VR Skepticism
Being a skeptic doesn’t mean I’m not a believer
Skeptical (adjective): not easily convinced; having doubts or reservations.
If you’re a VR skeptic, I don’t blame you. I first worked with virtual reality over a decade ago, and when Oculus Development Kits (DV1) units showed up at work a few years ago I was underwhelmed. But the technology has recently advanced significantly, and I can now see the the potential for how virtual reality and the metaverse it fosters will impact how we live and work just like how the internet has.
The metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. — Source: Wikipedia
I’ll admit that I was also an internet skeptic when I was in undergrad, believing that I would work on “real” software and not less-useful internet stuff. In retrospect, I should have known better, as I was using Google on a daily basis, and posting photos on Facebook back when Facebook was still only for college students. I did not understand the potential because I only saw what existed at the time:
- Real work was done with software, and the internet was for play and downloading music.
- Books were how you learned, and you had to have expert “Google-Fu” to find useful results on the web to help you with your homework.
I see the same parallel between my skepticism about the internet and virtual reality. You can do some fun stuff in virtual reality today, but for the most part you can’t do any “real” work in it. But that’s going to change — quickly.
Not only is the tech going to improve, but what we do in VR is going to become more and more meaningful to our everyday lives.
I believe the key is that the metaverse created by virtual reality is not going to be limited to access from head mounted displays (HMDs) only. Just like the internet was initially only on computers with browsers. Later, smartphones came along and you can access the same internet with a different contextually aware interface. And then there were smart watches, and Nest thermostats, and Alexas, and…
If the internet is primarily organized as pages, then the metaverse is primarily spaces and worlds. Just like newer devices had to figure out ways to serve up data from the internet in not-pages, non-HMD devices will also have to figure out how to give people access to the same spaces from the metaverse in not-spaces.
Take a tool like Slack for example. Right now, you have Slack channels where you can participant in conversations, and post files and images. In the metaverse, a channel will be a physical space, where you can organize things and create spatial memory and relational understanding. Fully immersed in an HMD, you’re in your project room talking and gesticulating with your colleagues, referencing things posts on the walls around you. Accessed from a 2D GUI, you have a chat transcript and files organized in a more traditional manner with search capability. But instead of having to remember a keyword when searching, you could also search for “the blue diagram that was on the right side of the whiteboard behind Dave.”
I acknowledge that it’s still the early days, the wild wild West, of virtual reality. And yes, it’s not ready today for everyone. Even I don’t use it everyday because today I don’t have the ability to do “real” work in it — mostly hampered by the lack of cross-device, cross-reality, metaverse today. But I am looking forward to being able to use the metaverse to make me more effective inside and outside of a HMD.
Fun fact: When I worked with VR before it was cool, I programed virtual reality psychology experiments for ReCVEB at UCSB. I even made my own 6DOF controller to use in an experiment because we needed a way for participants to interact with a domino game and observe how gaze, pointing, and verbal cues were used to collaborate. One participant saw dominos with color tiles, and the other saw dominos with number tiles, and they had to collaborate to choose the correct piece to add to the board that worked for both of them.
I didn’t realize I was ahead of my time then, hacking together a 6DOF controller, because I only saw VR as something that lived in a lab, not something that we would use for “real” work.
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