Eva Hoerth is a VR design researcher & community organizer, and she enjoys recording videos of people as they’re immersed within a VR experience. She shot a video of of her co-worker in VR trying out the latest Leap Motion Orion update, and tweeted it out saying “This is the future.” It went viral with over 5000 retweets, 5 million views on Imgur, it hit the front-page of Reddit, and amassed nearly half a million views on YouTube.
It struck a chord and tapped into the public’s perception of VR, and some of the fears of social isolation that is a common perception of where VR technology is going. Eva wrote up an essay of these reactions on Medium titled “I love VR but hundreds of thousands of people think I hate it.”
I had a chance to catch up with Eva at the VR Hackathon before GDC to talk about some of these reactions, being a woman in VR, and some of her community organizing efforts to bring women in VR together.
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Here’s the video that Eva shot, as well as her original tweet:
https://twitter.com/downtohoerth/status/700822675824865281
Eva does love VR, loves people watching, and is highly amused with “how hilarious today’s headsets look.” She “>says, “Today, we are literally this guy. Except imagine that chunky phone strapped to our eyeballs”
I think that there are a couple of other things that Eva’s viral video taps into. One is the fear that VR will transform our society into an anti-social dystopia, and the other one is that it’s weird and awkward to block out eye contact while you’re around other people in a social situation. Robert Scoble told me that part of the negative reactions to the Google Glass was that it broke eye contact while talking to people, and that this violated our social contracts and cultural norms.
I think that this breaking of eye contact can help explain why some of these other images of people using VR in public received such a strong reaction.
This image of man in VR outside of a restaurant was shared to reddit’s /r/pics on January 28, 2015, just a month after the Gear VR Innovator Edition was first released.
Then on June 11, 2015, Zach Lieberman posted a picture of game developer Dimitri Lozovoy playing a VR game on the NYC subway.
the future has arrived pic.twitter.com/mtIERnEwjx
— zach lieberman (@zachlieberman) June 11, 2015
Here’s a video of Dimitri playing VR in public:
This was written up by Gothamist and Gizmodo, with comments about how absurd VR looks and marveling at how “the person we were gawking at couldn’t even see or hear us. So we all had complete license to stare, and boy did we ever.”
On February 21, 2016, just a couple of days after Eva’s video went viral, Mark Zuckerberg attended Samsung’s Unpacked event and entered the room while the entire audience was immersed within a VR experience. Here’s the image that Mark posted to his Facebook account:
is this picture an allegory of our future ? the people in a virtual reality with our leaders walking by us. pic.twitter.com/ntTaTN3SdR
— Nicolas Debock (@ndebock) February 21, 2016
This image generated a lot of visceral reactions ranging from the Washington Post calling it “creepy” to the Verge saying,
The picture trips all of our “horrible cyberpunk future” alarms, carefully put in place by everything from The Matrix to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. The former uses evil squid-bodied robots, the latter privileged human elites, but both works see humanity too distracted and preoccupied — by a full-scale replica of late-90s reality, or just sports on TV — to even be aware of the actions of those in charge. Zuckerberg’s picture acts this out: MWC attendees plugged into Samsung’s Gear VR headset literally can’t see the Facebook boss as he breezes past them.
I think Robert Scoble is right. The Google Glass violates the unspoken social contract of eye contact, and wearing VR in public triggers a similar social taboo of not being aware of the other people around you. This image of billionaire Zuckerberg evokes even more connections to a dystopian sci-fi visions where the masses are unwittingly being controlled, but overall I think that part of what makes this image feel “creepy” is that the people aren’t fully aware of what’s happening “outside of the matrix” in the real world. Having a powerful celebrity walk by you can be a memorable event, and these people in the photo are completely unaware of it.
I do think that VR, and especially mobile VR, will face some cultural barriers in being used in social situations. Samsung attempts to normalize the use of VR in public with this ad showing a woman using VR on a bus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTVnJEAr66o
Will people start to use VR more in public situations? Or will the chilling effects of public shaming or the feeling of vulnerability be too great? Or will people be more likely to use AR in public since they’ll have more situational awareness of their environment.
I think it’s worth reflecting on these viral images and videos of people using VR in social situations, listening to the public’s reaction, and being aware of how these reactions continue to change and evolve as more and more people have their own personal experiences with VR.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. On today's episode, I have Eva Hirth, who's a VR community organizer living in Seattle, Washington. And so Eva likes to document the social dimensions of VR by taking photos and videos of people as they're in VR. She actually had a video that went viral where she had one of her co-workers playing the leap motion and she's in the foreground and he's in the background. And her comment was, this is the future. And this video actually went viral back in February, just a couple of days before Mark Zuckerberg was walking down an aisle at a Samsung press conference with hundreds of people in VR, which is another photo that went viral just a couple of days after that. So we'll be talking about some of the public perceptions of this new virtual reality technology, some of the underlying fears behind it, as well as some of the initiatives that Eva has in terms of promoting women in virtual reality. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Unity. Unity has kickstarted this virtual reality revolution by making these easy tools set available for content creators to be able to take their dreams and make them into reality. There's no better way to learn about virtual reality than by getting started today by creating your own experiences. And it's easy with Unity. To learn more information, check out Unity at Unity3D.com. So this interview with Eva happened at the VR Hackathon that happened just a couple of days before this year's GDC in San Francisco. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:54.814] Eva Hoerth: My name is Eva Herth, and I am currently doing design research for VR in Seattle.
[00:01:59.959] Kent Bye: And so how did you get into the field of virtual reality then?
[00:02:03.788] Eva Hoerth: I didn't know anything about VR until I went to a meetup in Seattle. I was in my senior year of college, and my professor invited me to this event where Tom Furness would actually be speaking. And I remember sitting on the floor in the front row, and behind me there was about 100 plus people. And I saw Tom up there, and he's this adorable man. He's like the VR Santa Claus, pretty much. And he went on and on talking about this virtuality, mixed reality, virtual reality, all these realities. And I, to be honest, for quite a while didn't know what he was actually talking about. Because with VR, you know, you have to experience it to understand. So the whole time I was like, wow, you know, he's saying all these cool things, like we can use this platform to solve problems, to help people, to have a global impact. And I was hooked, but still not really sure what he was talking about. So at the meetup after his talk, I was able to try my first virtual reality experience. And it wasn't actually inside a headset. It was more of looking through this 3D viewer that was developed by DeepStream VR, which is located in Seattle. And they're working on VR for Pain Relief. Really cool. You should check them out. And I peeked my eyes in, the viewer, and I was instantly transported to this snow world, which is the name of the application. And so I was floating down this river in this boat, and I look up. And there's icy cliffs and these giant fat penguins staring at me and snowmen throwing snowballs at my face. And then later I was told that I could click the mouse and throw snowballs back. So that was pretty fun. A virtual snowball fight. And I was like, wow, this is the future. And so all of this was great. And then at the end I learned that they're actually using SnowWorld in about 30 plus hospitals across the world. to help burn victims control the pain during the horrendous bandage changes and wound cleanings. So at that moment, I was like, wow, this is something that's really useful. And this 3D environment, I played 3D games like Skyrim and anything like that. And I never thought about being in the environment. And so that's when I got hooked onto VR and I wanted to learn more. And so it wasn't until after I graduated from college that I attended my first VR hackathon. And from there, I met Tom Furness and he offered me a job to work on UX and VR so I was very pumped for that.
[00:04:38.278] Kent Bye: So maybe you could describe like what is the RAT Lab?
[00:04:40.860] Eva Hoerth: RAT actually stands for rocking and thinking which is like a thing that engineers do when they're brainstorming ideas. So Tom Furness, he started up the RAT Lab, and it's a small engineering lab in Seattle that does consulting work with various companies in the area. And right now one of our projects is working with Envelop VR, and we are pretty much doing a lot of cool VR stuff that I can't really talk about, but I would love to tell you more in the future.
[00:05:06.775] Kent Bye: Awesome, yeah, so it sounds like your job right now, part of your description is to just kind of try out all the latest technologies and do some R&D into what's out there, is that right?
[00:05:16.461] Eva Hoerth: Yeah, and I love it. It's literally like a playhouse of VR tech. For example, a month ago we were trying out Leap Motion's newest software, the Orion Update, and oh my god, we were just sitting around playing with this beautiful software, creating these virtual boxes, and from the outside we look ridiculous to the rest of the Rat Lab crew who aren't working on VR. So they'll walk in and they'll see us with our giant headsets on, flailing our arms around, questioning what we're doing. It is work, it's research, so we do like to do that a lot and I think it's really important to stay up to date on all the tech, right? I don't think it's very important to limit yourself to the hardware when you're designing. For me, I like to research more about how humans think, how they behave, and then design based off of that versus basing off of the platform itself because it's constantly going to change. So a lot of my time at the Rat Lab is just researching, translating 2D metaphors to 3D space. How can we do that? Or how do people stay productive at work? Or what causes distractions? That kind of stuff. And then thinking about that in a 3D space. So it's honestly just a bunch of playing around, researching, and just kind of taking risks because we don't really know what the best thing to do in VR is right now, which is awesome.
[00:06:39.520] Kent Bye: Yeah, and with that Leap Motion Orion update, you actually took a video that went viral. So maybe you can talk a bit about what happened there.
[00:06:46.816] Eva Hoerth: I did, yes. Yes, that was us. So I take videos of people all the time wearing VR headsets. I think people look ridiculous and funny and silly and I like people watching so I combine those two things and I just record. Hey you in the headset, I'm gonna record you right now. Actually, I don't usually tell them that I am and they don't need to know, right? They don't know. my coworker Aaron he was trying out leap motion Orion for a solid hour right and I see him constantly in the corner of my eye just like knocking shit over and I don't know I get really concerned that something's about to happen and I also just want to capture how ridiculous he looks I can show him later because he looks at it he's like wow I look like that as if it's a whole new world and so one day that was happening and I just whipped out my camera and recorded and I posted it on Twitter and then the retweets came in and Reddit happened and it just kept happening from there and it was pretty exciting for us because we're in a small little startup house and having that kind of recognition is pretty cool.
[00:07:56.945] Kent Bye: I think there's been a lot of really interesting people using VR in public type of pictures and photos and reactions. The big reaction to Mark Zuckerberg at the Samsung release, walking with 3,000 people in a room in a shared experience. there's something weird of, you know, seeing somebody in VR, they're kind of cut off socially. And in talking to Robert Scoble, he made a really interesting point to me, which was that, you know, with the Google Glass, there was this big backlash of people wearing the Glass headset out in public, partially because I think a lot of people thought that this could potentially be recording people at any moment in time. And Robert said, well, it's actually another thing that was a big part was that there's the breakage of eye contact. And that's a bit of a social construct and a taboo of whenever you're in a social situation with another person and you can't see what's happening, you have this dynamic of someone in this virtual world and you're in this real world. And if you haven't done VR from the outside, it does look really ridiculous. But once you've been in VR, you kind of have this experience of you know what it's like and you can empathize with that. I think there's this dynamic of people using VR in public right now that I've seen a lot of really interesting reactions. And I think your video kind of caught that a little bit.
[00:09:12.586] Eva Hoerth: Yeah, yeah, totally. I read the comments, and I know I shouldn't have, but I did because I was interested in what people think about VR. And most of the comments were, like you said, analyzing the social impact of VR. wearing these headsets. And a lot of the comments were actually more expressions of concern about the future. You know, like, oh, I'm never going to have a girlfriend or, you know, there's never going to be friendship anymore with these virtual reality headsets. And I do think that it's a legitimate concern to think about, you know, well, how are these giant bricks on our faces going to impact our daily interactions face to face, eye contact, anything like that? But at the same time, it was interesting to hear from people who haven't tried VR. I think a lot of them haven't tried it and might think that it is a very isolating experience because from the outside, it definitely looks like that, right? You know, you're pretty much putting a blindfold on your face and just walking around and you have no idea what's going on around you. So I think it's important for people to understand that VR doesn't have to be isolating. I do think that It can interfere with those social interactions in a lot of ways, which is why I think it's important to design systems that are not isolating to people outside the headset. And if that means, you know, I don't know if you've seen these mixed reality videos going up, that's one way to do that, to bring outsiders into, as close into the virtual world as they can. Or AltspaceVR is a great example where you can be in the VR headset, you can still interact with people on the desktop. That's also a good example. I think ultimately we're going to still want to maintain our daily social interactions. Pass-through cameras, they're not enough for me. I've had people tell me, hey, why don't you just turn on your pass-through camera to talk to your co-worker? And it's been a legitimate tip for how I can work better, because sometimes I'm in a headset for three hours at work, and I feel weird not making eye contact with my co-workers. And pass-through camera is just not enough. So I think, ultimately, AR is going to succeed much better than VR in context of social groups. Whereas VR is great for experiences that should solely be immersive and focused on the individual user. Yeah, if that makes sense.
[00:11:33.195] Kent Bye: Yeah, the way that I see it is I've definitely had experiences at being at a VR meetup, and I'm in these conversations, but I'm also helping set up a demo in a Gear VR. And there's been a number of times where I just have to say, I'm sorry, I'm going to go into VR right now. And I put the VR on, and I say, OK, keep talking. But it sort of changes the whole dynamic, because cutting off of that eye contact, it just really changes the conversation, even when I have the headset on and try to keep talking. But I think, you know, the thing about VR is that once you're in VR in a social space within a virtual context, then it could actually be way more social than, you know, looking at your phone on a bus.
[00:12:09.059] Eva Hoerth: Exactly. It's the same dynamic, right? We can't necessarily react to VR headsets as if it's a whole new social destroyer because we do it all the time with our phones glued to our faces. And you're right. If it's a social collaborative type of experience within VR and those people inside it all have access to headsets, that's great. Because that can be really fun. The toy box demo, awesome. You really feel that sort of presence. And I would never say I feel isolated in that kind of environment. It just comes down to what you're trying to use it for. It comes down to the value of the application itself. If social is going to enhance whatever it's doing, that's great. But other times, it's just going to be better to be in VR yourself or to simply use other mixed reality technologies that will be emerging within the next years.
[00:12:58.272] Kent Bye: So you wrote a whole retrospective essay with some of your experiences of this specific video that went viral, and you kind of titled it like, millions of people think that I hate VR, but I actually love it. And so I'm just wondering some of the big takeaways that you have from being able to look at the slice of the reactions, both as you as a person in virtual reality, as a woman in virtual reality, and as somebody who's an evangelist from virtual reality, but perhaps being misperceived as someone who kind of secretly hates it.
[00:13:25.704] Eva Hoerth: Yeah and to be fair the video probably did suggest that I am dating my co-worker because we're you know we're based out of a residential house in a startup and it probably looked like we were dating or it probably looked like because I'm more of a sarcastic person it probably looked like I was annoyed by him ignoring me or I was jealous that I wasn't given a chance to play around with the headset. So those are valid comments but overall there was a few things that I learned from it. One of them is the biggest for me is that I want as many people to try VR as possible because I think that a lot of responses were based off of people who haven't tried virtual reality. And of course, access right now is still limited until all the consumer headsets come out. So I think it's incredibly important to get the VRgens, the virgins, you could say, involved in the process early on, and to gather those reactions, gather those perspectives. Because ultimately, if this is our future, I think we can't just have a limited group of techies or any developers having access to this hardware. So my goal as a VR evangelist is to just walk down the street and be like, hey, you, stranger, you want to look into the future in this headset? I think it's incredibly important to get people trying it because that's going to inform us as designers about what people want to see in VR and maybe help them see it as not necessarily an incredibly negative destroyer of society, hopefully. Yeah, and I've been surrounded by the Seattle VR community for the past almost year. And so I'm always around people who are preaching for VR, who are developing stuff outside of work, staying up late into the night wanting to make this tech really cool. So there is this bias where I feel like we're kind of in this bubble of VR love and Outside of it we're not as exposed to the legitimate concerns that people have about not only VR but other mixed reality technologies and I think it's important to listen to those concerns and to address them early on throughout our designs. If we want to get more people involved in the process and if we want to make consumers more likely to try out products. And then the whole other thing that I gathered from this whole thing was being a woman in VR is very similar to being a woman in games. Because there's so many indie developers out there working on VR experiences, the same, I guess I could just say, sexist attitudes that exist in the gaming industry have leaked over into the VR space as well. mean the internet does this right if you're a girl on the internet and you post a video you're gonna get some kind of bitch comment or I Don't want to say the other ones, but you're gonna get those comments and it's unfortunate, but it also does Make me feel more passionate about getting girls, high school students, college students, people who know nothing about VR, I want to get more women involved in this space and give them access to technology and to prevent VR and mixed reality, the whole industry itself, turning into another sexist male-dominated culture that has persisted for too long. And not to say that I'm luckily surrounded by amazing men who would never question me because of being a woman, but at the same time, I know that there's so much sexism in other areas that I'm luckily not as surrounded by, and I think if we act on it early on, we can definitely make a difference.
[00:17:02.219] Kent Bye: Specifically, is there other specific initiatives that you know of or would recommend people towards those ends?
[00:17:08.147] Eva Hoerth: Yeah, definitely. There are great resources out there. There's the Women in VR Facebook. Highly recommend that one because you're going to meet a ton of women in there that are involved in the VR space and that are doing really cool stuff. And I have honestly had the most support from that group versus any other VR group or meetup that I'm a part of. So definitely recommend going there. There's also, from there, if you go to the main page, there's tons of links to resources. to get involved in the community. There's a woman in VR slack. There's events for women in VR, workshops, meetups, whatever you want. So there's a lot online right now. And I think a lot of this is actually based in San Francisco. So shout out to San Fran for being awesome in that space. But in Seattle, I've noticed that there's a huge lack for that because most meetups that I go to are definitely male dominated. I went to an audio and VR meetup the other night and there was only four women including myself there out of about 50 to 60 people. So I do still see a need for that space because I know about a ton of women in my own circle that want to get involved but don't know how and don't have access. So I'm working with a couple people on building women in VR workshops. So right now we're in the process of gathering names of people that would be interested and we're going to be doing something in May to get that jump started. So I'm really excited to finally change the way that the tech industry works and to prove that For these experiences, we need all sorts of perspectives, any race, any gender, any age. We need to gather these and pull them in early on so that it's not dominated by one specific gender.
[00:18:51.897] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what that might be able to enable?
[00:18:58.373] Eva Hoerth: Oh my. That's funny hearing you say that in person because I've listened to at least 300 of your podcasts and hearing you say that in person makes me giggle because now I'm answering it. I've actually thought about this question a lot because of you and I've enjoyed listening to all the perspectives that your other interviewees have given on the topic. But when I think about VR, and as we're moving even closer to augmented reality experiences as well, I see VR as being a great opportunity for social experiences that couldn't happen outside of a 3D immersive space. So there's a lot of cool things, right, going on in VR. There's cool games that are coming out, which is always expected. There's some cool experiments that people are working on on their own for productivity, for virtual desktops like Envelope is working on. Lots of stuff going on. And I think it's good that we're experimenting with all these things. But ultimately, when it comes down to it, VR is so incredibly immersive. And if we're going to be searching for that ultimate potential, I really think that we should be, instead of asking what would be cool in VR, we should be asking, what could we design in VR that we couldn't design on another platform? How can we harness its potential and use it for education, for training, for anything like that? So I see VR as a tool for giving us superpowers that we never once had. So teleportation, you can go to different places. Connecting with people that you couldn't have connected with in the same way.
[00:20:39.833] Kent Bye: So just to kind of reflect a little bit, one of the things that that makes me think of as you're speaking here is that, you know, there are going to be a lot of experiences that we could only do in VR. For example, if you imagine in a normal conversation with a room full of people, there may be a sort of power law dynamic where 20% of people take up 80% of the conversation. You know, you get this sense where there's a couple of people that may dominate a conversation. And you may start to have these situations where there could be AI-mediated conversations that could only be possible in VR. And so there's going to be stuff like that where you can be as productive because you can have software kind of like be the moderator where you would never be able to do that in real life. And so, yeah, I imagine that that's just one example of the types of experiences that you can have in VR but you couldn't have in real life.
[00:21:27.654] Eva Hoerth: Yeah, you definitely nailed that. especially when you bring in AI. That would be a whole separate podcast, is the potential of AI. That's going to be your next thing, right? The voices of artificial intelligence. What do you see as the ultimate potential of AI? That's a whole other topic. But yeah, I think we're just going to be using VR when we need to, I don't see us using it all the time. Because again, AR, HoloLens, anything like that, whatever Magic Leap's working on, is going to bring these capabilities that even exist in VR right now into our real world, so we're not isolated with the headset. So I think VR definitely, I'm not saying that AR or VR is better, but they serve different purposes ultimately. And I think it's important to really take a step back and instead of getting so excited about the tech, which is hard because there's some cool stuff out there, but instead of getting so excited about that, we should really think about how the brain works, how society works itself, how social interactions happen and design around those versus forcing people to change their ways because of the, the hardware itself. For example, the other day I tried taking a sip of coffee while wearing a VR headset and I pretty much almost spilled it all over myself. It was tragic. It just kept clunking against my Oculus and it's just funny to think that I can't simply drink coffee because I'm wearing a headset. Little things like that, like that's definitely trivial compared to the other implications it could have. But yeah, I think right now is the time to really think about what we're trying to accomplish and why we're using this tech versus other platforms that already exist out there. And I think we should have fun with it. You know, it's definitely worthwhile to take risks and to experiment and to try things we might not have seen in previous platforms. But again, always thinking about why are we doing this? What's the value? Instead of thinking about what would be cool, we should think about what would be useful, what would help humans without forcing them to adapt to the technology.
[00:23:32.698] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:23:36.360] Eva Hoerth: It's really exciting to see you in person again. Because every time I hear your voice, and now you're right here in front of me, it's like, it's just blowing my mind right now. So I'm really excited to see you again. Because the last time I heard you, we were at CVR, and I didn't need to see your face. I just heard that voice. The voices of your voice. And that was it. So thank you for letting me interview with you.
[00:24:02.100] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.
[00:24:04.822] Eva Hoerth: Yay. Thank you.
[00:24:09.104] Kent Bye: So that was Eva Hearth. She's a VR community organizer who lives in Seattle, Washington. And at the time of this recording, she was working as a contractor at Tom Furness's Rat Lab and is currently actually looking for her next gig. So get in touch with Eva if you have a VR position within the Seattle area. So a number of different takeaways from this interview is that first of all, there's been a number of different events that have happened with people wearing a virtual reality headset in public that gets documented, either a photo or video, and then it kind of goes viral. The first time that happened was back after the Gear VR had been released and somebody was outside a restaurant drinking a soda and basically watching something in VR. This is back in January of 2015. And then in June of 2015, there is a video game developer who was on the subway and basically playing some sort of a video game in VR while in the New York City subway. And someone took a photo and posted it to Gizmodo saying, hey, look, this is the future. And then with this video with Eva, as well as just a few days later, the image of Mark Zuckerberg walking down the aisle with hundreds of people in VR, not able to see him walking down the aisle. So I think that VR in this way kind of violates a social contract that when you're around other people in public that you kind of expect to be able to have eye contact and interact with them in some ways. And this is something that Robert Scoble had told me at Unity's VR AR vision summit is that you know talking about Google Glass he said that a big thing that happened that people had such a visual reaction to that is that Anything that becomes a barrier between you and somebody else's direct eye contact is tends to be a technology that we have some visceral feelings about. Robert was talking specifically about Google Glass and this whole glasshole phenomena where people who are wearing Google Glass, it kind of became this larger symbol of the tech culture and its influences in San Francisco. But I think Robert's right in terms of that there's an element there of We kind of expect to have eye contact with other people who are in social environments, or if nothing else, that they're aware of us if we can see them. Now, if you take a step back and see what's actually happening in the world with people checking out into their cell phones, there's not much difference when it comes to just being explicit about it and just completely shutting out everybody around you. But still, at the same time, I think that this is one of the challenges that VR is going to have in terms of people using it in public. I definitely feel that there's a taboo and you kind of have to violate the social norms in order to wear a VR headset in public while you're around other people. In the privacy of your own home, there's no problem. And after people experience VR, I think they're a little bit more empathetic into the experience that someone might be having. But in terms of the larger social norms around using VR in public, I think it's still a bit of an open question and could potentially be something that you kind of expect to do in your privacy of your own home, just like there's certain things that people tend to keep private rather than do in public. This is one of the reasons why I think ultimately augmented reality is going to be something that's going to be much more pervasive. Even though there's still this dimension of attention and eye contact and violating a social contract that we saw with the Google Glass, I think that with things like Snapchat that are so fun and interactive with putting virtual objects into images of the real world, I think the culture is going to evolve to the point where it's more and more accepted. And then maybe at some point VR will be just more accepted to be able to do VR in public. But specifically in this video, in terms of the reactions that Eva got, I think it's really interesting to go and read the comments on Reddit and the other kind of reactions of people who haven't done VR yet because I think there's still this gap between people who have experienced VR and people who haven't and that kind of larger public perception of what the implications of our society are when we have technologies like this. And it's a common misperception that VR is a completely antisocial technology. If you look at it in the context of you in relationship to people immediately around you, it can certainly feel antisocial and isolating. But if you look at the types of experiences that you have with other people in virtual spaces, it can actually be a lot more social and dynamic and interactive and not squashing all of our different body language that we have to be able to express ourselves. And so I think in the long run, there's going to be so many different social interactions within VR that you'll be able to connect to people around the world and kind of feel like you're actually co-located in the same place with them. And that's going to be extremely interactive and social. It's just that the people that are immediately in your surrounding geographic area, you may not be interested in hanging out with them. You may actually want to hang out with people that you share similar values with or interest or you geek out about something that Maybe there's just a dozen people in the world who are really into the thing that you're in. So I think that you'll be able to hang out with people all over the world rather than just immediately around you. And, you know, I think this is going to actually come up more in mobile VR than it is in desktop VR, because desktop VR, you're mostly in your privacy of your home anyway. It's just not very convenient to lug around your VR-ready PC into a Starbucks and start doing room-scale Vive experiences in public. And so we're really kind of talking about mobile VR. You know, I think the takeaway is that there's something that is within the culture that is going to be a challenge for mobile VR. And perhaps the culture will evolve. But I still think that augmented reality in the end is going to be something that is going to be way bigger than VR, just because there's so many other use cases. And it just doesn't violate as many of the social contracts when it comes to eye contact and being present with other people co-located. there's still some cultural accepted norms that put a subtle pressure to make it just feel awkward and weird when you're in a VR experience and around other people. Like I mentioned in the podcast, even when I'm at a virtual reality meetup and I'm trying to get ready a VR experience, but I'm in the midst of a conversation, it does feel weird to be like, okay, hold on a second, I'm going to put on this VR headset block my eye contact and still continue to try to have a conversation with this person and it just completely changes the interaction and the dynamics and it just feels really weird and unnatural and perhaps we'll outgrow that and it'll become more of a common thing but I suspect that it's going to be something that is actually going to hold back some of the mobile VR and how successful it is up until we're able to make it just more acceptable to do VR at any place anytime. Also, just a quick note that Eva did make a pretty good prediction about the Voices of AI. It is a podcast that I'm actually now going to be starting up and have a conference that I'll be going to the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence in a couple of weeks and doing a lot of interviews with artificial intelligence researchers. So if you're interested in the Voices of AI, follow me on Twitter at Voices of AI and you can get more information when that eventually launches. And I do plan on continuing the Voices of VR podcast and, you know, have quite a number of different events I'm going to over the summer and have a healthy backlog. So you can be sure that there'll continue to be a lot of cutting edge insights into virtual reality. So that's all I have for today. If you enjoy the Voices of VR podcast, then please do help spread the word, tell a friend, and leave a review on iTunes. And consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
