells. And the devices that were available at the time were these big towers with individual huge cartridges. And when you put the smell cartridge in, it stunk up the room. And the other researchers said, we're not having any of this because it smells up our entire VR theater like diesel exhaust and dusty town after a rainstorm. Those are my two smells. And I said, OK, then I'll invent something that doesn't stink up a room. And that's how I invented the scent collar, which I did in 2004. It was patented in 2007, and we are on the second generation of it now.
[00:18:27.885] Kent Bye: I see. And you said there was like a molecular theory of what are the mechanics of actually it blowing out.
[00:18:33.269] Jacki Morie: You said there was some sort of theory of... Oh, I call it molecular drift or molecular flow because we're not spraying stuff at you as a liquid. It's just the molecules that are coming off of that filter disk and then you're just blowing an air current across them so that the molecules are pointed towards your face.
[00:18:51.243] Kent Bye: I see.
[00:18:51.523] Jacki Morie: I don't know if that's a real theory or not.
[00:18:55.705] Kent Bye: Well, and you've also been involved in virtual reality for quite a long time in that I hear you're also working on a book about the history of VR. So what can you tell me about that project that's happening?
[00:19:06.433] Jacki Morie: So it's morphed a little. I'm not going to write about the history of VR for the first book. The first book is going to be foundations of virtual reality as a new medium. So that takes into account all of the things that I developed over 25 years of trying to figure out how to allow participants to contribute to the VR experience while still getting the points that you want them to have in that experience across to them without a way that seems forced or coerced. So I did a lot of those techniques for my dissertation, which was finished in 2007, and that will be the basis for the book, but I'm also going to be talking to lots of companies and individual creators that I think are doing really amazing things to develop this new vocabulary for VR. because I think it needs to be codified a little bit so people can take that as the starting point for what VR is going to become.
[00:20:03.704] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had recently got a chance to do a keynote at SVVR, where I started to talk about the philosophical implications, as well as the mind-body split that happened during the Renaissance, and how I kind of see that VR is kind of integrating this mind-body science spirit. And I heard that you also are in the same line of thinking. I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on some of those points.
[00:20:25.121] Jacki Morie: A lot of that is in the dissertation. So I talk about that split that started with Descartes, but how it's been proven to be not correct, you know, with people like Damasio and other neuroscientists who talk about the mind-body connection as being critical. So a lot of that's in the dissertation. VR as an embodied medium needs to be underpinned with that kind of stuff. Your talk was amazing, by the way. I think everybody should listen to that talk. So, yeah, there's a lot to be said there. I don't think we have time to go through the whole thing, and I think we should all be talking about it frequently.
[00:21:00.142] Kent Bye: Well, I think just to kind of fill in both myself and other people, in terms of what you see is the biggest evidence that maybe going against this philosophy of science of this Cartesian split between mind-body dualism, I see embodied cognition as one Trajectory that is talking about the importance of the body as a holistic system, but you mentioned one researcher I'm just curious to hear what you see as the big things to point to if people wanted to read more about it either from a philosophical point of view or neuroscience, but just other people that you think are providing a Contrary evidence to that Cartesian mindset.
[00:21:34.605] Jacki Morie: Wow, there's so many. Well, I think Lakoff's book and I can't remember I think it was a philosophy in the flesh.
[00:21:39.409] Kent Bye: I
[00:21:39.700] Jacki Morie: Yeah, philosophy in the flesh is a big one because it tells how the embodied aspects of our existence really flavor everything we say and do. Certainly neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio, who's at USC, and a number of other ones, Gerald Edelman, there's a number of them that talk about the importance of the body. In fact, I think there's nobody today that doesn't know how important the body is in our cognition. Now what we can expand from that is what our body is like in VR. So this is uncharted territory. We know that we have this physical body in physical space, but we also know we're existing as a body in a virtual space. And I call that the isochronic body, because you've got two bodies at once. And if you've got an avatar, maybe you've got three bodies at once. So we are in kind of uncharted territory. There's lots of philosophy and things that can be done. You know, the rubber hand experiment. All of these things are pointing to an expansion of how we do embodied cognition. And I think that's really exciting and I have no idea where that's going.
[00:22:48.043] Kent Bye: Yeah, just looking at the research of Mel Slater, the way that he phrases it is the virtual body ownership illusion such that, you know, you have a correspondence between as you're moving your physical limbs, you have this proprioception awareness of where your hand is. And if you see a correlation between that and what you see in the virtual world, then you start to identify with this virtual body and that they've started to push the limits of being able to identify with things that don't have a physical correlate. So being able to move your body in a way and have additional limbs. And so Yeah, there's this sense that you can evoke the virtual body ownership illusion, but once you do that, then you can start to morph it and change it in ways that you're identifying with a level of embodiment that isn't even physically possible.
[00:23:30.210] Jacki Morie: What I find so interesting is where this is all going to lead. There are already some anecdotal things, along with people like Mel Slater who are doing full research, that when you inhabit an avatar, what you do with that avatar actually changes your mental model of yourself, your behaviors. People who don't have certain mobilities are able to, after watching their avatar do things, they're like, I can do that. I think we're going to find that that virtual body is going to be a therapy of the future. That's what I think is going to happen.
[00:24:08.471] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's sort of like there's been some research at Duke University collaborating with Brazil of using VR to use these robotic exoskeletons to actually physically move their body, but also put them in a VR experience such that they're making a correlation between what their body is doing and the visual stimulus that's happening, so they're starting to potentially do this. neurorehabilitation of people who are paraplegic and they're able to regain specific aspects of their bowel movements as well as their bladder but yet they're not fully walking but they're getting reconnecting that part in the brain and so that you're able to do this neuroplasticity inspired neurorehabilitation and And I agree. I don't think we really know the full potential of that. But not only that, but being able to expand our minds into new human potentials that we don't even fully realize yet. But I know that David Eagleman has a project where he's doing this sensory replacement. So he's like. wearing a vest that's sending signals into his body and then he's able to take a phone and then translate that into these 32 different spots on his torso and essentially turn his torso into an ear. It's giving the same input that the ear is receiving and that, when he's giving that to people who are deaf, they're able to basically start to hear through their body. So this idea of sensory replacement or sensory expansion of creating new senses and I don't know, for me, I just get really excited about the things that we can't even imagine, but yet using these principles of embodiment and the virtual body ownership illusion to be able to rewire our brains in things that we don't even know what's possible with that.
[00:25:40.216] Jacki Morie: Yeah, and just imagine if we start young with children who have issues like that. They may never have issues like that. They may be fully functional and that neuroplasticity and being able to change the way we think about the world, experience the world and interact with the world. If virtual reality starts that whole ball rolling with these kinds of thoughts being brought to the fore, I think that's going to be a really powerful contribution to human evolution.
[00:26:12.307] Kent Bye: And so for you, what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:26:16.364] Jacki Morie: I want really high artistic experiences. I want things that are part art, maybe part a story I can contribute to. I want characters that I can interact with. I want characters who exhibit emotions and empathy. They may be AI characters, they may be other people. But I really want things that are speaking more to what I call high art, which isn't well defined, but it's just not necessarily something made for therapy. It's not necessarily something made for research. It's maybe not a game. You know, it's something we really only have a few examples of, I think, and even those are at the very beginning levels. So I think we are at the point where film was around, you know, 1910, 1920. And we will see this kind of high art at some point, but we're just at the beginning stages of it. We need more technology to support that. We need more artists involved. And we need more people to experience these things, to give feedback, so that we can continue to develop the vocabulary and the potential of VR.
[00:27:32.180] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:27:40.592] Jacki Morie: Well, I think we've talked about a number of things that we don't know. I mean, the street finds its own use for things, and we don't know exactly where VR is going to be. It could be many, many things. to many people. I know people ask me, well, what's the killer app for VR? And I go, what was the killer app for television? You know, there wasn't just one. You had to have this whole palette of things that appealed to many different people. And I think VR can be the same way. And we don't know, you know, in 10 years, we're going to look back and go, oh, look, we were running around doing that. We were running around doing that. But look at what VR has done for whatever. And many of those applications, I think, are still to be invented and developed.
[00:28:21.490] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:28:24.712] Jacki Morie: No, I think sleep is next.
[00:28:28.073] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:28:29.414] Jacki Morie: You're welcome, Kent.
[00:28:30.975] Kent Bye: So that was Jackie Morey, who I had a chance to talk to back at VRLA in April of 2017. And she was showing her smell collar. And we also were talking about some of the PhD work about the history of VR. So a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, diving into some of my archives of Voices of VR, I can definitely see that there's these different tracks that I pick on, body cognition, and other things that are really, that set my mind and I get obsessed about and talk about in all my different conversations. And so not being able to experience this mail caller, I had to pull in some of the other more theoretical aspects of embodied cognition and the role of the multi-century experience of virtual reality. And so just trying to draw some of these other aspects in the course of this conversation. And also, I think I was aware that Jackie was thinking about writing a book about the history of VR, and that is elaborated on in the book of The Land of the Unreal, where I just want to read this little paragraph that gives a little more context of the work that Jackie had done. So the prominence of women in VR as early as the late 80s and 90s was unexpected of Mori's PhD dissertation, completed in 2007. The thesis is a reflection on artistic practices used for creating fully immersive VR experiences. She was a senior research scientist at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, C Chapter 1. While doing her degree remotely at the University of East London, Mori told me in an interview that she did her dissertation, quote, thinking VR was dead. It was a way to summarize the work she had done over the last two decades before moving on to whatever would be next. As part of her research, she wanted to create a historical record of the VR artistic works that had been created since the 1980s. Many were not documented, but Mori cataloged about 100. She was surprised to note that nearly two-thirds of these pieces were created by women. I knew all of my women friends who did VR, she told me, but I didn't realize in the grand scheme of things how prominent they were. So Morey's featured in The Land of the Unreal Chapter 6, VR Feminine's Mystique, a technology of the hashtag me too moment. So there's a number of critiques that Maseri is making around what was happening quite a lot within the context of the VR community was gender essentialist logic saying VR technology is uniquely suited for women. And so Maseri has more of an anthropological feminist critique of that, saying that it's reinforcing power structures, creating these false binaries or excluding people who are not identifying as women or men. But just to come back to what Jackie is doing in the context of her work is that not only just trying to document some of this history that I haven't seen a lot of other information about. And so I'm very curious to see much more information around some of this history that is not as well known. One of the points that Lisa Masseri makes in her book is that a lot of the story of virtual reality technology is focusing in on technological platforms rather than the content of virtual reality. And so that's part of the turn that Missouri is starting to do and a lot of the work that I've been documenting over the years of talking to artists and creatives And there's a whole other aspect of the history of VR that Jackie is starting to document here But there's some other books that have also been done that is starting to look at some of those different projects over the years And I know that Jackie has continued to work on the smell collar and I'm sure that she would have lots more information to talk about from this interview that right now feels like pretty ancient history back in 2017. But again, I wanted to dig into this conversation just because there's a moment in time that Lisa Masseri is coming into Los Angeles that following year in 2018 and having these different conversations with Jackie Morey that she's featuring within the context of her book as well. And, yeah, just generally I have anywhere from 800 to 1,000 or more interviews that are not published. And as I was reading through Masseri's book, it just inspired me to dig into my archive a little bit and air some of these old interviews, because I feel like there's still a lot of historical relevance to these conversations, not only from the technology that's being talked about, but some of these other issues, like anthropologists like Masseri's looking at. I always think about my work as this kind of dual role of being a journalist, but also oral historian, and that the sooner that I can get it out, it's like serving that journalistic role. It's like a real-time oral history that I'm capturing, and so there's lots of really historically relevant conversations that I've had over the years that I want to find a way to also not only publish them all, but also make it more accessible with transcripts, which I have now on my website as well to find stuff. And so anyway, I'm sitting on a vast archive of conversations like this. And yeah, just want to dip into some of that archive and hopefully over time start to publish more and more of these different types of conversations. So, that's all 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 listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
