Mixed Space for Virtual Reality (1/6)
The missing leap in a creative work, lifestyle & play revolution.
“Our goal is to create media, to create content, to create spaces that allow us to stay curious, to stay alive, to awaken the wonder junkie in all of us…”
~ Jason Silva
I find freedom here, moving beyond the arbitrary limits. They are all gone now… these convenient rationalizations of shoulds, have tos, fomos, and musts, which left unchecked had faded with me into the old routines.
When I’m here, everything clicks into place. There is space here to move around, and to change environments on a whim.
I don’t sit hunched over anymore, motionless for hours, my psyche twitching. When I work, I skip typing on a cramped keyboard in front of a too small glowing screen. I use my voice, and listen actively. There is so much more I can do with my hands now. I move my feet, too, and dance and walk for miles and wander while I think. I stand taller, and stretch comfortably whenever it feels right. When I change my point of view, I do it fully. It’s a changing of perspective with my body playing a lead role in it — with all of my senses — and not just the internal models of a thing I hold uncomfortably in an overcrowded mind.
When I need a special tool I have it ready within minutes or less.
Laser cutting CNC machine? An entire film studio in a box? Open source visualizations for computational biology? 3d printer on demand? Fancy paintbrush and spray paint can? Yep, I’ve got them all within reach anytime I load up the right program in the space around me, and turn my wrists this way and that to call up the control menus I need.
I can record my movements, and play them back. Watch tape of my most productive moments, and laugh at clips shared by friends.
I can meditate on a beach half a world away, write bots that talk with fields of food in the urban farming coop where I volunteer my mornings, and ride dragons with my party in a VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) — all in the same day.
I thought I’d never have time enough for all of this.
For too long, I’ve lived uncomfortable with submission to flattening by two dimensions… these cramped frames made for fixed mindsets artificially restricting what I can do. A quiet chorus of social pressure hides (barely) behind each email, message, and notice to work ever harder, not smarter, by squeezing diminishing riches from each second.
Never have had much of an appetite for a default exhaustion dictating how I might move, connect, work, and play.
Yet like a door materializing in shimmering air in front of me, or a beanstalk from folklore dismissed for its life lessons, I’ve found time is a thing that can be created by how I see it. Time can be tempted to be kind to us by what we give in each moment. My perspective of time, and my relationships with it, have changed by stepping outside my mind’s eye.
Thanks to immersive virtual spaces, the freedom of real choices — the kind I actually want to make — is all around me.
I move through my choices now by stringing together objects and symbols of options and actions within any environment I choose. Some think it feels more like a game, some like living in a movie. I like to think it’s closer to (mild) lucid dreaming, enhancing what’s already real.
In time it’s become clearer to me that I’ve been asking the wrong question. This life isn’t really constrained by time at all.
Here is a better one, then:
Where do I find the space to create with this much freedom?
…
[Part one of a six part series on what makes a space ready for virtual reality.]
