What is a Map of Reality?
The PATTERN5 project has a single aim — to assemble a diverse group of practitioners and citizens to shed light on the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds. Having a historical timeline, a statement of the importance of the present moment, an accurate map, clear mental model and language will benefit both the creators and inhabitants of this emerging new world.
Defining or describing reality is hard — the task has consumed scholars and scientists for millennia. Whether philosophers, religious leaders, artists, scientists and laypeople — knowing what is real is the essence of the human condition. For a daunting look at the scope of the thing, we need look no further than Wikipedia.
Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.[1] It’s broadest definition includes everything that has existed, exists, or will exist.
So there you have it — just draw a simple, clear picture of everything. Ever. Gulp. Let’s begin.
Please indulge the sketch below —it was my first attempt to show what was happening in VR/AR early in 2016 using basic human-centered design.
As humans, we process reality through five senses. Each will play an important part in the future of virtualization but Sight has risen above the others in the early market. VR is primarily a visual medium (for now) which makes sense — our brains have evolved to experience life as a series of images over time. Pause. Reread that sentence. It matters.
These images form the movie of our life, played forward and back as we remember the past, imagine the future or dream while we sleep. We are storytelling animals and how we see can change how we think. Strong stuff.
The new reality we’re creating is one of lenses and worlds. My sketch above shows a crude version of what’s referred to as Milgram’s Continuum.
On the far left of the diagram is the “real” world —a place composed of atoms and molecules and seen with the naked eye. I see therefore it exists.
At the far right is a world that is purely “virtual”. Here we need lenses. This world wraps around the head and fills the brain with digitally generated scenes consisting of characters and narratives that are fantastical, unbound from the strictures of reality. In it, both our bodies and minds enter a simulation. The eye tells the mind “I am here”. By “here” we mean within and by looking down at our virtual hands we complete a magical loop and realizing “I am myself in here”. The final piece of this Hand-Eye circle is that with our hands, we can build and create new realities.
But the middle of the continuum is likely where we’ll spend most of our time and it’s also the hardest to understand and predict.
In this project, how we see and control this new reality will be a recurring theme. Robert Scoble has aptly-named the era of Spatial Computing the 4th User Interface. This trend toward body-operated interfaces is significant across the spectrum of Realities — as we knit the real world to the virtual, systems and software will need to evolve allow human-computer interaction without thinking — media without mediation.
There will be an unprecedented acceleration when our machines understand us and speak “human”. We’ll see this in sensors, cameras, screens, voice and facial recognition, intelligent assistants and self-driving cars, drones, satellite, geospatial imaging and more. All these interconnected field will race and to keep pace with a world intent on mirroring itself in a series of high bit-rate feedback loops.
And then there is the basic unit of the future of Future Reality — 3D models. Currently it feels like these exist mainly in video games and architectural models. As systems come online, everything that can be virtualized, will be. Much already is, from the CAD models of your Nike’s to the roads of you run on.
The stakes in emerging reality are high. But synthesizing this load will place an immense strain on our most basic informational infrastructure. As Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired’s May edition:
“The artificial reality winners will be the largest companies in history, dwarfing those today by any measure (yet) the scale of the servers, bandwidth, processing, storage, and cleverness required to run networked virtual places at the scale of the planet for billions of people is beyond Big Data. It is Ginormous Data.”
And what is being simulated? Land — (and the people, vehicles, objects and data associated with it. As many have rightly pointed out, the drawing of maps is a delicate matter. There’s an interesting point to be made here related to the history of exploration, empires and colonial conquest — often the Map that returned from voyages was more important than the gold and spices collected along the way. I wrote about this recently in “VR: A Telescope for the Mind “ — how we see changes how we think. I hope we can unite to reveal “what is “. Only then one can we imagine “what could be”.
Cyberspace is spatial and our metaphors matter. VR and it’s variants show a frontier beyond the physical earth in which wealth is decoupled from extracting natural resources from the land or invading nations to seize theirs. Instead, the path forward relies on understanding metaphors. We can virtualize nearly everything, reducing our reliance on material goods in favor of the emotional and pragmatic functions they represent.
The technologies to come will challenge us all — business leaders, citizens and lawmakers will face an unprecedented level of responsibility and thoughtfulness. AI, for example, offers perhaps both the greatest benefits and risks — it could either serve to render humans obsolete or free us from the historic shackles of trading labor for survival.
The tools we use to enable simulation and the free exchange of connected experiences will determine our course and destination. Reality has never been more malleable — the world, today and tomorrow is ours to shape and create, to name and define.
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I’m pleased to announce a few co-authors here. My friend Dave Edwards of Intelligentsia has agreed to work on AI market analysis. Matt Connors and his team will cover 3D optimization. Tony Parisi and Mark Pesce are helping cover web 3D standards. Tony Rai of Legal.io will work on Legal Frameworks and Policy with Ginsu Yoon , formerly of Linden Lab / Google.Marc Shillum of Chief Creative Office will be working on the future of brands. Robert Scoble will be joining us. He needs no introduction and will define his subject matter soon. Adam Nelson has volunteered to help with the dark art of complex systems modeling — he’s great. Lawrence Wilkinson will continue to provide sage advice to me, as will Mustafa Osman Turan, Viv Wang, and many more. Michael Felber of PASTPRESENTFUTURE will aid in the hardest job of all, visual design to make the complex, simple.
More coming in the next day or two but as a next step I’ll start loading market maps like this for AI, this for VR, this for Drones and this for Game Engines onto a shared Google Drive folder. If you want to join in, give a shout and/or pass along to those who also feel strongly.
Again, thanks for everyone’s supporta.
R
