The Agog Immersive Media Institute officially launched today by Grist-founder Chip Giller and philanthropist / investor Wendy Schmit. They describe Agog as “a groundbreaking initiative at the intersection of technology, communications, and social impact. Agog, a philanthropic organization, will help creators and nonprofit leaders harness the power of extended reality (XR) technologies to spur positive social transformation, opening new avenues for empathy, understanding, and activism.”
I had a chance to get a bit more context on Agog from co-founder Giller as well as advisor / consultant Amy Seidenwurm, who ran Meta’s VR for Good initiative for six years. We talk about their five main areas of focus that include social justice and equity, high-impact storytelling/world-building, research, education and outreach, and advocacy and policy. They’ve been operating in stealth for a number of months already having been involved in a number of projects, and I’m really quite excited to see how they can help fill in some of the gaps that are needed within the growing XR ecosystem as more and more non-profits and social change organizations start to wrap their minds around how to integrate immersive media within their missions.
Be sure to check out the Agog.org website for more information, and check it out in the Quest browser to see the first WebXR and AR iterations for what they intend to develop into a fully-spatial brand. It’s not launching with full iOS or visionOS support yet, and I am able to see the AR components on Android, but it isn’t as fully interactive on Quest yet. Still early days for WebXR, but keep an eye on how they continue to develop their website with more immersive features.
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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. It's a podcast that looks at the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So in today's episode, I'm going to be digging into a brand new immersive media institute called Agog that is announcing today, although they have been operating in stealth over the last number of months. And so they're going to be focusing on a number of different key areas, including social justice and equity, high impact storytelling and world building, research, education and outreach, and advocacy and policy. And so they're a nonprofit that's going to be kind of a connective tissue, a glue to interact with social justice organizations, nonprofits, but also trying to spread knowledge and information and education and outreach and just generally try to do a lot of what the original initiative of VR for Good was doing as well. So I had a chance to chat with Chip Giller, who's one of the co-founders of Agog, as well as one of the consultants and advisors, Amy Sydemore, who was leading Meta's VR for Good initiative for over six years. So we have a chance to kind of sit down and reflect on this space of VR for Good, XR for Good, and how Agog is going to be stepping in to fill in some of the gaps for what's currently not being addressed within the ecosystem. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Chip and Amy happened on Sunday, March 11th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:36.706] Chip Giller: I'm Chip Giller. I'm the co-founder of Agog. We're an immersive media institute. We're a philanthropic organization that helps people use XR to imagine a better world.
[00:01:47.659] Amy Seidenwurm: And I'm Amy Seidenwurm. I'm a consultant with Agog and an advisor with Agog. And I have a long history with XR and Impact. I ran the Meta VR for Good program for quite a few years and I'm a big believer in this medium.
[00:02:05.153] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:02:13.063] Chip Giller: Yeah, sure. Well, to go on the way back machine, I kind of had a bit of a weird childhood. I had two obsessions growing up. One was the environment and the other was journalism. In fact, one of my first babysitters was this guy, Bill McKibben, who's gone on to be the most well-known climate activist and climate writer in the world. And so I was learning about climate change at his knee. Anyway, I proceeded in a career in journalism and started one of the first digital only news organizations and first nonprofit news organizations called Grist, grist.org about 25 years ago. And Grist is a leading source of news around climate change. And I don't know, Ken, over the years through my work, I've had some degree of impact introducing people to this challenge of our lifetime, maybe the biggest challenge humanity is up against. But I began to feel that we aren't acting quickly enough as a world, as a species right now, against this civilization-wide challenge. I just began to feel that facts can only get you so far. Of course, facts are central, but journalism, trying to change the world through journalism, can be limiting. And I began to crave for other forms of communication, other forms of storytelling that can help connect the dots and awaken people to give a damn. So about 10 years ago, I began experimenting with VR, early Oculus headsets and so on, and got excited about it. but it still seemed pretty far out the real opportunities here now i feel as if we're really on a cusp where these tools are going to become more mainstream and more popularized and what i'm excited about xr is with XR, people can experience, they can feel, you know, you can experience the beauty of the planet. You can experience the power of human connection. You can experience the beauty of the planet and how imperiled it is. And I think, uh, using these tools to make that kind of emotional, visceral connection, that's why I've landed in this XR space. And sort of, that's why we're ending up launching Agog. I could go give a little more of your background too.
[00:04:25.446] Amy Seidenwurm: So, I mean, I've always been fascinated with how technology can kind of plug into places where it's not naturally thought of. Really early on in my career, I was working in the music business, working at various record labels and thinking about how to plug in technology. I worked at a record label in Seattle and I think we had the first record company website really dug in on that side of things. But then later I was working for the LA Philharmonic and we were thinking about how to make the orchestra and the orchestral experience more approachable to younger people, a more diverse audience. And we came up with a whole bunch of weird things. We actually created something called Bravo Gustavo with Gustavo Dudamel, where we had essentially like a guitar hero game, but for conducting and a few other really interesting, weird things for an orchestra to do. But the last thing I did there was the thing called Van Beethoven, which was a 360 experience with the orchestra on Gear VR. And we took that around Los Angeles and brought it to communities that were underserved on the art side. And I just saw how their attitudes immediately changed around classical music and arts and feeling welcomed in a space because we depicted the space in there and immediately quit my job and started learning everything I could about XR production and got super lucky and VR for Good was starting up and signed on to run that initiative, which I did for six and a half years.
[00:06:05.713] Kent Bye: Great. And Chip, maybe you could talk about some of the first VR experiences that you started to come across in terms of if there was any kind of aha moment of seeing any of the existing Impact XR projects that are out there, or just kind of maybe give a little bit more context for some of the other media that really inspired you.
[00:06:24.415] Chip Giller: Yeah. Well, overall, Ken, I was just sort of thinking just for a moment reflecting on what Amy was saying. And to some degree, this moment in XR reminds me of when I started dabbling with the web in the early to mid 90s, where there was so much creativity and so much enthusiasm and things were kind of being invented day over day. And then at Grist, we kind of rode this wave of first newsletters and then blogs and then what was podcasting and could you do video? And so this is sort of an extension of that journey I've been on. I've seen so many tremendous things. Just today, for example, I don't know, Ken, if you've experienced Body of Mine, but Cameron has produced He's in the midst of producing a newer thing around conversion therapy and the horrors of that. And, you know, I'm just thinking I'm at South by Southwest right now. And I had a chance to sample that super powerful. And the grams work like Goliath. I got to sample impulse today, which is about ADHD. So there's been a number of experiences. Of course, my first VR stuff was what people's typical first VR stuff is something like, you know, Richie's plank and stuff like that a long time in the way back. You know, and let me add, I think I've had maybe some of the most powerful experiences I've had have been in social VR platforms like Altspace, which is no longer around, but even in Engage and VRChat, there's a really, really powerful experience that the designer Shushu made. It's a rendering of the overview effect, which is what many astronauts have described when they travel through the Earth's atmosphere and look back on the Earth and see the beauty of the earth, and you can recognize how interconnected and how fragile the planet is. Doing things with others in VR, I think that's maybe been some of the experiences I found most moving. When you're in something powerful that a creator has rendered, but you're experiencing things with other people, those things have especially moved me.
[00:08:26.285] Kent Bye: Yeah, no, Amy, we've crossed each other's paths many times on the film festival circuit. I know you've been previously at Metta working on a lot of VR for Good projects that have really been at the forefront of using different documentary forms to collaborate with different nonprofits. I'm wondering if you could maybe just give a bit more context for your experience and journey there. I mean, obviously to go through your entire filmography would take multiple episodes. Go through everything you've been able to do as a executive producer and producer, but yeah, just to give it a little bit more flavor for how that project came about, like the origins and just some more context. I feel like what Agog is are much in that same spirit of that extension of what used to be kind of internally at Metta now is maybe taken up by other nonprofit entities like Agog.
[00:09:15.482] Amy Seidenwurm: Yeah, I mean, I'm hoping that it's all those, or at least a lot of the entities, plus Agog. I'm hoping that it's growing. But when I started at VR for Good, and honestly, I don't want to take credit for the idea, a woman named Paula Cuneo and Lauren Burmaster were the masterminds behind the idea. And they had gotten sign off to start the program and was really set up as a lab to begin with. They had non-profits apply and people who wanted to be VR filmmakers apply and they just picked 10 and paired them up. had a quick workshop and then realized that they knew nothing about VR production. And fortunately they knew me from the Van Beethoven project and I was really excited to come in there. I'd actually been doing some freelance VR production with Secret Location and they said, do you want to come around this thing? And I was, it was a fuck yeah, very quickly. So yeah, the first year was all 360 videos. And the second year was going to be all 360 videos. But then Felix and Gayatri came around and insisted that they make something immersive, which was super exciting and interactive with Home After War. And then the third year, again, was mostly 360. But then we had Rose Troche doing We Live Here, which was a fully interactive experience, and Celine with The Key. But all in all, I believe we ended up creating something like 46 different experiences or episodes. And as I recall, maybe seven of those are fully interactive experiences and the rest are 360. But across really diverse causes, everything from transphobia to the refugee crisis to slavery that still exists to testicular cancer. So, yeah, it was an amazing journey. And, you know, Ryan Thomas is still over there carrying the torch and hoping that VR for Good continues to be a thing. There are plenty of people at META still rooting for it.
[00:11:25.919] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that Blake came and dinner has said that Maya birth of a superhero was maybe one of the last official VR for good projects that is showing this year. So my understanding, at least it's any new projects is at least taking a pause and that you've moved on. I don't know if there's anything else you want to elaborate on there in terms of that internal, it seems like it's kind of ended at least for now.
[00:11:47.215] Amy Seidenwurm: I'm not embedded there, I don't want to speak on a turn, but even if something isn't labeled VR for Good, I know that there is a lot of energy there around keeping the spirit alive. And, you know, Impulse is part of that initiative, whether it's officially branded VR for Good or not. And I know they're taking pitches and looking at other projects.
[00:12:07.237] Kent Bye: Okay, well, that's a good setup in the larger context for this initiative and efforts that have been happening in the larger XR ecosystem. And so Chip, maybe you could talk a little bit more about the inciting incident when you decided to do what you're already doing with Grist, but to expand it out into Agog and more formally step into XR production and starting to be a liaison and all the different things that you imagined that Agog is setting out with the intention to do, like what was the turning point or inciting incident to create Agog?
[00:12:37.403] Chip Giller: One of my best friends was a founder of the game studio PopCap Games. They made Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. And my friend John Vici and another co-founder, Jared Cheshire, started an organization called Pluto VR. And Pluto, it's in the VR space and Pluto's trying to figure out, and they have figured out how you can have tethered VR experience in an untethered headset and stream things really powerfully. Anyway, I was on this journey with John for many years and just began to feel like we really are on the cusp of a change in this space where these tools are going to become more accessible and more available. and evolve in really powerful ways, and was spending time in VR chat, was spending time in Altspace VR, and I don't know, Kent, something just really clicked where I was like, I really want to lean into this, and began to talk to others in the field. I met Amy about a year ago and really began to dive in. And a good friend of mine, Wendy Schmidt, who's a philanthropist, a generous philanthropist and an investor, she and I have partnered on projects in the past. She was a board member of Gris. And I think about a year ago, actually last March, I gave her one of her first demos in VR. I mentioned before the overview effect, we went through that. A guide for me in this space is an individual named Tom Nickel, who's almost like a docent within certain communities, and he has built experiences where you can tour activist street art around the world and meet with the artists who've created that art. and learn from them. So Wendy and I began to do things like this together and we put our heads together and we said, you know what, let's start an organization to help nurture a field of people using these tools for social good, in particular to help people use these tools to imagine a better world. Sometimes in the social change sector, a lot of storytelling is anchored more in the problem set with the goal of sharing all these challenges with a thought that will motivate people to respond. But in my experience, gloom and doom isn't really the ticket forward and can often be enervating or turn people off or people tune out. So with Agog, we're particularly excited to, as I said, help people use these tools to envision how a better world might feel. What would that be like to experience a world that is more just, a world where climate change has been addressed, to fill people, as we say, with, you know, for people to be Agog, for people to be full of wonder and awe. And so we're setting forth, we want to help support creative projects, help support the creation of amazing XR experiences. But just as importantly, we want to help be a connector in this arena. So we want to nurture the community that already exists and be welcoming to newcomers to XR, provide tools for people to learn how to build, for people to learn about the possibilities of XR, and to some extent, be a midwife or a network weaver amongst community members. And so in that vein, I'm really grateful to be partnering with Amy, who has such a wealth of experience in this category.
[00:15:52.894] Kent Bye: And Amy, you've been on the front lines of helping to create a lot of these different VR for good projects. Like you said, 46 projects that you've worked on over the last six years at Meta. And one of the things I've noticed is that there is like a film festival circuit to show some of these, but a lot of these were really made in collaboration with nonprofit institutions and entities that were able to either have their own impact campaigns and to use it to tell their story of what they do as an organization. And so there's obviously films and other ways to tell stories, but I feel like XR has been able to do this intersection of documentary and storytelling and really push forward what's possible with the medium. And so I'm wondering if you could maybe just reflect on what you've seen in terms of how these types of VR for Good projects have been used in either impact campaigns or to help somehow tell the story in a way that is unique or new or different.
[00:16:48.709] Amy Seidenwurm: Yeah, sure. I mean, Home After War, I know I've already spoken about that, but was just such a great example because the organization we worked with, GICHD, Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining, they installed Home After War at the UN and ran the Iraqi ambassador through Home After War. It was really beautiful to see him come out in tears and talk about how he understood what they were talking about so much more. That organization went on to show Home After War at delegations around demining around the world, and other organizations use it now too, but it's still something they use whenever they meet with new people and want to show what they do. There was a series called Authentically Us around demystifying the trans community, and we worked with Pride Foundation in Washington. It was one of the tools they used to defeat the bathroom bill that was in Washington at that time. and they just took it out to the street and showed people, essentially gave people the opportunity to get to know a trans person and realize that that's somebody that is just a person in their world. I really like what Anagram has done with Goliath and that it has become a teaching tool for people who are in the mental health field trying to understand how their patients feel, their schizophrenic patients feel, and it's part of a learning system.
[00:18:20.838] Kent Bye: So Chip, as you have looked at what's happening with some of these existing organizations, nonprofits, it's pretty decentralized in the way that lots of people are doing their own thing. And you had identified five key areas of focus. And I'm wondering if we can maybe step through each of these and you can elaborate a little bit for what you have in plans for each of them.
[00:18:42.353] Chip Giller: Yeah, so we're really excited as we build out a gag, we have some key areas of focus, among them are really leaning into social justice and equity. So we hope to support and nurture a really diverse field of immersive media creators. that are focused on lifting up social justice issues and ensuring that these technologies are made more accessible. I think too often in the past, as technologies have emerged, the folks who are developing them might not bring a full swath of lived experiences and diverse backgrounds to the table. So we hope to invert that or remake that tapestry. So social justice and equity are central to our work. We're going to be helping to invest in high impact storytelling and world building. So as I was saying earlier, we hope to support the creation of XR content that really builds empathy and explores ways to address social and environmental challenges such as climate change, racial justice, human rights. And I can give some examples of this, Kent, but let me just tick through these other three. We're also planning to collaborate with research institutions. There's a really exciting launch at South by Southwest now of a consortium of academic institutions who have XR programs. and are now beginning to collaborate. So we at Agog want to partner with such researchers to explore the applications of XR in fostering empathy and in driving positive behavioral change. And then a fourth area of our work will be around education and outreach. So this is a burgeoning field, but still a new field. And it can seem sometimes daunting to jump in. And so through workshops, through YouTube videos, through training programs, other outreach efforts, we really want to empower a broader set of people to use XR for social good. Yeah, I'll get into an example on that in a moment. And then finally, a fifth area of focus for us will be around advocacy and policy. So Agog, we want to engage in efforts to promote the responsible, ethical use of these immersive media technologies. so we don't end up in sort of some dystopic WALL-E-like future, but that these tools are used in ways that really map back to reality, map back to the real world, and can help disperse social change. So just to kind of make this a little more real, because all that can kind of sound heady, we've been building up our team and kind of operating in stealth mode for the last several months, but we have hatched some initial partnerships. So for example, we were a sponsor of the MIT Reality Hack, which I think is the world's biggest hackathon in the XR space. That took place at the end of January and involved more than 700 participants, people from all over the world. And we were able to sponsor a track at that hackathon focused on social change together. How can these tools be used to bring us together to address some of these issues? And we were also really influential in introducing some indigenous perspectives to that hackathon, really helping to center some indigenous viewpoints. So that's been an early partner, and we're really excited about that. Amy and I have both mentioned Anagram's Impulse, playing with reality. And it's a revolutionary MR experience that explores what it means to live with attention deficit. hyperactivity disorder, and we are helping them to think through their impact campaign. It's an amazing experience they're creating. How can that experience be used to reach educators, be used as a learning tool, reach wider audiences? We're also partnering with Nani de la Pena's Arizona State University's Narrative and Emerging Media Program around a project that they're calling City of Awe, which is a project that will enable communities across Los Angeles to use immersive media tools to design and then physically transform abandoned areas in their neighborhoods into community green spaces. I'm sure many of the listeners here have experienced Forager, which is an XR experience that uses sight, sound, and touch and scent to immerse participants in a complete life cycle of mushrooms. And it's a really remarkable experience, but as technologies get improved, as changes happen, sometimes it's hard to keep experiences up to date. So we're working with that creator, Winslow Porter, to update that experience so it works in an optimal way, particularly in a Quest 3. So, you know, I think as we're getting out there, we're encountering, we're learning of and we're experiencing that some XR creations that are now a bit outdated or don't work as well as they could in the latest technology. So that's going to be a body of our work. How can we update things that are really powerful that have been built, but just need a bit of help to enter the current era? We sponsored a social impact build fest at the University of Texas at Austin, which work with XR newcomers. So we really were hoping that this field can be more and more inviting to new folks. The build fest works with newcomers to prototype social experiences in XR centered on impact. And then the final partner I'd like to mention is a project called Whose Future, which is a pilot program that gives hand on XR instructions to teens at the Boys and Girls Club in Harlem. So again, if you think about Who has access to these tools? Our vision is that it won't be limited who has access. Everyone should have access to these tools. And it's important that people with varied lived experiences are participating at the start so we can help define this field together. So whose future really represents that to us?
[00:24:33.293] Kent Bye: Well, that's a really quite impressive list of mission statement and all of your intentions and goals, but also the fact that you've been operating in stealth. I mean, you're officially announcing Agog on Monday through a number of different announcements of coming out of stealth. But yeah, it's just a really impressive list of projects you've already been working on. I guess one quick follow up on all of these efforts and initiatives is what's the best way for people to interact with you, whether they're producers or, you know, there's a whole range of different stakeholders that it seems like you're interacting with here. It's sort of becoming a glue in some ways of trying to connect both the technology producers and the knowledge with the people who want to tell these stories and perhaps provide funding or support. So just kind of maybe elaborate on that.
[00:25:19.128] Chip Giller: Yeah. I appreciate that description, Ken. I mean, we're really envisioning ourselves as being a hub in support of the community of creators and as such, also connecting creators to the nonprofit community, to mission-based folks who have a curiosity and a hunger to be using these tools, but don't yet know how. And so if we can be that cross pollinator. So the very best way to learn more about us and to reach out is to visit agog.org. That's A-G-O-G. And at agog.org, at the very top of the page, you can reach out to connect with us. And there's just a really quick form where you can give a bit about your background and ways we might overlap and we'll be in touch. We really, again, the goal here, we're not intending to be a studio. Our intention is to be that hub, to be the glue. So we're really eager to hear from folks and we're really eager to be of service.
[00:26:17.918] Amy Seidenwurm: Kent, I just wanted to make sure you knew that the Whose Future project was previously called Whose Metaverse, and that's Gabo Aurora and Barry Poosman's project through Lightshed. Just didn't know if you knew that that was the same thing. They just renamed that project.
[00:26:33.928] Kent Bye: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. No, I wasn't aware of that. Okay, that's good to know. And so, yeah, I guess, Amy, as you see all this list of different efforts of stuff that's happening and you're in this role of consultant and you're also executive producing projects, love to hear any reflections on how you see Agog fitting into the overall ecosystem. You're someone who's obviously been a part of what's happening in XR for a long time. And how do you see that Agog may be stepping in and providing some connective tissue, some interstitium as it were, that may have not been there before?
[00:27:08.512] Amy Seidenwurm: Yeah, I feel like there are so many places we can dive in. And I think this first year, we're going to be learning a lot about where we can be most effective. We actually have had a dinner in L.A. and a dinner in New York where we brought together a lot of the leaders in this community who happen to live in those cities and just listen to what everybody felt the community needs. And we're going to do our best to fill as many gaps as possible. But I think what we've heard a bunch and what I've heard at different gatherings at Venice and Tribeca, especially in the last year, is that we're kind of at a place where we're lacking a little bit of leadership as far as best practices, as far as understanding how to find work, and taking care of each other as far as learning from each other. We're going to be doing some really interesting stuff. You'll see if you go to our website, we took great pains to make sure that it's a fully spatial website. There are cool things you can do in AR and VR on the website that'll be live, and those will be built out quite a bit. It's a fully spatial brand. We are creating a case study around that experience of creating a fully spatial brand that we will share as soon as we can finish it up, but it'll be quite soon. So the idea is we're going to learn this stuff and then we're going to share it and hope that we can start funding some research on that side as well so that it's just opening up doors for people rather than everybody having to learn how to do this stuff individually.
[00:28:44.288] Chip Giller: We're really grateful and excited that we have a wonderful set of advisors, too, who I'd like to call out because they've been very helpful already, and we're excited to partner with them even more moving forward. They include Nani de la Peña, whom I mentioned earlier at ASU, and of course, she is known as the godmother of VR. Lauren Hammonds from Time Studios, who ran Immersive at Tribeca for years. And I mentioned earlier John Vici, who was the founder of PopCap Games, and Jared Cheshire, who is the CEO of Pluto VR, but he is also very active in the OpenVR community. He's a participant in the Web3C Immersive Web Working Group and has been involved in a ton of OpenXR standards. And Courtney Cogburn, who is at Columbia and has really been a leading thinker about I guess, how to improve the characterization and measurement of racism and its role in creating racial inequities in health, but also in how to apply DEIJ principles within the XR realm. So we feel really fortunate to be working with these folks, too.
[00:30:00.010] Kent Bye: Nice. And I know that being on the film festival circuit and covering a lot of the discussions, one topic that comes up again and again is streamlining distribution, finding ways for people to get these pieces of content out there so that larger numbers of audience can easily see the content. I think we're in this stage where if you make a game, it's very easy to be on the MediQuest store. And if you're making an immersive story or a documentary, It's been difficult to get on the meta quest store and there's app lab, but it's still like the distribution part to invest in projects and then get them out there and, and have some return on investment, whether it's they're selling them or just to have it have the most access possible. It seems like the distribution is something that has been a huge issue. And I'm just curious, Amy, from your perspective, from. being inside of meta and seeing all those dynamics, if you have any reflections on what else might need to happen in that ecosystem. We have some distributors like Astraea and Lucid Realities and Diversion Cinema that have picked up the slack in terms of picking up some of these. projects that are on the festival circuit, but I feel like there's other things that have yet to exist in the ecosystem to really solve this issue of making sure that these projects, once they're created, can have an easy way of getting distributed out to the masses.
[00:31:19.693] Amy Seidenwurm: I mean, I don't think it's one answer, but first of all, I think Meta knows this is a problem and I know that they're really trying to solve it right now. And there are a lot of cool ideas over there going on about how to get more work into that platform. But I think other good news is that there's more hardware right now. I think there are going to be more outlets and hopefully we can standardize a couple of APIs so that you don't have to build specifically for each platform. But I also think that what we're talking about isn't all VR. Some of these might be mobile experiences. Some of them might be on the Ray-Ban glasses. Some of them might be something we haven't even experienced yet.
[00:32:03.093] Chip Giller: But I think- You can experience our website via AR just with your phone, for example. Yeah. Agog.org. Yeah. Sorry to cut you off.
[00:32:12.988] Amy Seidenwurm: No problem. But before I started talking to Chip, actually, I was working with a couple of museums and performing arts spaces. And I think there really is a thirst to think about this technology as an art form in those kinds of settings. And I think we need to start, as a field, standardizing what that could look like so that we could start plugging into places where people go, whether that's museums or libraries or performing arts spaces or public spaces or whatever. And I know we've all been talking about that for a long time, but I've been talking to Sarah Wilson, I've been talking to Casper Sonnen about it, and it seems like everybody's pretty dedicated to figuring this thing out. And we've got a lot of really good minds working on it. I don't know what the answer is, but I think we'll get there.
[00:33:02.817] Kent Bye: Chip, you had flagged that you were doing some specific things with world building. I just published an interview I did with Lisa Masseri, who did a real landmark anthropological study looking at the land of the unreal in Los Angeles, specifically looking at the development of the political ecology of VR as an industry based in Los Angeles in 2018. But through the course of her field work, she had a chance to work with Al-Qaeda a little bit, learn a lot about world building and just this speculative practice of trying to imagine another future and how VR could help to create some of these possible speculative futures, this kind of future dreaming or world building process. So I'd love to have you maybe elaborate on that. Yeah, of course.
[00:33:46.945] Chip Giller: Well, for me personally, some of this harkens back again to my journey at Grist. My last several years there, I started a solutions lab at Grist, really looking at solutions to the climate challenge way out of the planetary pickle. And as part of that, we began a project called Imagine 2200 to try to think through, OK, if climate change were addressed, what might that world be? And we started a climate fiction storytelling contest. And I think it's its third or fourth year now. And every year we've gotten 1,200, 1,500 entries from around the world, I think 87 different countries. And so that and the stories that came back, the short speculative fiction stories were so powerful and so imaginative. And every year we, of the thousands of entries, share with readers. We have a set of judges and we've shared with readers about 12 finalists and three winners. And Kent, those stories are so rich and imaginative. But around this time, I was really leaning more deeply into XR too. And I began to think, gosh, if these stories could be brought to life through these immersive media tools, that would be just so much more powerful. And I think what's interesting is, yes, you can use XR to experience what could be, but also what was. And there's so much wisdom also to be had from the past. So another partner we're having early discussions with is a group called Sisila in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest, the former chair of Lummi Nation, which is a Native American tribe in the Northwest. The former chair of Lummi Nation started Sisila, and he and I have been in discussion with some of his colleagues about what it could be like to build an XR cultural experience of what a longhouse felt like 500 years ago in the Pacific Northwest. What would it be like to experience talk about immersion, like connection with the natural world in that way, where there was very little separation between humanity and the natural world. What would it be like to use XR to experience for a moment life as an orca, life as a salmon? And so this speculative stuff, you can play it forward, but there's a lot of wisdom also to be had from the past that I think should be brought into our current reality and our future. So those are a couple of examples I wanted to share.
[00:36:05.415] Kent Bye: Right. Well, Lisa Masseri's book, In the Land of the Unreal, she starts to, from an anthropological perspective, dig into the culture of XR it's been developing. And one of the things that she starts to really address is this idea of VR as the empathy machine. And some of the things that she was pointing out is from this technological solutionism trap that some folks can fall into thinking that VR alone could start to solve social problems. And I think some of the points that she's making is that, first of all, the problems of embodying another character and coming out of a virtual simulation, thinking that you might understand completely what that experience is like, and that Also, she points to what Carrie Shaw is doing with Embody Labs in terms of using VR as a way of training caregivers so that they can have these experiences to understand what people who may be going through some neurodegenerative diseases, what their experience might be like, because there's already an established relationship there that can be built upon rather than having a virtual reality experience that maybe substitutes a full understanding of being in relationship to some of these communities that are being featured. And so I think VR as an empathy machine is something that has got catalyzed with Chris Milk's talk in March of 2015. And there's been a lot of academic scholarly critiques about different dimensions of that. And so VR and empathy and VR for good is walking this fine line for how to really do this in a ethical way, how to be in right relationship, how to establish connections to the broader community or provide an avenue for people to really be connected through these impact campaigns. So I'd love to hear any reflections on some of the, because I feel like that's a core part of what Agog is going to be doing. And just love to hear some of those specific considerations for how to do this and kind of a way that's in right relationship.
[00:37:55.393] Chip Giller: I think the most important thing or among the most important things is really who are the creators of the experience and what are their backgrounds? What are their firsthand experiences that they're bringing to the table? And that's something that we're going to be especially thoughtful of because I think you're right, Kent, there are risks and projections that can occur. And I think it's just really central. And that's one of the reasons we really want to center social equity and justice in our work is, um, I think we need to be really thoughtful about who are building these worlds and who are building these experiences and doing stuff in service of the communities representing these causes. So I wanted to share that perspective. What do you think, Amy?
[00:38:41.616] Amy Seidenwurm: I think that's right. I think, you know, one of the things that I've thought about a lot after seeing a lot of work in this field is like, I don't know how to do it, but I think we need to be really careful that if you're representing somebody from a marginalized community and an experience to not pretend like they represent that entire community and the whole like, this is not a monolith, or I'm not a monolith kind of idea. I think it's really easy to say, you know, this is what it's like to walk around in this person's shoes. And that's true for that specific individual, but it's not true for that person's community necessarily. The other thing, I wouldn't say I regret any of the work we did at VR for Good, but you know, kind of going back to one of the things Chip was saying earlier, I think that we need more than ever to make sure that we're giving people inspiration and hope and not just laying something that's terrible in the world on people. I don't know why you'd want to watch. I think you'd really have a bad day if you watched all of the VR for Good experiences in one day. It's a lot of the world's woes to put on yourself at once. And I think we need to be giving people hope and inspiration and not just telling them what's wrong with the world.
[00:39:58.188] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. And as we wrap up, I'm curious what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:40:09.909] Chip Giller: Oh my gosh. Well, I'm something of an idealist and have some ambition. And so I think speaking, this will sound kind of grandiose, Kent, but I think we as a species suffer from a couple big challenges. One is a lack of connection to the planet. And another is we're often fearful of differences in others. And those aren't rational challenges. So reason isn't always the way forward. And I think the opportunity of XR is you can experience a sense of belonging to the planet. You can experience connection with others. And so I don't think XR is going to be a panacea, but I think that it can be a really powerful tool to shift hearts and then minds. So start with hearts, start with just the power of human connection. You know, to some degree, feeling is believing and we want to inspire people to build a future together. So there's some folks who in the popular press and some futurists have thought of these tools as sort of escapists escaping from reality. We very much want to use these tools to root ourselves in reality. But we think there's so much opportunity and so much power if we can harness these tools in the right ways.
[00:41:28.421] Amy Seidenwurm: Yeah. I mean, for me, I feel like we need to really, and I'm not the first person to have this idea, but the idea that there's like XR and then the world is a separate thing is silly. And I just want this to be a part of people's lives in a way that is healthy and to be able to encourage art that inspires people. And to me, I'm not an artist, but art is what gets me up every day. And when art is used in a positive manner, that's just so powerful. And we called this company Agog because we want everybody to have that sense of wonder when they see work in this field.
[00:42:12.457] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:42:18.002] Amy Seidenwurm: This isn't really a coda, but we didn't really get into it, Kent. And one of the other kind of missions that we've been thinking about a lot is something, I don't really think we're going to call it this, but we're codenaming it the Gog Squad. And we love the idea of working with a team of technologists and embedding them with nonprofits or organizations that are trying to do something better in the world and be able to like rapidly prototype something that is aligned with their mission. And so that's something we're really going to be investigating moving forward. And I think that's something that this field really needs is just people who can work on the fly and kind of help new folks think about how to use these tools.
[00:43:00.124] Chip Giller: Yes, definitely not a code I can't, but I, but just to pile on and add to that, I experienced in the mid and late nineties, you know, all of a sudden every organization needed a website and, but people were asking questions. What's a website? What's a listserv? What do I use these tools for? Then blogs happen. What's a blog? Do we need a blog? And there were some organizations that existed to help mission-based organizations scope their needs correctly and then build out tools. Similarly, we're hoping to be able to offer technical support to mission-based organizations who are working on vitally important issues and maybe have some storytelling prowess but haven't yet built things in XR. And we hope to have a team of technologists whom we could embed, as Amy was saying, within organizations for a couple of weeks or a couple of months to help those organizations develop some muscle, to help them develop some internal wherewithal, and then welcome them to the community. So we envision that being a line of our work too.
[00:44:04.961] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, it was a real pleasure to learn a lot more about Agog, this new immersive media institute for social good that's already been working in the industry and really excited to see where you take this. I feel like there's a lot of really important connective tissues and glue that this organization is going to help facilitate and really accelerate the ways that XR could be used in all these different nonprofit contexts and also just continuing the spirit of the VR for good, XR for good. And yeah, just really excited to see where you take it in the future. So thanks again, both Amy and Chip for joining me today to help break it all down.
[00:44:38.946] Amy Seidenwurm: Thanks Kent.
[00:44:39.427] Kent Bye: Thank you. So that was Chip Killer. He's one of the co-founders of Agog, which is a new media institute that is being formally announced today, as well as one of the advisors and consultants, Amy Sidermorm, who formerly was running Meta's VR for good program. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I'm super excited to see where Agog is going to take this in the future. They've already been collaborating and working with a lot of really great organizations with the MIT reality hack, helping to sponsor that to think about the impact campaign for impulse playing with reality, as well as Forger trying to port that over to a Quest 3 version so that it can be a little bit more accessible, working with Who's Future, a pilot program working with the teens and the Boys and Girls Clubs in Harlem, the Social Impact Buildfest at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the City of All, which is a project out of the Arizona State University Narrative and Emerging Media Lab with Nani de la Peña. So lots of really amazing stuff that they've already starting to collaborate with different organizations. And overall, they have the five key areas of focus, including social justice and equity, high impact storytelling and world building, research, education and outreach and advocacy and policy. And so There's a pretty broad spectrum of things that they're planning on getting involved with. And so definitely go check out their agog.org to get a little bit more context and information and get in touch to see if you have a project that it makes sense to collaborate with them or to potentially seek some type of support. Chip did mention that they're not aiming to be like a traditional producer of doing all of the funding of entire projects, although they may be stepping in at some point or coming in the impact campaign. It's a little unclear as to what the specific bounds of their support will involve, but It's just really great to see a nonprofit like this step in and to think about things in a holistic way and try to close some of the gaps that existing right now in the ecosystem, especially around the education and outreach and research. And yeah, just also trying to have a little bit more world building, kind of imagining positive futures and see how these XR technologies can start to step in. I am reminded a lot of my conversation with Lisa Masseri talking about In the Land of the Unreal, this anthropological field study that she did of really interrogating XR technologies in the context of LA to become this ultimate empathy machine. And just how there are some traps that you can get into this technological solution mindset that you can throw technology at these social problems and expect that a pure technological solution is going to do something. And I don't think that's what Agog is really getting at here. But I think that's certainly on the top of my mind as I was having a lot of those conversations of really interrogating whenever you have technology that's making social claims around how it could start to shift different behavioral patterns. And I think what Chip is saying is that he's really coming out of grist and many decades of looking at these issues of climate change and running a media organization that's really focusing on that issue and just seeing how The facts can only take you so far. And at a certain point, you need to speak to some of the more non-rational or emotional parts of people and really speak to their hearts through storytelling, through world building, through inspiration, through science fiction, speculative futures, all these things that they've been experimenting with in the context of GRIST, and now taking it to the next level to see how they can continue to expand some of these potentialities within the context of XR. This is certainly one of the areas that I have had huge inspirations from in terms of what I think is Part of a big potential of XR as a technology is the ability to tell some of these stories or to give people an embodied experience for some of these different speculative futures. Certainly, XR and world building is a key part that we discussed briefly with Lisa Masseri and her book as she does a little bit of exploration. We talk about some of the more speculative turns that she's seen in the context of Anthropology and that conversation in episode 1359, where she unpacks a little bit more of how, even in academia and research, how you can hit a block sometimes and entertaining solutions or to get out of some of the limited context focusing on some of the I'm Obviously, each of these have dystopic elements, but there are some elements of how these virtually mediated technologies can create these virtual spaces to have social interactions that we're imagining at the time, a whole future that didn't really actually exist yet. And that by computer programmers reading some of those, they got super inspired that they were so close, they could continue to take a few more steps and actually implement some of these visions that were depicted within science fiction. The imagination and storytelling is such a key part of how we're going to step into a potential future world that is perhaps addressing some of the biggest problems of our day, which Chip is trying to talk about in the context of this interview. So I'm personally super excited to see where this goes in the future and hope to continue to do my part of featuring some of the artists and storytellers who are exploring some of these different ideas of speculative world building and immersive storytelling. And I'll be diving much deeper into a lot of the different projects that are being featured at South by Southwest. I was not able to attend this year, physically. And so I'm covering about half or two thirds of the program remotely. And I'll be starting to air some of those projects sometime within the next week or so, digging into some of the different ways that artists and storytellers are using XR technologies to explore some of these different topics and issues. And just also want to say that Chip was inspired by different dimensions of social VR, whether that was in Altspace or VRChat and EngageXR. So each of these different platforms providing a context and an ability for people to also come together as communities. And so very excited to see how that may be a part of their future as well, as we have new ways of gathering and using these virtual media technologies to create group experiences is something that I think has a huge potential. Also worth noting that I highly recommend going into your Quest headset and going to agog.org to see some of the more immersive elements. It's very sparse at the moment. It's not the entire website. It's like a standalone immersive experience. When you look behind you, it's mixed reality. But when you look in front of you, it's more of an immersive experience. VR. It's sort of like the Apple Vision Pro where you're able to dial in and out how much is immersive or not. And so you have these augmented reality little flowers that you click on and it takes you into like a 180 or 270 degree sphere that just gives you a little taste of some of the different worlds. So a very nice first step for starting to translate a website into a spatial experience. It's not the full website yet. I think that's still a lot of even as I think about how to start to translate what I've done with the voices of VR into a fully spatial immersive XR experience, you know, to think about the whole of information architecture and what that might look like, you know, there's still a long ways to go for how that's all sorted out, but really great to see like a first stab at what a spatial brand and a spatial website might look like. And definitely check out the 3OV viewer within WordPress where you can start to add lots of other dimensions of spatial websites as well. I hope to dig into that a little bit more as I do some more experimentation and talk to the developer of that plugin as well. So lots to be done I think as we continue to move forward. I think we're all sort of waiting for Safari to fully launched their WebXR implementation within the Apple Vision Pro and within all their iOS devices. They're still hidden behind a flag within the context of Apple Vision Pro. And even just talking to some of the different developers, it's still a little bit of a moving target in terms of the WebXR implementations for Apple's side of things. But once they get that settled and launched, hopefully we'll see a lot more experimentation with WebXR and spatial websites. Cause I think we've, we've all been kind of held back in some ways by not having full support from Apple and Safari. And I'll be digging more into the Escape Artist and some of their experimentations with doing both the Quest version and Apple Vision Pro version for their Polly's Award winning Escape Artist. And I'll be airing that after I get through some of my South by Southwest coverage. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. 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 this is a part of podcast and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself 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.
