VR Isn’t What You Think It Is
It might turn out to be, but I hope not.
Right now, Virtual Reality is still becoming. Right now, you could have an idea for a VR event you’d like to run or a show you’d like to produce in VR and just do it. People will come. My son wondered what VR meditation would be like — now he leads meditation groups with people from all over the world three times a week in three different VR places.
There are no gatekeepers. It will not always be this way.
I think that most people vaguely see VR as something like 3D TV. Wherever TV shows come from now, that’s where VR will come from, only they’ll be 3D, which is cool.
It is cool, but it’s actually even cooler. The 3D part turns out to be a second-level matter. That’s not what keeps me going back. What keeps me going back is people. Not stories about people, elegantly crafted at professional billing rates. Just people.
I was in a Social VR app the other day, vTime — and a total stranger sitting next to me said she came there every day because she worked at home and didn’t see many other people, so vTime was her way of connecting, feeling part of the human race. The so-called real world (SCRW) provides no people for her, but vTime does.
Is that what you thought VR is?
It surprised me too.
I’m a retired digital media guy who doesn’t want to stop yet. I thought I’d be producing content for VR and I am, 360 pics and videos. I can look at them in my Oculus Go and they are amazing.
But that’s not what VR is.
We mostly assume VR is some new form of content that can suck us in so deep that some of us will never come back, but that’s just the way it goes. Gotta break a few eggs and all that … which is just the beginning of a seriously dystopian view featured in every movie about VR ever made.
It is not inevitable that VR will evolve in a Matrix-like direction. It is not inherent in the technology. In fact, the seemingly magical power to make our brains feel that we are in the presence of someone else who is nowhere near us physically is inherent in the technology. Because of this ability, you would think VR’s built-in dynamic would be to connect people, not to isolate them into individual consumer units.
VR is not promoted as a social medium, but it is. It might be the most social medium ever by expanding the scope of Being Together exponentially. Our brains have major circuitry dedicated to shared presence — establishing it, interpreting it and acting within its field effects. VR extends all that, potentially, to everyone everywhere.
Avatars
It is hard to imagine believing some weird 3D graphic is you, until you’re in VR and you just do. It happens quietly, no effort needed.
We believe that what our eyes see is where we are because that has worked out pretty well so far. We believe that when a body moves like we tell it to — it’s ours, duh!
I am often asked, ‘when will my avatar be able to be, like, me?’
The tech answer is that the hi-res video bandwidth needed to deliver a high-quality version of you is probably one more wireless breakthrough away. The answer anyone who has studied VR or experienced Social VR very much will give you is, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
I have met and conversed smoothly and easily in VR with people I know very well who were with me in the form of avatars that did not look at all like them. It was not an issue. After the Tom-avatar was through gabbing with the Alan-avatar, I took off my headset, went into the kitchen, and told my wife I was just with Alan. That’s what it felt like.
That what VR is, right now.
We don’t need to go Beyond-Avatars. Avatars work, as far as shared presence, and there is reason to believe communication can even be improved by working through representations of ourselves. Distractions are limited; essential social info makes it through.
Our avatars nod when we do. That is huge. Even though you are hardly aware of yourself nodding, it is essential to the way we’ve learned to do shared presence that a sufficient level of these micro-motions are passed to the avatar through head tracking and other methods.
I’m not even touching on the freedom to try out other looks that avatars provide. That’s frosting on the cake. I know that from the outside, avatars feel like a problem. They’re not. Of course they won’t cut it for 100% of the people who try, nothing ever does. But for most people, avatars are part of the solution.
Is that what you thought VR would be like?
Let’s just consider the idea of representing You for a second: What are you doing every morning in front of the mirror? Is that You you’re touching up so everything is just so? Of course it isn’t; your face isn’t You. It’s just a representation of You that the rest of us get to see and try to interpret.
Avatars make it clear what is always going on anyway. We like to think that we present a carefully constructed image to the world at all times, that conveys just what we want it to convey and conceals just what we want it to conceal. Our clothing and our facial expressions and our demeanor are like an on-going Halloween mask over our true hidden selves.
We use our front-facing surface, and the rest of our body, like it’s an avatar, but we don’t always like to think of it that way.
Did you think that VR is like the biggest make-up kit ever?
Place
I have met and conversed smoothly and easily in VR with people I did not know at all until I met them virtually. Maybe my avatar sat next to their avatar at some live event at an Oculus Venue, and we whispered to each other. Or maybe I joined a talk show in progress and fell easily into the talk-show-guest role with the host and other guests there.
I’m not very good at talking with people where the purpose of being together is not clear. But when I know what’s going on, like, ‘we’re in a talk show,’ then I can be pretty good at it sometimes.
Places are about limits and parameters. Any Place is formed by lopping off a little chunk from everything else and saying ‘here is what’s inside and here is what’s outside — and inside, things go like this …’
All spaces communicate, at some level of clarity, who should be there and how they should act. This is true in VR just as in the so-called Real World, I think, because it is a fundamental attribute of Place.
Jessica Outlaw, a Top Writer on VR in Medium, is exploring this idea in great depth in her current series. Her work is perfectly timed because AltspaceVR has just released a World Building Toolkit. We can be Gods. And while we’re at it, there are some fundamental principles we might want to bear in mind. Except for the problem that those principles are is still pretty hazy.
The Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University is working on clarifying them, under Founding Director, Jeremy Bailenson. Jessica Outlaw gave Social VR demos to a diverse group of experts and solicited feedback. One finding is that Places in VR need to help us figure out what to do in them.
Some already do. Premium viewing platforms like Sky Box or Pigasus are designed to say, ‘sit back, relax, and watch.’ So most people probably will, making VR a culture of passive consumerism instead of active engagement with other people. If our spaces say, ‘meet other people here and do things with them,’ and then help them do those things by the way the space is designed — some people will probably try that too.
In the so-called Real World, we can’t always do whatever we want with our Places, but in VR we can assign every pixel. We have never had this kind of control over Place before, nor have we had the ability to move between so many different ones instantly.
I have been aware of Place as a key Variable in any kind of social activity for a long time. Until VR, I never thought of it as a Variable I could manipulate at will.
Fear Factor
The whole idea of being anxious or even scared of something in VR is logically absurd. Part of you knows it’s not real and you can just take off the damn headset.
Right, try explaining that to my heart as it started beating like crazy when I found myself hanging off the edge of a virtual cliff.
But that’s not the kind of fear I want to bring up here. Fear of public speaking, spiders, flying, and heights are all phobias being treated effectively in VR for some people right now. Western psychology also recognizes some forms of social anxiety as a disorder.
The single thing that has surprised me the most about VR over the past six months is how many people with no major phobias and no social anxiety disorder are petrified about meeting people and socializing in virtual environments. I shouldn’t be surprised, however, because I felt that way myself.
I was lucky. My son held my hand at the beginning. The first time I went solo, I summoned up all my nerve, entered vTime, looked at all the available Connections, requested to join a small group (as scary as asking a girl to dance at a Junior High mixer) — and had my request declined. That almost ended it for me right there.
What is this about? Very confident people who do meetings with movers and shakers and make sales calls get unexpectedly nervous about Social VR.
I think it’s the Unknown, the idea that they will find themselves in a situation where they don’t know how to act, where they might then screw up, which they are not used to doing. Something like that.
I know that kind of Fear Factor is present. I don’t know for certain that humiliation by acting wrong in an Unknown realm helps drive it. Even if I’m wrong, this mostly unacknowledged anxiety underscores the importance of Jessica Outlaw’s initial findings. First, Places need to make it clear who is supposed to be there and what are they supposed to do.
Second, it may be essential in some cases to provide a Host — a Docent, a customer-service person and a Walmart Greeter all rolled into one. A good Bot might work some of the time.
I have been coming to this realization as well, as a result of the informal pre-tests I am leading for a VR Salon. I want to do more than overcome the Feat Factor, although it all starts there. I want to put the right Host-and-Guest ingredients into the right Place to help make great conversations happen among people who feel together even though they are not.
I don’t think we have the tools or the right media environment, yet, to start making human connections at scale. I hope we have enough time to develop them before it becomes a necessity, because feeling we’re all together is what VR does.
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