Where Thoughts Go: Prologue is one of my favorite VR storytelling experiences of the year, as I think that creator Lucas Rizzotto has discovered a number of different design innovations that push forward the storytelling potential of the VR medium. I’d highly recommend everyone check it out before diving into this interview unpacking his design philosophy of emotional education, and cultivating this sense of introspective, self-reflection.
Where Thoughts Go is an experiment in collaborative storytelling that is built on the premises that the emotional nuances of our human experience are complicated and nuanced, that everyone has a story, that these stories deserve to be heard. Rizzotto has crafted a series of worlds that cultivate a deep sense of emotional authenticity and vulnerability. Each world is designed to based around a specific question, and you can listen to previous answers to these questions by selecting a floating sphere that plays you previous responses. You’re then invited to record your own answer to these questions, which is added into the overall experience. It’s an ever-evolving, living story that is designed to create an introspective hero’s journey of self-reflection, and it’s a perfect example of what I’ve been referring to as the “Yin Archetypal Journey.”
The Yang Hero’s Journey is like Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey, which is much more about the individuation of the hero making who is choices & taking action out in the world. The Yin Archetypal Journey is much more about ego disillusionment, centering the experience in the embodiment & emotional presence of an individual’s phenomenology, & seeing how an individual is connected to a larger whole. I previously spoke about the dynamics of the Yin Archetypal Journey with Cosmos Deng, who expands on how the Chinese mythologies and stories are influence by Taoist & Buddhist culture of focusing more on how the individual is connected to the larger whole. Where Thoughts Go manages to provide that experience of showing you the common threads of human experience as you listen and empathize with other people’s experience and reflect upon your own experiences relative to the questions.
I unpack some of the experiential design philosophy, collaborative storytelling innovations, and insights for how to create a VR experience that’s resilient to trolling with Rizzotto at the Magic Leap LEAPCon in early October.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here’s the announcement trailer for Where Thoughts Go: Prologue:
Audio clip of @_LucasRizzotto sharing the design philosophy of Where Thoughts Go: Prologue. It asks a series of questions that you can explore by listening to other people's answers that were recorded by people who previously went through the experience.https://t.co/zhmw7ydcJb pic.twitter.com/HIt0Hzs38Y
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) December 13, 2018
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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. So back at VRLA, I saw Where Thoughts Go, which was done by Lucas Rosado and is now available on Oculus as well as on Steam. And it's one of the best experiences that I've seen this year. And I say that because it is pushing for the storytelling medium of virtual reality to show what's even possible. And it's really focusing on the phenomenological experience of an individual and allows you to participate and create your own hero's journey as you go into these different worlds and hear other people's thoughts and it encourages you to record your own thoughts. And so Where Thoughts Go is this experience that is trying to craft worldviews and do this form of emotional education, but at the end of the day, trying to really focus the experience on your own experience of trying to get you more self-aware, more introspective, and more connected to yourself, which I think is one of the deepest powers of virtual reality. So Lucas Rizzotto, I think, is one of the most exciting and interesting creators in virtual reality right now. And I would encourage everybody to, first of all, go experience the experience of Where Thoughts Go, and then dive into this interview, because I think the way that Lucas is thinking about it is really tuning into something that's special and unique affordance of the medium of virtual reality. And also, there's this whole discussion around harassment and creating safe online spaces in virtual reality. And Lucas is somebody who actually used to be a troll online. And so he designed his virtual reality experience to be, in some ways, troll-proof. And so he's really getting inside the mindset of what it means to be a troll and trying to create these experiences that may be a little bit more resilient to trolls interacting with it. So we'll be diving into all of that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Lucas happened on Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 at the Magic Leap LeapCon in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:07.337] Lucas Rizzotto: Hi, my name is Lucas Rizzotto, and I created a piece called Where Thoughts Go Prologue. It's set in a fictional world where human thoughts exist as sleeping creatures, each one of them a voice message left by someone else who was there before you were. It's an interesting VR experience that lets you explore alien worlds populated by personal stories left by others. You can wake up these creatures to listen to the stories of strangers and learn about them. And as you progress through the narrative, you also have to answer very personal questions of your own and leave your own stories behind for others to find and it builds up to a huge climax at the end. This is part of a series of explorations I've been doing on trying to use VR to connect people emotionally in ways that were not possible before, playing with social dynamics and make people cry whenever I can.
[00:02:51.845] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to do this at VRLA, and my experience of it was that I was paying attention to the VR design. It was beautifully designed, setting a context, and then allowing me to explore the thoughts of other people. There's a number of rounds, a number of questions, and the first couple of rounds I kind of went to the end and then recorded my own, but then I sort of switched my strategy. which was to really focus on the question and then listen to what other people had said. But once I had it in my body, what I wanted to say, I then immediately just recorded it and just sort of captured it to capture that answer and not linger on it too long to let it slip away. So maybe you could talk a bit about this design process that you took in order to sort of cultivate this type of experience.
[00:03:36.018] Lucas Rizzotto: So different people approach the experience in completely different ways. And one of the things that I try to do is to make sure that people are in full control of the pace and the length of the experience. We don't ever strong-arm people into doing anything. Everything is optional and everything is your decision and within your power. So the moment you start a chapter, you have control over that. How many messages you listen to or if you listen to any at all, you can control it. What do you say? Your message can be five seconds long, it could be two minutes long, ten minutes long. Your message could be empty for all that we know. We just let you make those decisions yourself and we assign the responsibility to you. So it's an experience that's about building trust with software in a way and going deep into parts of your mind that you don't usually access. And building that relationship takes time and some people will trust it immediately and just pour out their hearts. Others will need to listen to the stories of others before they feel comfortable saying their own. And others will just need time to figure out what the answers to the questions are. We are, in a way, I think, trying to enable self-reflection and introspection and making kind of accessible and interesting and fun. And I think that if you can do that, you can create a domino effect in the world that results in just better people who are more mindful, kinder to each other, and more self-aware.
[00:04:54.405] Kent Bye: Now, I saw this experience maybe five or six months ago now, and what I remember was that there was a shift with each question, maybe a color shift, a music shift, trying to cultivate a whole context to lead you up to that question. Maybe you could talk a bit about, like, this other aspect of setting the stage to ask these different questions.
[00:05:13.795] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, so I think alongside with designing all of the mechanics and all of the visuals and the sounds, I think you're also designing a mental headspace or a particular emotional state. And the orchestra of all the sensory input that you design, be it visual, haptics, or sound, it results in a final emotional state. So I crafted from the very beginning an emotional chart of where we wanted to take people, what we wanted them to feel in each particular location. And we designed every single aspect of the level from the color scheme to the sounds to the music and to the themes to try to get people into that emotional map. Of course people's emotions are complex and it's not like everybody has the same emotional experience. Sometimes you will be in a particular world in which most responses and stories are sad but there will be some that will be comedic that will appear out of nowhere. And I think it's a lot kind of like life in that way. It's not like a single emotion. It's just this huge blend. But sometimes you have a particular dominant emotion. So darker worlds usually are about exploring deeper questions. So in like enhancing a sense of privacy. Most of the worlds are very open-ended, so we have lots of space to think about, not a lot of sharp surfaces, so you don't feel threatened by anything. Even the thoughts themselves they interact with, they have the proportions of babies, so you can feel like parental towards other players, which we found reduces trolling like tremendously, because you just start to treat others as like your children. And yeah, I think orchestrating all those elements gets people in a particular headspace. And once you are in a particular headspace, you can access parts of your mind that you usually wouldn't be able to access.
[00:06:57.500] Kent Bye: Well, the thing I find interesting about this experience is that it is so participatory. You're really asking people to add their own story that then other people could have access to that in the future. So it's like a living story in that way. It's ongoing. And so you're almost taking a little sample of the zeitgeist of what that quality of that moment is. At least, you know, I imagine if I would do that experience again, there may be things that I'd answer completely differently. But it's an experience that, from a storytelling perspective, you're really trying to cultivate this engagement and participation that I haven't seen a lot of other VR experiences that were able to go to that level of depth of really asking people to share some really intimate parts of themselves and so just curious to hear about that sort of journey for you to To set that context and then to be receiving all these very intimate things that people are sharing with you
[00:07:48.795] Lucas Rizzotto: I think you stumble upon something interesting when you design something that's consistently surprising you. And that's what I've been trying to do for a really long time. And I feel like in Where Thoughts Go, because it's really... Actually, before that, I was trying to write several kinds of narratives and stories. And what I've been learning from life is that people's stories are usually far more complex and far more interesting and varied than anything I could possibly write. So I decided to just create a framework in which people could put their own stories in these worlds and have a character arc of their own. Because everything, the way everything is crafted, we do try to design a character arc for each individual person. So the moment you walk out of the experience, you're different than when you walked in. That being said, I really like to look at software in general as this idea that it's this organism that's consistently changing, and Where Thoughts Go is consistently changing, and I feel like in two months and ten years and a hundred years, it's going to be a really interesting collection. It's a little glimpse on humanity. And I personally really like that and I think that even though when you listen to someone you don't know who they are, part of the takeaway is that it could be literally anyone in your life, it could be anyone walking down the street or any stranger or someone you may know. And I think at the end of the day what we were trying to do is craft a worldview into an interactive experience. and let people experience that worldview and decide whether they want to ascribe to it or not. And that worldview is everyone's emotionally complex, we all have stories to tell, and we all deserve to be heard to some level.
[00:09:25.198] Kent Bye: Well, I think that when I saw it, it felt like you were able to take in a bunch of recordings of answers and then maybe curate it a little bit. But at the same time, this is a project that seems like that you're going to be taking more and more people's answers to these questions and maybe put it into the database. Like, can you explain to me like this balance between this curatorial process of sifting through these answers and then maybe trying to create like the best of or to just completely Surrender to the total randomness and trust that whatever people listen to may actually be the perfect thing that they need to hear at that moment
[00:10:02.752] Lucas Rizzotto: So, Where Does It Go Prologue, the stuff that we took to film festivals, it had an element of curation built into it. But the way that I want to approach it, especially going forward on the other things that we're doing with the project, is letting people choose whether they want the pure raw material or a version that's a little bit more curated, which is essentially, it's very subjective. It's the things that cause a strong emotional response with us personally or that tug on our heartstrings for some reason. And initially the curation, it was there actually because we were worried about the possibility of trolling. That was our biggest fear that you could have one toxic reaction that just completely takes you out of the moment and out of the headspace and all of a sudden you have your armor on and your shield on and you're not opening up or being vulnerable or having the kind of progress that we want people to be able to have. But it turned out not to be a problem. And I think it's because of the way we designed some things. There's literally like, aside from one guy who did sound like that sound in his recordings, which was probably his way of saying, I don't want to say anything, no instances of trolling. And it's been like 1500 people now through the experience. Which is really surprising, and I think it shows that in mediums like VR and AR, where you have deep control over every single little bit of... In VR and AR, where you have deep control over the sensory input and the headspace of the user and the emotional journey you're taking them through, It may make this medium the easiest to moderate and the easiest one to get people to be collaborative and kind to each other by exploring the principles that we have been exploring. The things like, you know, other players are shown as babies, etc. So I think that's a very hopeful thing. It may look bad now, especially because most of the social apps in VR are synchronous. So they're a little bit harder to moderate and hard to have control over. But I think in the long run, it's going to be one of the healthiest communities out there.
[00:12:00.246] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that it certainly has a strong potential to do that. The thing I worry about when I hear that almost sounds like a challenge to the trolls to be able to do that, to actually sort of be disruptive in that way. But I feel like that part of the dynamic of doing things face to face is that you are there, the creators are there. It may be harder for people to troll people face to face, but I wonder once it's released, if you do have this process of needing to go in there and curate it a little bit more, if you do actually start to have that problem.
[00:12:27.623] Lucas Rizzotto: So even though we're launching officially in October 25th it's been on early access for a couple months so we got already like a bunch of people through that completely played into the experience and we've been taking into like arcades and film festivals in which we were not present and of course like when you're when you have a physical presence you're more willing to cooperate. But I think there is a series of design principles that deal with trolling before it happens. So just stop it from being an impulse. And I think it's little things about how Where Thoughts Go is designed. If you are trolling, you're literally just screaming at the voids. There's no feedback mechanism. You're literally just wasting your time. I think little things like that make trolling just seem pointless. And I was a troll for a very long time. So I understand the psychology. Over the past couple of years, I've been through a very strong process of change in which I think I've become a better person and I'm trying to create software that enables that to others. I'm particularly interested actually in what if instead of just banning trolls, if we used VR and AR to create a redemption path for them, although that's a completely different conversation, I think there's ways for us to give trolls a path to redemption in the social media platforms we design in the future.
[00:13:43.035] Kent Bye: Wow, that's really fascinating. So what changed? What shifted for you to move away from trolling?
[00:13:51.422] Lucas Rizzotto: I guess I started to pay attention to the world and people. I got into contact with space and nature and slowly became a more self-aware individual. And I don't know. I don't know how to answer the trolling question exactly. I think I went through a lot of bad shit that made me a more empathetic human being, and then trolling slowly started to make less and less sense until it made no sense anymore. I think you can learn a lot from painful experiences, which actually brings a lot of interesting questions in VR, like should we even design pain to teach people things? Are there things that can only be taught through painful experiences, and is it ethical for us to design pain, even at a psychological level? Yeah, I think experiencing pain and loss and growing with it made me a better human being and trolling started to make less sense once I had a certain baseline level of empathy now that I've been to places that changed my outlook in the world.
[00:14:50.599] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's curious that you have that history because you've designed this experience now and to create it to be a little bit resilient to this trolling behavior. And so what do you think are some of the key components that for you as your experience of participating in the process of trolling that you've took away or you designed around it or you try to cultivate a culture and a community and a context? I think that's what I find so interesting is that with virtual reality, you're able to create a larger context for interaction and that you've been able to do that within the Where Thoughts Go, but if you were to kind of boil down to some of the design principles that you used.
[00:15:28.257] Lucas Rizzotto: So this is going to sound strange, but I think you should design the user experience of someone who's trying to harass others. Like, get in their headspace and make sure that there's no positive feedback mechanism to their actions. If the act of trolling is a pointless act, they will stop. They will get tired. They will go troll on a YouTube comment section in which they'll be able to get far more reward for their actions.
[00:15:55.103] Kent Bye: So don't feed the trolls.
[00:15:56.671] Lucas Rizzotto: Yes, not only feed the trolls, but like design the user experience of the troll so it's the least pleasant possible and they will bore themselves out and go away. So basically give positive feedback for the actions you want people to take and just make the troll reactions neutral, not even negative. Even punishing could be like openly punishing could be a sign of acknowledgement or a sign that he's pissing off the platform. So that's I think it's one thing. Another one is that in VR, people don't have to, in most social VR apps, people are represented, with the exception of VRChat, people are represented pretty much as equals, they have the same scale and dimensions and size. Once you do that, you lose a couple of opportunities to choose visual metaphors that could have this sort of inherent social behavior. So in the case of Where Thoughts Go, thoughts are small, you can grab them in your hand, and they have the proportions of babies, specifically, so people feel parental towards them, and so they never feel threatened by others. They are always in control of their environment. I think being able to play with scale and how you represent people, it appeals to certain senses and sets of behaviors that are built into us over a really, really long time. So appealing to our internal instincts, I think just looking at evolutionary psychology is just generally very interesting and helpful. And designing what harassment looks like so it's as dull as it can be.
[00:17:23.675] Kent Bye: And so we're here now at the Magic Leap conference and you've also been looking at both the HoloLens and Magic Leap and augmented reality. You've done this virtual reality experience and so maybe you could talk a bit about like what you see as maybe the design affordances of VR. You've done some experiments and maybe some early like what have you done and what have you found so far?
[00:17:44.370] Lucas Rizzotto: I started with Mixed Reality. I was doing HoloLens applications and experiments and I moved into VR late last year because I found that it could do certain things that Mixed Reality couldn't. I think VR is an amazing medium for focus. You have control over every single pixel and sensory input. You can take people into far deeper personal and emotional journeys in VR than you can anywhere else because you have that level of control. You have their full attention and you can design where their attention goes. And in mixed reality you're competing with the world, so I want to find a way to create the same effect in your living room, and I'm sure there is a way. I haven't found that quite yet, and my thing, I guess, is emotional software, so I'm still trying to find out how can you achieve the same results within the context of a device like the Magic Leap, but... I like it. I think it is definitely the future, but I've also been thinking a lot about pass-through VR and what kind of AR experiences can be built for pass-through VR that can't be built on the Magic Leap and vice versa. So, even though I had really strong opinions about the AR and the MR ecosystem two months ago, right now everything is jumbled, so I can't be coherent with you.
[00:18:58.608] Kent Bye: Well, it's the end of the first day before you've had an opportunity to have the whole experience here. So it's still early, but it feels to me like it reminds me of the first gathering of the virtual reality developers at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I started this podcast. And there's a similar amount of excitement and not knowing about where this is all going. And I think that what I find interesting is that there's a bit of a dialectic process where I see an experience and I say, OK, well, this is a terrible user design. Like, why would you do that? But then they're also trying to do something that's the first. So there's a lot of firsts that are out there that people are doing stuff and trying to really come with these fundamental design pattern languages for how to do some of these user interactions that VR has been able to do that, but interfacing with the real world has different considerations and contexts. that it still feels like things are too early to figure out where things are gonna go, but you have this process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis where you're seeing a lot of stuff, you'll have a lot of reactions, and then I think that'll catalyze the creators to go off and then build their own iteration or version that maybe solves some of those issues.
[00:20:04.538] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone in this event, because it's the first one, I think it's the first major mixed reality conference about anything, by anyone in this space. And the motivations of everyone here are pure. Everyone's here because they're interested about the future or because they are taking part in building it. Everything's collaborative. People are here generally not here for the money. They're here for something else that's driving them. So a very positive feeling. And from Magic Leap, you're starting to see the emergence of certain design standards, like experiences that are continuously adjusting to the player's height. And these are things that actually, principles that apply into VR very well. So, yeah, the community is healthy. I wish I could have looked at more demos so I could have a stronger mindset of what they're trying to do. But, yeah.
[00:20:55.687] Kent Bye: Well, for you, what do you personally want to experience either in virtual or augmented reality?
[00:21:02.212] Lucas Rizzotto: So I want things that consistently change my outlook on the world, that consistently show me that the way I was looking at the world was simplistic, and now I know more. And I'm more capable of making decisions and interacting with people and appreciating the world around me. I think that's part of the personal journey I've been taking over the past couple of years is learning how to appreciate the world So actually, I've gotten in the habit now that every time I see something interesting, like a sculpture, I stop and I touch it in every way that I can. If I see a flower, I go smell it, I go engage my senses, touch it, listen to it to see if it speaks. and even eat it sometimes just to see what it tastes like. Just really absorb what the world has to offer and trying to study the world to get a greater appreciation of it. I think it does help with reality design in general, having that kind of relationship. So I want things that change who I am. I want software that's actively making me a better person and that's actively making me self-aware. And I think emotional education is not something that we have built into our educational system. It's something that happens when you have good parents or maybe happens when you have a bad breakup and you get over it. But there's no go-to tool. And I'm hoping that the experiences we're designing, we can offer some level of that. An easy way for people to educate themselves emotionally and to grow and to become more self-aware.
[00:22:26.244] Kent Bye: I've been thinking about this a little bit more lately because of this concept of consciousness transformation. There's a bit of you being presented with some sort of dilemma, a moral dilemma, or some experience that makes you grow. And oftentimes it is these crises that happen that forces you to expand your worldview in some way. there's a concept called polarity therapy, which would be like, if you're trying to deal with shame, you would like create an experience that would be the most shameful experience that you could possibly imagine. So what would that mean to design an experience like that? But the idea of this alchemical or Jungian concepts of the polarity therapy is that if you hold in the tension of opposites of those two polarity points, that the third resolution of that comes up. And I think we go through that process in storytelling, you go through building up that tension, whether it's through the narrative tension, or through music, or whatever else, and then you resolve it. Music does that as well, with the consonants and the dissonance, but what does that look like from an experiential perspective, to be able to have that full spectrum of embodying all the different emotions of an experience, and then does that allow you to have the embodied experiences to actually expand your worldview, or to grow in some way?
[00:23:40.930] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, I mean we've seen plenty of examples that show how embodying a character can change your personality and showcase parts of you that maybe you didn't know were there. I'm particularly interested to see how you can generate experiences that allow you not only to embody something and roleplay it but also look at it afterwards and reflect upon like Why did I do those things? Me and my co-workers, we went out on the Nerf gun battle in the park a couple of weeks ago. And Dara, my co-worker, she was shocked at the character that I became once we were both confronting each other. There was a lot of betrayal, there was a lot of... There were a lot of emotions that usually don't come up in the workplace, it just appeared within that context because we were playing characters. I wonder if you can scale that to digital experiences and really create things that are not only entertaining and interesting but become platforms for self-discovery.
[00:24:34.170] Kent Bye: Yeah, Mel Slater has actually done a moral dilemma research that is trying to invoke what he called the time travel illusion where you go into this room and you're in this museum and you start to operate whether or not people go up or down on the elevator and then at some point a person comes in and murders everybody on one level and then the experience stops. You come back a week later and you're watching yourself do the same actions and you know what's going to happen and there's some ability for you to intervene and change the fate of what happened at this last experience. But he reported that people experience this feeling of time travel so that we're going to be able to spatially record our experiences in a way and revisit them. So what are the implications of going back in time and being able to cultivate this witnessing consciousness to be able to see ourselves from an objective third-person perspective? Is there a way that we could maybe notice aspects of our being or humanity or body language or ways that we interact or our tone? Things that are completely invisible to us in the moment, but yet can we reflect upon that and maybe change?
[00:25:40.165] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, there's one particularly popular study that I'm sure you're aware of in which you sit with Sigmund Freud and you just tell him about the issues you're going through and then you embody Sigmund Freud and you see yourself 3D scanned talking about those issues and you give yourself advice and people actually, you know, generally walked away with a very positive experience. So there's all these interesting mechanics and this is something, spoilers for Where Thoughts Go. At the end of Where Thoughts Go you listen to your own messages at the end and you get to reflect on whatever that means and that's your main takeaway from the experience. And it's an ending that accommodates everyone from the good users to the trolls and the people who said nothing. If you said nothing, you get nothing at the end. And if you've opened up and shared things, you would listen to those and you get to reflect on them. But if you also decide to be a troll and say horrible things, you will listen to your own voice before you go and you have a moment in which it's an opportunity for regret and an opportunity for re-evaluation of why you chose to contribute to this world with those toxic messages. And I think the voice is a very important component in this, especially in the example of time travel. I imagine if you incorporate voice, it intensifies it even more. Because it's easy to read text and have someone else's voice in your head, especially when you're being obnoxious. But listening to yourself say horrible things is usually very painful. As hearing yourself saying things that are really meaningful and personal to you, it has much more of an emotional impact. Throughout the experience, actually, we don't even let you listen to your messages. We just get you in the mindset of record and leave behind and don't even worry about how you sounded or what you said. We're just trying to keep those as raw as possible. So at the end, we can bring them out and give you that opportunity for self-examination.
[00:27:30.189] Kent Bye: I deal with that all the time because I do a podcast where I record myself and then we'll go back in time and listen to myself, but just coming from Oculus Connect 5, there was a lot of things there that were making me very angry. You know, just supporting gaming and not a lot of support for non-gaming applications, and I could hear it in the tone of my voice. And it's almost like, oh, my God, I wish I could edit that out. But it's a bit of me becoming aware of my own unconscious anger that gets triggered in these different situations. And, you know, I've tried to cultivate this deeper compassion of like, well, if I were to do this, what would I do? And there's a bit of like, yeah, it's easy to play the armchair quarterback and to say, oh, well, they should really be doing this. But when you're in the position of having to look at all the spreadsheets and look at how do you push forward this entire industry then it allowed me to cultivate my own compassion but there's this self-reflective nature that I think is going to be happening within virtual reality where we're going to be able to capture different dimensions of ourselves and I mean of course there's a lot of privacy issues for you know where this information is going but if we are able to record it and store it in ourselves and be able to revisit it, then we have this capacity to be able to, almost like a diary, go back and capture and re-look at these things and maybe get these deeper insights about ourselves, which I think at the end of the day is what we really want, is this capacity for self-reflection and growth.
[00:28:46.350] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, and this is something that I'm looking deeply into, is can we get these concepts that we applied into the singular experience and create deeper habits that could result in day-to-day engagement. I think one of our internal metrics for these kinds of recurring applications that we're trying to make around these formats is the rise of introspection. of our users, like how their message length changes as they get used to the experiences we make. How much time do they spend listening to others? Are they more interested in what others have to say? And I think you can create products that have that their first goal is to make people better people. But it's not that we get to say what makes you a better person. It's like we're completely removed from that. We just give you the ability to look at yourself and we walk away. And we let you just deal with that on your own. I think it's important to mention where I thought it was anonymous, fully. There's no user accounts. The messages you leave, of course, there's a chance that someone can recognize your voice somewhere.
[00:29:48.087] Kent Bye: Yeah, someone might recognize my voice, for example.
[00:29:50.328] Lucas Rizzotto: Yes. But the voice is... Your voice is a key part of your brand, but... Well, the voice is generally a personally identifiable information.
[00:29:59.430] Kent Bye: I mean, people generally can identify other people through their voice, so...
[00:30:02.355] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, it's just that when a message plays, it goes away, you can't play it again. So it has this very ephemeral quality to it. And because everything is random, the messages you find, the probability is low enough that I think people for the most part, myself included, don't care that much. And there's no stake. The stakes are not high. It's not like we're asking you to give up internal secrets. We're just giving people a space where they can talk about personal things that don't usually get talked about on the internet. Privacy is something I'm personally really concerned about, and I think that it brings out the extremes in people. that could be the best and the worst. Whether it's going to be one or the other, it depends on how you design it. Which is why I've hesitated to allow people to send messages to each other as of now. We're only going to do that once we're absolutely sure that we can do it in a way in which no one can ever hurt each other. Because voice is such a personal medium, getting attacked On Twitter, you can shrug it off easily, but if somebody attacks you with their voice because of something intimate you've shared, that is a far more painful blow that could be the end for some people, so I try to take that part very seriously.
[00:31:19.575] Kent Bye: Yeah and I've been thinking a lot about the future of storytelling and the unique affordances of VR and AR and I've been calling it the Yong archetypal journey and the Yin archetypal journey where there's like this typical hero's journey where you go out and you conquer things and there is a complementary inner part of this that you have to overcome but that this yin archetypal journey seems to be something that's much more about you cultivating this sense of embodied presence and emotional awareness and self-reflection and introspection and it feels like Where Thoughts Go is a perfect example of this the sweet spot of what I see is this new affordance of virtual reality to be able to do these types of experiences that are much more centering you into your own experience and to allow you to become present to your own your own story and to still participate by contributing but that it's really trying to center yourself within your own embodied sense of presence but also emotional experience. So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on this new framework or model of the Yin archetypal journey and how you've been able to cultivate that?
[00:32:26.923] Lucas Rizzotto: I find it fascinating, actually, the way you managed to word it, because these are concepts that I've been working with, trying to work with intuitively, but without an actual written framework, like giving words to the whole thing. There's something about designing narratives that are ambiguous by nature, that can mean different things to different people. I think I was trying in a way to explore the idea of creating a hero's journey but it's completely your own and where that character begins and ends, it's completely dependent on who you are as a person, how you feel towards the world and what are the things you're willing to do when you're put into this context. And honestly, I think that's like, it's probably one of the most powerful types of narrative we can have. Of course, the structure of it is not really laid out. I actually stumbled upon this type of narrative completely by accident. It was just by building things and I was following emotional reactions. I was building a bunch of stuff last year and just hoping that I would stumble upon things that make people feel strongly, feel something new that technology hasn't made them feel before. And I just followed that until I ended up in a final product. But I'm a huge fan of those types of narratives, and I think that storytelling in general has helped me understand people in the world at a really significant level. It's almost like I understand the world through stories. Every single year is a season. I need to map a character arc in January, and it needs to close in December, and I need to have meaningful change, otherwise the season's not interesting to watch. And it's a strange analogy, but it's been very helpful in my life. And I think that if we design stories with that outcome in mind, because in my case, it was more of an accidental consequence as a byproduct. But I think if we're able to find out the structures of designing a narrative with that goal in mind, you can change people actively through entertainment at a really meaningful level. And if you enable this kind of growth, and if you can get that kind of personal growth to scale, I think you can end wars. Because really wars are just like, it's a domino series of events that leads to one event that pushes the whole thing over the edge. But if you can get people to train themselves to be more self-aware, and kinder, and more empathetic, you can stop the series of events somewhere along the way. So it's a micro change that I think could have huge impact, we just won't be able to see it directly.
[00:34:43.189] Kent Bye: Yeah and as you're talking it reminds me of Michael Mead and his philosophy around storytelling because he will tell a story live in front of a lot of people and he'll ask you to listen to what is striking to you and then you'll in some context you'll be able to share whatever that was how that was related but often what he says is that striking moment is like spiritual acupuncture, where it's like getting to the core of the root of whatever happens to be up for you right now. There'll be a moment in a story that you're able to project yourself into, and it'll strike a chord. And that's what I found so interesting about your experience, is that it's really starting to cultivate that. Because you're getting a sense of lots of different stories from people. And people may be listening to them, but they may not be landing or hitting with them. they may listen to somebody's answer and it may be the exact same thing that they're going through that allows them to connect to what's happening in their life and then they have the opportunity to contribute to this living story and participatory story in that way.
[00:35:44.361] Lucas Rizzotto: Yeah, this is a common takeaway. I feel like the way the experience is designed, it allows coincidence to exist. People discover things about others that they just didn't think people felt like or did, but they also found a lot of common threads between humans from all types of backgrounds and places and accents, just people sharing some of the same struggles and some of the same experiences. And it shows you how complex we are as a species and as individuals, but also the common threads between everyone. And I think the most meaningful thing to hear is when somebody goes through the experience and after going out into the world, several weeks after, they look at people differently on the street. It just changes how they see the world because they got to get in touch with people in a way that the real world wouldn't allow them to. And I'm excited about VR and AR especially as really giving us the opportunity to break down the social barriers that stop us from talking and engaging with others. It's kind of crazy how on public transportation, in which so much of this country spends so much of its time, that we don't talk to strangers at the bus, that we don't engage with them at any level, and it's almost considered rude and unwanted to do so. I wonder if there are ways for us to break down the social barriers and get people to feel less isolated, because loneliness is a growing problem worldwide. And I think VR and AR has a role to play in fixing it.
[00:37:16.969] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential for virtual and augmented reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:37:27.909] Lucas Rizzotto: I think VR and AR, it turns perspective into something you can download, into something you can easily consume. So the consequence is more empathetic human beings, but I think that as we find out exactly how to maximize the amount of learnings and the amount of experience and the amount of insight that we can get from these downloadable perspectives, essentially, we increase our ability to understand the world, understand each other, and have a more harmonious existence in general. I think VR and AR will give us tools to look at ourselves in ways that we never did before, that will unlock new forms of self-reflection. And ultimately, I think that as you become more self-aware, you become kinder as a consequence. I feel like both changes are directly connected. So it's going to give us ways to Turn reality into a liquid to consistently play with it to realize that there's no rules to absorb perspective at will and grow as human beings at will and maybe This idea that software should actively make you a better person. Maybe it's something that can go beyond where thoughts go, maybe it's really something that we should all be looking at, is should social media be striving to maximize the amount of minutes it gets out of your day, or should it strive to cause the highest amount of positive impact in your day? Like, how can we change those metrics to create software that actively makes people better people? So, I think that's what's the potential right now. My opinion's gonna change on this, by the way. It changes all the time, but I think right now this is the most important thing I should be doing.
[00:39:07.772] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the AR or VR community?
[00:39:13.242] Lucas Rizzotto: The values behind the design decisions we make matter, and they will reverberate through the industry and the medium in the years to come. The things that we make that work will be copied by others and will, you know, will spread out and we need to make sure that the values behind those design decisions are pure and that we know what we're building towards. It's a new medium so we have the opportunity to build something really really great and I have a personal saying it's like don't make old mistakes only make new ones so let's like not make the same old mistakes that we've made with social media and the echo chambers and We've learned so much from that that I think we can approach VR and AR with that information to make sure that the mistakes we've made before don't happen again. Also, Where Thoughts Go is going to be available on Oculus at the Oculus Store and SteamVR at the end of October, so you should check it out.
[00:40:07.965] Kent Bye: Definitely check it out. It's one of the experiences. I think it's going to open up a lot of new pathways for what is possible with the medium. So I just wanted to thank you for creating the experience, but also for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:40:20.677] Lucas Rizzotto: Thank you, Kent. It was about time. Really happy to be here. And everybody out there, keep making cool stuff.
[00:40:27.344] Kent Bye: So that was Lucas Rossuto. He's the creator of Where Thoughts Go, which is now available on Oculus as well as SteamVR. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, first of all, the experience of Where Thoughts Go is one of my favorite experiences that I had this year. And I think that it was really able to cultivate this sense of embodied presence and emotional presence and do this world design that is trying to, what Lucas calls crafting worldviews, to be able to create an emotional context and to have other people share intimately these different perspectives, and then to be in this matrix of relationships that allows you to connect to your own story by listening to other people. You're empathizing with them and finding the common humanity through the process of listening to all this. But at the end of that, you're able to actually capture your own story and be able to share that with the rest of the people. And so it's this form of emotional software that Lucas is trying to design with this, and he's building it within these three main principles of trying to say that we're all emotionally complex human beings, that we all have stories that need to be told, and that we all are people that deserve to have those stories be heard. And so I think this is very similar to Testimony VR, which was an experience where women were able to share their personal experiences of sexual assault. And that was an experience where we were able to just bear witness to what they have to say. And I think that in the process of virtual reality, you're able to create this context where you're able to do this deep level of listening. And so all the ways that Lucas has designed all of these different spaces are doing this world design that is creating this context to allow this level of intimacy and introspection and cultivation of this self-awareness. Lucas said that there's no real good emotional education and that a lot of times we go through these really hard experiences, but yet what are the tools and methods that are out there and available that allows us to cultivate and build up these different types of emotional skills and emotional education? And what Lucas was saying is that some of his most deepest and profound experiences of growth have come from experiences that are very painful and very difficult. And so is it possible to create these artificially difficult or painful experiences within virtual reality? And are you then able to maybe be in a more safe environment to allow yourself to cultivate the different skills that you need to? It reminds me of this interview that I did with Ida Benedetto where she talks about transformation and that some of these key transformational experiences, whether that is an outdoor adventure, whether it's sex parties, or whether it's a funeral, that each of these have like real stake of something that could go horribly wrong. Like in an outdoor adventure, you could actually lose your life. at a sex party, she was really looking at the dimensions of social shame and humiliation. And that at a funeral, the big challenge is whether or not you're able to actually get to this process of deep catharsis and emotional vulnerability of being able to grieve somebody that you've just lost. And that each of these cases, there's something that's really real that's at stake. And so is it possible to have a virtualized experience without that real stake? Or if there are ways to create artificial constructs to allow you to experience these types of growth opportunities. I think it's one of the questions that's both an ethical question, but also a question as to what are the ways that you can actually grow worldviews and beliefs. And I think that just the process of listening to other people and listening to all these different experiences is something that's a really powerful experience just to go in and hear these really deep and profound questions and to hear a whole range. of different experiences. And it also really reminds me of this process of this relationships that you have to each of these different stories. And whether it's from different worldviews like Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy or Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, all of these are talking about processes that are evolving over time and that it's less about these concrete objects that we're using to describe the world. And it's more about this matrix of relationships and processes that are evolving and changing and growing and in this process of constant evolution. And I think that is a lot of what I heard from Lucas and the way that he's thinking about this process of creating these types of experiences, which is like this organism that's constantly growing and changing and evolving. But when you walk into this matrix of relationships, you're able to listen to these different dimensions that are connecting and landing to you in different ways. And there's this process where he's really trying to engineer this level of serendipity and synchronicity where you're listening to these different experiences and you have these coincidences that allow you to be a reflection of what is happening in your own life that then allows you to then articulate and share it with the rest of the world. And so it's this process that is allowing you to have this almost walking through and having these random serendipitous interactions with somebody else's really deep emotional experiences that allows you to reflect on your own deep emotional experience. And I think that is what I find so deeply profound about where thoughts go is that it's really this architecture that allows you to have this deep emotional introspection and to be able to participate in this process that I feel like is one of the best depictions of what I've been calling the yin archetypal journey, which is the yang archetypal journey is much like the hero's journey. You're going out there, you're making choices and taking action. It's all about the individuation of you and to essentially be the hero. and that the yin archetypal journey is much more about you having this complete ego disillusionment and the purpose of that is to see how you as an individual is connected to a larger whole of something that is much larger than yourself and so looking to something like the Chinese culture, the Japanese culture, those Buddhist concepts and Anybody that does these psychedelic experiences, you have this turning off of your default mode network of your brain that is so much about your ego, and it allows you to go past your ego and see that there's all these human experiences that we all share that allows us to connect us to the larger whole. And it's not about being the hero, it's about seeing how you are fitting into the larger ecosystem of humanity. And I feel like this experience of Where Thoughts Go is the best experience that I've seen so far in virtual reality that is able to really do that in such a really successful way. So I really encourage people to go and check it out and to have their own experience with it, because I think it's one of the most profound VR experiences that I've had. The other thing is that Lucas used to be a troll and he is trying to really design experiences that are trying to be somewhat resilient to troll-like behavior. Now this is experience where there's no real-time interactions and so you're going in there and you're hearing all these other thoughts and experiences that are being shared with you but you're able to share your own experience and if you decide to be a troll then there's an opportunity at the end where you have this review where you actually have to listen to yourself And it's kind of like this moment where you get out what you were able to put in. And so if you put in a lot of really deep emotional authenticity, of really deep introspection, of really trying to evaluate your emotional architecture of your life, then you're going to get a lot out of the experience. But if you don't, if you try to really add different stuff that's going to try to be disruptive to the rest of the ecosystem of this raw input that's being fed into this whole project, then you have an opportunity to actually listen to yourself and there may be an opportunity for you to really hear something about the way that you're acting that you were never able to actually hear before. And so I think that's a really profound insight that he had, but also that he was trying to design an experience that was not trying to either positively or negatively reward a troll, but to just think about the mind space of what it means to be a troll and to create the most neutral experience that you could possibly can so that it's not even giving negative feedback. Cause that could be a positive reinforcement that there's some acknowledgement of what they're doing. That's trying to be disruptive and that there's no real time reward for trolls to be able to do these types of trolling behaviors. And so there's no way to get any sort of feedback as to whether or not the trolling was even successful or not. And so that to me was some interesting insights for how to cultivate and create these different experiences that a little bit more resilient to this trolling like behavior. And finally, I just really enjoyed hearing about Lucas's process as he's designing these types of experiences where he's really trying to create these headspaces and these environments and to create a whole emotional map and emotional journey so that you as an individual are actually having your own hero's journey, but it's an inward journey of you really becoming more emotionally present, emotionally aware, having these different dimensions of self-awareness, and that as you listen to other people, you're able to cultivate this deeper sense of empathy and understanding of this common human experience and that it has the potential to change the way that you're walking around in the world and seeing that any one of these people that are walking around could be having any one of these really deep emotional experiences that are connected to you in some ways. And that if you're just walking around at a bus stop, there may be no way for you to actually have this deep and meaningful connection with other people. And so what would it look like to be able to actually break down some of these social barriers and allow us to really deeply connect to other people in the world? And I think that is a larger design goal that I think Lucas is moving towards. And I actually had a chance to spend some more time with Lucas at the dev lab that was sponsored by Kaleidoscope VR, Oculus, and Riot. I was there teaching a whole workshop on experiential design and got to hear a little bit more of some of the future projects that Lucas is designing. And it's a continuation of some of these themes of designing this type of emotional software. And I'm personally really excited to continue to watch and see how these experiences continue to grow and evolve. And I just really encourage people to go check it out and to support this type of work, because I think it's really important to really support these types of independent creators who are really trying to push the medium forward and to explore what's possible with trying to create new ways of exploring this level of emotional intimacy, introspection, and cultivation of empathy. And at the end of the day, connecting us more to ourselves, more to each other, and more to all dimensions of reality. 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 your donations in order to continue to bring you this type of coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
