100x VR Concepts
A bit of an outlier post here, and excessively long, but I promise these are all bite sized — 100 VR concepts, brainstormed in a vacuum over a few months in early 2022. Usually before 7AM, after mediocre sleep and good coffee. No parameters, just a self-imposed challenge to keep the gears turning, and to document simple ideas for the VR medium.
With 100 concepts on any topic, the quality levels vary pretty wildly. Duds and clunkers aside, I think there’s some good stuff here — some concepts feel genuinely new and interesting, but others are likely already out there in existence. And that’s fine (send me links if I tapped into something that’s already been tapped!). There’s no agenda here, no business angle. Just an interest in what this space can become over the next few years and beyond. This exercise forced me to dig in, and it was worth it.
My concepting focused mostly on VR experiences, often with a brand layer (brands tend to drive this type of innovation, with their deep pockets) — but I also dabbled with some hardware and physical/analog concepts that relate to the human interaction with VR technology. Some of these are simply the VR-ification of things we have now in flat mediums. Look for experiences focused on art, utility, fandom, and note my general biases towards the things I’m already into; baseball, Costa Rica, architecture, cartography, travel.
Scan the topics, or read in full, or ignore after #23, an MJ concept, which I think may be my favorite. There’s no order here, except that the concepts are chronological. I’m sure my thinking evolved over the course of this exercise. I’ve also ignored any technological constraints — I don’t know enough about them to get too specific, and didn’t want today’s limitations to dampen my explorations into what could exist in the future.
OK here they are — 100 VR concepts. Lightly edited but mostly raw. If you’re into this stuff and want to throw ideas around (or make something cool together), let’s talk.
001
Logo high fives.
Jump/float to high-five the swoosh on your way into the Nike lobby. If you know you know. First time high-fivers get a coupon for VRcommerce within the experience. Random bonuses can be high-fived out as well, like a free pair of Jordans (virtual or IRL).
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002
Sky branding.
Look up, and there it is at 500ft. A brand’s logo can float up above at a super height/distance so that it’s effectively always there in your world, without taking up any ground-level space. Hunger Games style projection, or it could be floating in low orbit like that triangular prism in Oblivion. Could also be a step-repeat tiled pattern.
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003
Wellness room.
Naturebathing locations from around the world — companies can buy in to the platform and make it available to their employees in wellness spaces at work with provided headsets.. Place yourself in a calming, meditative natural space of your choice, from a huge library of options. 10 minute loops with a subtle seam so they can be experienced for 20m, 30m, 60m without too much repetition. 360º footage captured from real or enhanced locations, highest quality available. Impeccable audio as well. Pop on the headset, choose ‘Tundra’, or ‘Blue Lagoon’ or ‘Grand Canyon’ or ‘Monteverde’, and relax/meditate like you’re really sitting there.
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004
VR portraits.
A moment in time with someone engaging with the 360º camera. Like you were there with them. Smile, move, talk, sing, whatever. We do this with still images, we do this with video — now we can do this with 360º/VR capture. Is this how memories will be stored in the future?
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005
Baseball 3D trajectory mapping.
Explore the arcs, trajectories, stats (exit velo etc) of every pitch, hit, throw in a baseball game. Watch in 10x speed or highlight all trails from the full game (a 3D infographic representation of the game). Or, select all of Shohei’s home runs from the season and watch their trajectories back-to-back from any angle. Leave the trails visible, or just one at a time.
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006
Audio chill.
Take a seat in an audio visualization room. Play your music from your playlist. 360º trails and shapes and color shifts. The music is the baseline for an algorithm-driven 3D visualization, but you can change hues, lite/dark, saturation, number of (particles flying around)? Whatever other metrics the artists want to put in your hands. Gesture based controls. iTunes visualizer in 3D, with more variety and more control over the aesthetic.
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007
Super HD product explorer.
Instead of static 2d angles of those Nikes on pancaked Amazon — we can now show the shoe in fully rendered 3D in VR. VRcommerce will be huge. But the fidelity of the 3D model can be huge too. What if you could fly in (ant-man-mode?) to see incredibly detailed surface textures? Macro detail that you can’t even quite see with the naked eye? Processing power may not be there yet, but it’s coming. Not only can we simulate seeing the 3D product, grabbing it, turning/spinning it — but we can level up the details in ways that supersede real life.
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008
CooperstownVR.
Cooperstown is hard to get to way up there in upstate NY. The Baseball Hall of Fame — and other physical destination experiences — could create VR experiences that replicate and expand upon the real thing, for people who can’t get there in person. Museums have been trying to become more interactive for 20 years, and a jump to VR could make the experience 100x more engaging than even the real experience. Charge for a VR ticket to enter. Stroll the halls of the actual museum, engage with Ted Williams’ plaque to open up interactive stats, a huge video wall with his career highlight reel, tour Fenway park, stand next to a 6’4” living statue in 3D. And hiit the gift shop on your way out for vintage gear.
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009
Hood up.
Live experiences through VR — happening in real time/live. You don’t know where you’re going, or what you’ll see when the hood comes off. Could be Eyes Wide Shut NSFW, could be Cirque du Soleil from on-stage. Could be Sir Elton John performing 3 songs just for you in his living room. Could be a fireworks display from a drone up in the explosion zone. Eh, doesn’t have to be live, just unexpected and random. $10 for a 10 minute experience? I’d pay that if the content is guaranteed to be high quality and bizarre and interesting and unique.
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010
Tiger hunt.
While exploring Onitsuka Tiger’s VR world/site on the open VRweb, keep your eyes out for a very shy, very real looking (friendly) tiger who mostly stays out of sight, but occasionally wanders into more populated areas. Snap a photo, get something for sharing it. AI-controlled behavior, truly rare occurrences of the tiger making an appearance. An easter egg, essentially, tied to social sharing and real value within the VRcommerce environment. Could the tiger pop up on other worlds as well? Cross promotion, shared easter eggs.
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011
Light as logo.
In a native VR experience, from a native VR brand, the concept of a logo can be completely reimagined. Imagine a moving, dynamic, never-the-same display built of light, floating in 3D space, like it has physical form. A light sculpture, without the rules of IRL physics. Like a hologram, but with as much color/fidelity and nuance as the creator wants. There is no static version of this logo. There is no front or back. There is no vantage point from which it’s meant to be viewed. It’s so complex in its sequencing that it could never be confused with someone else’s VR brand identity. Inspo
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012
Mini game entry.
Who says everyone gets right in? Maybe you have to play and win a mini game before the front door opens. Want to get in to Mizuno’s pro-gear shop? Face off against a mid-90’s MPH fastball and put a ball into play if you want to explore the pro-level equipment. You wouldn’t be here shopping for this gear if you weren’t a serious ballplayer. Mom’s shopping for you, and she doesn’t hit fastballs? There’s always a way in for people looking to spend money, but gamifying the front door would be PR gold. Use sponsored MIzuno pitchers in the MLB and Japan for 3D vid cap. Pick a Mizuno bat for the challenge.
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013
Hidden passageways.
Like in a cool old house, except instead of taking you from the kitchen to the parlor, it could take you from the VR retail shop to the factory in Portugal. And it doesn’t need to be a physical door. You can spin a hang tag, or wave your hand through a candle’s flame. Anything can trigger a transport (teleport) to another place. Your 3D space doesn’t have to be contained, and it doesn’t have to follow the rules of physics.
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014
Superfan full access.
An all-season pass to live 3D cam feeds from every Red Sox home game at Fenway. Can bandwidth support a put-you-there experience in real time? The UI allows you to choose your vantage point, in real time, so I can swap from behind home plate to the top of the Monster, to Pesky’s Pole. Imagine watching a HR lift off from the dugout perspective, then jumping to the Green Monster cam to see it land a few rows away, in real time. Superfan for bands — buy access to 3D live cams on stage at every show in (pop star du jour’s) 2022 summer tour, all real time. Jump to a camera in the sound booth, and another backstage. Missed a show or a game? Full archives available. How much would superfans pay for something like this?
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015
Product transparency.
Show how your product is sourced, manufactured, shipped, used, re-used, and then recycled as part of the Circular Economy. Circular interface lets you choose any step on the product lifecycle to see how that thing you’re thinking of buying became that thing. This is about lifting the curtain, and having confidence that your company’s way of doing business, making things, shipping things, recycling things is worthy of exploration and praise. Layer in information about working conditions, sustainability of raw materials, shipping methods and associated carbon footprints. Each scene is a looped in-situ look at how things work, like you’re checking in personally on the assembly line. Layer in storytelling, infographics, hidden experiences.
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016
Concierge.
Green-screened 3D concierge to welcome people in to an otherwise virtual experience. The one photorealistic component in an otherwise digital space. They greet you, ask you what you’re looking for, then help you get there. Personalized content based on how well they know you, and how smart the AI can be. Choose the concierge character you like best and have them be the one to meet you the next time you return.
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017
Deep fake meetup.
Spend a few minutes with a celebrity deep fake in 3D. Pick a place, a celebrity, a conversation topic. Just hang out. Simple moments.
Globeprint. Enter where you’ve been around the globe by latitude/longitude, in the order you traveled there. Build a spherical/3D fingerprint of your world travels. Take it with you as a collectible item.
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018
Hidden footage.
Port in to a 3D clip captured during that awesome scene from that awesome movie. Like you were a mouse on set, out of the line of sight of the camera. The ultimate behind-the-scenes footage could actually be right in the middle-of-the-scene. Spin your angle to see crew and trucks and everything behind the camera. Spin back and it’s like you’re in the scene with Scarlet. Hide the 3D camera in plain sight in every scene of the film.
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019
IKEA everything.
Choose a roomscape, explore your way to any and every item on sale at IKEA. View in the context of their rooms, or in isolation without distraction. Explode it and put it back together with the wave of a hand. Watch the step-by-step build with full control over timeline/playback speed. Tap into your headset camera to remove the experience’s background and place the item into your space in an AR via VR context.
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020
Triolingo.
Language learning in 3D via video interactions between native speakers in real scenarios. Italians in the coffee shop — acted out around a central camera so you can observe and listen to their conversation like an audience of one, right on stage — control speed and playback, layer subtitles if helpful. Toggle ambient noise on and off. The VR version of a classic ‘dialog’ exercise, in full immersion. Scenes are also shot with the 3D camera standing in for each side of the exchange, so you can swap yourself in to either role at any moment — then pull back out to spectate again. Pick your Italian city, accent, interaction. Audio triggers — in Italian — allow you to ask your counterpart to speak more slowly, or please repeat what they just said — which loops in other clips and carries the exchange forward naturally.
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021
Fullview film.
Watch a film shot from a central point within each scene, static or moving, in the middle of the action. Perspective and directionality become much more fluid. Directional sound becomes key to indicating where you should look. Short film tests must have happened by now. Feature-length will be here soon. POV — fly on the wall, or first person even — where your central perspective as the viewer is also the perspective of the main character, who you embody throughout the film.
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022
Themepark preview.
Booked your tickets to Disneyland? You now have pre-access to the virtual park map and planning experience in VR. Up-to-date events, closures, schedules, heat maps for most traffic by time of day, anticipated attendance, food planning. Live-cam 3D vistas. Watch the fireworks in 3D from on top of the castle. Upsells on short lines. Take a virtual ride on the California Adventure Park roller coaster. Pre-purchase souvenirs for pickup when you arrive. Watch the history of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and link out to the movie franchise to watch or buy.
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023
MJ.
Super high fidelity/deep fake Michael Jordan — stand on the floor amidst rebuilt 3D scenes from his most legendary dunks, buzzer-beaters, championship moments. Everybody else is a silhouette, so we’re spotlighting Michael in every scene. Watch in real time, slow mo, super slow mo. Travel around the scene, go in close, back way out to the upper deck. This is like an EA Sports FIFA replay, but in 3D, with recreated historical footage that you can immerse yourself within. Real audio from those real moments. On the court, from the broadcast booth, both, or pure silence. A 3D highlight museum for the legend.
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024
Metacaching.
Geocaching in the metaverse. Hopefully the free and open metaverse, not the Meta™ Metaverse™. Secret caches or even hidden rooms or spaces on a metacache network. Great way to bring new customers to your world, if you’ve joined in on a meta-experience like metacaching. When you’re in the Uniqlo VR shop, if you’ve followed the clues, you know to throw a pair of virtual socks through a poster on the wall to open up a room and claim your find. What does a cache map look like when it has to span independent 3D/VR spaces in virtual space?
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025
Training ride alongs.
Military, forestry, construction, law enforcement, mining, transportation, logistics. Send a 3D camera along for real-world missions or outings or tasks. Record and document. Allow new recruits to plug in via VR and ride along on those experiences — or dozens of them — to start building familiarity with the environment, challenges, and the nuanced awareness required in those scenarios. Focus on when things go wrong, so when they see it for the first time in the field, they’re not seeing it for the first time.
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026
Valentine’s shrine room.
Build out a 3D space for your valentine, with giant photos on the walls, video panels, maps of places you’ve visited together, giant 3D high-definition flowers. Customize a baseline space to be meaningful and significant to your partner — invite just them in to see it. A 3D shrine to your relationship. Repurpose for any event or memory that’s of special importance. A relationship hall of memories with multiple rooms.
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027
Police 3D cam.
In addition to monodirectional body cams that can be easily turned off, put a 3D mount on top of police cars, or have them launch a drone when they engage, or have them wear a 3D cam on top of a helmet. Or all of those things. Much closer monitoring of police and suspect behaviors. Better documentation for prosecutors. No half-measures that can be easily obfuscated when cops behave badly. All of this bad behavior has been allowed to persist because they know nobody is watching and recording. Put multiple 3D cameras on record without officer involvement any time they engage, and their behavior will align with the knowledge that everything they do, and the entire environment, is being recorded in 3D.
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028
Tesla and chill.
Take a seat, choose your drive, push the ‘autopilot’ button in the UI or on the Tesla’s tablet display, and experience driving across the GG bridge in an automated car. Real footage from real drives. All non-Tesla drivers are curious about the experience of letting the car do the driving. VR lets Tesla share that experience. Choose your music tracks, play with the settings. Easter egg jump to a VR ridealong on a rocket launch to up-level your transportation experience.
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029
Cat cafe.
Drop a 360º camera into a swarm of cats in a cat room. Like, 30 cats. Pipe in via VR and soak it in. Perspective could be adjusted so you feel tiny (mouse-size) from a floor-level perspective. Controls within the experience let you trigger laser pointers, bird noises, video projections, catnip drops.
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030
Quetzal.
3D camera traps for research, or live feed. Set cameras up in the canopy, 360º perspectives at Quetzal-level heights and positions. Or all up and down the layers of the rainforest — lots and lots of animals to experience. Simple evolution to 360º from mono-directional, lets you track movement and interactions with a much richer omni-directional awareness. Set 8 cameras all around the entrance to the Cloud Forest Reserve in Monteverde, and the guides can have access to recent feeds in order to up their chances of a live encounter with their tours.
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031
War photography.
Strap a 360º camera to your helmet and hit record when Russia starts its invasion of the Ukraine. The richness of historical documentation through 360º live imagery will be amazing. Civil War tin-types > WWI sped-up footage > WWII onboard cameras in fighter planes > bombing runs in Vietnam > heat-maps and drone footage in Iraq/Afghanistan… all will continue to seem older and flatter and less immersive as new technologies go to war. We will all look back at the ‘boxed’ days of visual media and marvel that our window into other experiences was so small and flat.
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032
Trajectory ballistics.
A physics-based (like, nerdy astrophysics) game where you identify near-earth objects, determine if they’ll make impact, identify their composition, speed, arrival date, and vulnerabilities. Choose your munitions, choose your delivery method, set your timeline. Launch, control, refine, destroy… or be destroyed. This could be simple for 4th graders, or a super challenge for grad students with amplified complexity and real science. Point and shoot games are mindless, but having to calculate and plan for a space interception is pretty dope. Could be a graded scenario at university — get in the near-earth simulator and save the planet, or fail.
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033
Portland Bridges.
A virtual map of PDX and its bridges. Choose a bridge to isolate, go to CAD mode and explore its engineering, materials, how it was built — via animations and lego-like interactions, as if you were 200ft tall playing with the model version. Switch to real video and choose vantage points to check out — sit yourself at the highest point of the tallest bridge, where pedestrians could never go, and enjoy the 360º view. Expand or refocus this concept to the world’s iconic bridges. Engineering nerd out, plus unique access to viewpoints the public would never otherwise get to experience.
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034
Timelapse.
360º cameras and timelapse over a 3 year period from the middle of a greenhouse cultivating a bunch of lush tropical plants. Sit in the middle and hit play — and watch the forest grow around you at hyperspeed. Long term project, but it would result in some amazing content. Similar sequences could capture coastal water level rises over a decade, or reservoirs depleting… or new buildings going up, or new cities sprouting in the desert. Or on a shorter timescale, a street market on a Saturday, from sunrise and set up to the last stall closed. There is immense human energy in those types of scenes, and a 1-day timelapse could be really cool.
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035
Recruiting.
An edited VR video tour of the Intuit campus in Mountain View. Share with prospective employees, get them excited about the spaces, the people (returning back to work), the diversity, the energy. An easy advantage when competing for prospects. Make something cool that other companies haven’t made yet. Make it easy for prospects to check it out and see themselves inside your organization. Build connection between the prospect and the place they’ll be committing to before they’ve signed the contract. Hiring rates go up, especially for tech companies who put in this kind of tech-forward effort.
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036
Kaiju.
Game concept — pick a city, the decade, the weather, time of day, and the level of resistance put up by the local authorities with era-accurate defenses. Choose your Kaiju. VR perspective from 300ft in the air. Everything can be destroyed. A haptic suit would go a long way here. The buildings are accurate based on the decade you choose, and you can go way back (Godzilla takes ancient Rome). Set this in a warehouse with real space to walk around. Boxing workout Kaiju style.
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037
Remote learning.
iPads and Zoom are great and all, but VR and a 360º live camera in a classroom would be better. Instead of a tiny window into the classroom, we can remove all distractions and put the student in the front row. Picture-in-picture of the whiteboard, chat options with the teacher, voice options when allowed. Record instruction for video on demand after class time — available for the students who were able to attend in person.
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038
Image archives.
Gesture-controlled high-speed travel through Dropbox or iCloud archives in an immersive interface. Instead of digging through 2D archives on your devices or in browsers, plug in to a 3D space where you can use depth and rotation to quickly access and organize/re-organize your folders. Use tagging to group selects from multiple directories without moving the source asset. Lower-res previews for quick review and high-level visual reference, but this is about speed and immersiveness. Break the 2D restraints and move 10x faster through your archives. Add AI and location metadata to source imagery by geolocation, color theme, content (show me ‘beaches’).
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039
Boxing.
Import a CAD file, and design the packaging structure and construction that will be most effective in packing and protecting the item. Auto-contain in a box with minimal dimensions, measure volume, flag points requiring enhanced structural support. Stack in a palette and calculate weight, cost of materials to produce packaging. Could be a lead-gen for Ernest Packaging or other specialty packaging companies. Share enough information to pique interest, bring them in for a call to talk about specifics, and to fill in the gaps that were deliberately allowed to remain in the 3D experience. Share contact information before using the free tool (gated).
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040
Puzzle blocks.
3D chunks floating in space. Grab, rotate, join, build structural puzzles at any level of complexity. Architecture would be fun (leaning tower of Pisa, the Hoover Dam, the Ferry Building in SF, the palace at Versailles). Change your relative scale — from table-top toy to life-size structure. Everything starts as anywhere from 10–100 deconstructed chunks. Meditational, brain-teasing, challenging, rewarding.
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041
Magazine.
From pages to spaces — how could a magazine be reimagined as a 3D space or experience? Instead of a linear sequence of pages from 1 to 112, we can start with a lobby, and allow users to choose their path through the content within the virtual space. Each issue from a VR publication could share certain experiential details, styles, typography, interactions, but the content would be unique to the issue’s focus. Go room by room, or hall by hall… allow them to pick their own path, or guide them through an ideal track. Ads could be walking/talking characters within the space. Play videos, read text, all the old-world content experiences could exist, but the new stuff could be pretty amazing in native VR presentations.
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042
Floor plans 3D.
Not about the paint color or the finishes — pure structure. You’re interested in a property in (somewhere far away), and want to see more than the photo gallery and fixed-position 3D stills. 2D floor plans are so limited. You want to know how the rooms flow, how big they are, how thick the walls are, how high the ceilings are, how it looks from the street, how it looks from the back yard, where the property line turns a corner. An immersive 3D floor plan (full structure) of the house that you can walk through, scale up or down, view in context of the landscape and topography of the property. Fully accurate, but vector-based artwork. Check the path of the sun any time of year. Add a 5’7” person for relative scale. Add a 6’3” person and check if they have to duck through those doors. Measure the height of the railing in the loft. Identify crawl spaces and roof access. Tag a spot and ask a question for the listing agent. This is a virtual structural representation of the house. An interactive architect’s model.
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043
Pebble Beach.
Golf trip prep for that round you’ve always wanted to play at Pebble Beach (insert golf course here). Live 360º cams for drop-in at key spots throughout the course, fly-through tours of each hole in simulated environment with hyper-accurate locations of trees, surfaces, brush, rocks, sand and water. Weather forecasts for your upcoming reservation. Tips for approaches. Know before you go for golfers looking to mentally prep for their dream course before they arrive.
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044
Portal builder.
Create a virtual room with doors to your favorite non-app experiences in VR. Door #1 takes you to a Costa Rica live cam in Monteverde. Door #2 takes you to Nike’s 3D shop experience. Door #3 takes you to the Fenway Park virtual tour. A custom door/link-building experience, essentially pooling your favorite experiential bookmarks into one place, with portal doors exactly to where you go most often.
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045
Need a moment.
VR space making you woozy? Stuck in a virtual conference, and want a break without exiting the event? Look inward and take a zen moment of your design as an interruptive layer on top of whatever else you’re doing. You don’t leave your current app or experience, but your headset overlays a calming moment, like you’ve gone into your mind to visually escape your VR ride. You create the space, the sounds, the perspective. App layering needed for something like this, and tbd what your avatar does while your human brain actually goes somewhere else for a moment.
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046
Zenbuilder.
Build your perfect environment with a simple set of 3 categories, fully mix+match-able: place, sound(s), intangibles. Interesting combinations are sure to ensue, but the break from the expected could be really intriguing. Pick the surface of the moon, Costa Rica rainforest sounds, and rainbows. Press ‘go’ and that space is created for you to exist within. Try also: active volcano location, babbling brook audio, fireflies. Or top of the Sears tower, rolling thunder, beaming-light cracks in space-time. Build one of these spaces, or let it randomize, every time you enter. Save your favorites.
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047
Hardware indicator.
If I’m porting into a live 360º camera that sits in a conference room, or in a workplace — real humans near the hardware could/should know I’m there and can see them. LED indicator on a ring around the camera could show the direction I’m facing within that 3D viewer. We’ll need ways for humans to pick up cues from robots or rigs that are tied to other humans, remotely, via VR. Know if the person is looking at you, or the whiteboard, or if they’ve paused or left. Real life human-to-human indications are clear, and within a VR space, the avatar-to-avatar indications are also fairly clear. But human-to-VR-camera-input interactions are entirely new (video conferencing is the nearest model).
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048
Neurosimulator.
Experience neuro sensations replicated in VR. Partial blindness, intoxication, sleep deprivation, hearing impairment, ocular migraines, light sensitivity, cataracs, soft focus.
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049
Platebreaker.
Smash the hell out of plates, glasses, mirrors, ceramics, porcelain, computers, printers, and whatever other inanimate object you’d enjoy destroying. Hyper-realistic audio, physics tied to the actual object’s weight and strength and materials. Let it all out man. This is a safe place to lose your shit for a minute.
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050
Satellite simulator.
Follow the path of a satellite as it orbits the earth at realistic (super fast) speeds. The cosmos is accurate when you look behind you, and the light, weather and heights are all accurate below you looking towards Earth. Info layers a la Google Earth? Adjust your orbit to travel over Rome on the next pass. Could have some actual satellite simulators, or it could just be a nice ride with nice views that are accurate to the Earth in the moment you’re ported in.
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051
VRtual assistant.
Summon your assistant (avatar) on top of whatever else you’re doing in any app or experience — relay your needs by voice, have a real conversation if the AI can support it. Connect to your texts, whatsapp, email, Slack, all the ways you communicate outside of VR — they’re all there for you with help from your VRtual assistant.
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052
Opponent intel.
Right now JD Martinez looks at footage on an ipad when he wants to see what the next pitcher’s stuff looks like. Level that up with a VR headset that puts him in the batter’s box and simulated (or live footage) of the next pitcher’s stuff. Release point, hand shape for each pitch, velocity.
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053
Upside downland.
Feeling like right side up is all wrong? This overlay tool flips any app or experience you’re in upside down. Your headset height and perspective stays the same, but your body is inverted above it. All other interactions remain. A mirror trick applicable anywhere.
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054
Plugins.
Allow for additive or change-ative filters or adjustments to other apps or experiences. This could be a fundamental technology layer that allows for extensive customization and open-source-ish vibes. Browsers let you switch to dark mode — or to increase font size, or block images from downloading. VR can have equivalent layers of modification over existing experiences and the design and spatial decisions made by the original creators.
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055
Accessibility.
What does accessibility look like in VR? Can I slow down motion? Make fonts larger? Add subtitles? Can I adjust color contrast, turn up the volume, add cues for things out of my viewing range to indicate that there are things in the periphery that I need to see? Can I narrow the whole viewport to be more central? Can I remove excess features or graphics? Can I go to polygons and strip our heavy texture elements that slow down my experience? Can I ask for help when I’m confused?
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056
23andme.
There should be a map overlay experience tied to your genetic test results. Where your people come from, how those people moved through space over time. Where they might have crossed paths. Migratory trails of indigenous groups from our distant past, tied to a long range timeline. Historical links and references.
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057
Samurai.
Stand in against legendary Samurai in real historical armor. Experience what a skilled swordsman’s attack is like, based on real technique and real speed. Switch to a Roman soldier, a Mongolian warrior, an English knight. Die every time.
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058
Trebuchet.
Real physics, real controls over a medieval Trebuchet. Precise realism in accuracy. Choose your projectile, choose your location on Google Maps. See what damage you can do.
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059
Mt Bachelor.
Full 3D model, down to the trees, of every square meter of Mt Bachelor’s trails and back country. Experience the slopes before your trip. Choose the routes you want to focus on. Check in on live cameras. Fly over or stay at snow-level. Ride the lifts (choose your speed), and see what the drop looks like up on the cliffs at summit.
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060
Landscape design.
Stand in front of high-definition 3D models of the plants, trees, grasses, shrubs that you’re considering adding to your garden. See how they look at 1yr, 5yrs, 20yrs. Walk around them, put them beside each other. Check their color in different lights, water requirements, hardiness in different clients. Build them into a 3D recreation of your garden space to try before you plant.
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061
AI planets.
Let AI build a planet’s surface based on a set of variables. Terrain, color, flora and fauna, sounds, wind, water, gravity, sky. Pull up a lawn chair and relax.
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062
NYC roofing.
Drop in to a 3D model of NYC. All rooftops of all buildings are flat platforms. Pick your destination rooftop, hit the jump control, and go for a ride. Every jump is perfect, with no risk of falling. The city below you is accurate. Flea-jumping, flight, sightseeing. Switch to SF, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul.
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063
Fruits & vegz.
Multi-angle live footage of professional chefs properly cutting and preparing fruits and vegetables (and meats and seafood and so on). Via VR, you can watch from different angles, zoom in, slow-down, freeze-frame. Hundreds of fruits, hundreds of veggies. Audio play-by-play by the chef. Learn the proper 5-slice technique for a pomegranate. Mangos are tricky too. Peeling asparagus and snapping the stalks.
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064
Advanced avatar.
Who says your presence in a shared VR space has to be represented as a cartoon human with no feet and floating hands? You could be a blue mist. A spinning prism. A starfish in a fishbowl. A poem. A pebble. A pancake.
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065
Viewing dome.
Instead of smashing the viewport to your face, build a dome with an open base, suspended in the air, with screens on the inside surface at 18–24” from your face which pops up into the center. Like a gunner’s turret on an B-52. You turn within the dome to see what’s behind you. Optics are totally different, but could replicate immersion. Without a box on your face, you could be on video as yourself, in 3D, at least your head… and be more of a real person in virtual spaces.
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066
Northern lights.
Track, predict, view live feeds and check the view from satellites of current or recent Northern Lights activity. Explore color and movement patterns, learn how they form, monitor solar flare activity.
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067
Hall of fame arcade.
Play all of your classic arcade favorites on a giant screen with original graphics and sound. Larger than life Pacman, played with arm and hand gestures instead of joystick controls. Duck Hunt. Kung Fu. Pong. Get right up close to those 8bit graphics.
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068
Audio input.
Keyboard text inputs in VR is a great example of new tech (VR immersion) trying to replicate old tech (keyboards for your fingertips). Let’s go all in on audio inputs for searching, selection, commands and requests. Verbal communication is so much simpler for the user than laser-pointer keyboard entry. There’s no reason for the keyboard to hang around, even if there’s a spell-it-out situation (also something you can do orally).
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069
Disrupters.
Throw a smoke bomb in any experience, any time. Turn off the lights, or convert all objects into wire frame fractals. Put on night vision goggles. Rick Roll. Graffiti, antics, lite mayhem (there have to be some rules). Like hacking around with Inspect tools in Chrome, but you can apply your hacks to other participants’ experiences as well. What are the opportunities for layering on top of the details and rules of someone else’s experience?
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070
Find my.
Pop on the headset, walk around your home in find-my mode. Layered over the low res video of your actual space, we see distance and direction to your most important and occasionally lost things. Keys, the remote, your phone, wallet, watch. Tag your most important objects, use the headset in AR mode to find your anything.
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071
Super viewroom.
College football, EPL final weekend, MLB, the Olympics. A single lounge experience with 10 or more screens running live feeds from all games in any competition in real time. Red Sox v Yankees next to Marlins v Dodgers next to Reds v Twins. Whichever screen you’re focused on, that’s the audio you hear. Spin around to see the Mariners v Angels behind you, next to the Astros v Cardinals. Key plays have graphic indicators so you’ll see the frame flash blue out of the corner of your eye when a run is scored. Flicker white when someone goes deep. Pull up the competition-wide macro (meta) scoreboard with running feed of highlights and stats from all games.
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072
F1 spectator.
Pick your turn, jump in to a 360º cam on the course for real-time race action. Cameras could sit right out on the course with amazing vantage points. Map overlay of the course in VR lets you jump between cameras as the action flies by. Jump from turn 9 to one of several drones cruising overhead. PiP of commentators with running audio. Newsflash any time something big happens elsewhere on the course — jump over and watch the highlight from multiple angles, including the regular flat TV broadcast.
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073
Cross platform multipass.
Is there an overarching pass that provides virtual entry into multiple walled platforms? A pass from a governing body, maybe with a price tag, that allows easy cross-VR-platform jumping without hardware shifts or login/re-login hassles. How walled will these gardens be, and how much would people spend to smooth out the bumps of experiencing VR across different platforms?
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074
Paris metro.
Explore maps with actual tunnel depth and size and locations, route trips, explore the interiors of famous stations, review schedules and find street entrances. All of the put-you-there-first experiences you need before your visit to Paris (or NYC, or Tokyo). Build it once, license it to major metropolitan municipalities for versioning.
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075
Funhouse.
Tripped-out mirrors, flipped orientation, impossible spatial shifts. What tricks can we play on our perception of spaces within a funhouse type of experience? Portals, rifts in space time, scale, triggered fear or joy or disorientation. Pull a lever, the walls drop out and you’re in deep space. Flip another switch and up becomes down, or you can control which way gravity is pulling from.
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076
Walls and objects.
Space with stuff in it. Could be any space, with any stuff. Physics rules are set. Blank canvas for group get togethers and events, like an empty warehouse. Instead of prebuilding 3–4 group experiences or games, just set a blank canvas for actual human interaction and the types of encounters a group would have IRL.
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077
Jump me.
A series of (hundreds/thousands of) spots around the world with a 360 cam running live, or pre-shot with something amazing. Push the big green button, jump somewhere new. No choosing, no algorithm, no shared experience. Totally random, never, or hardly ever, the same place twice. Audio tour or read-along info for each spot when you get there. Or it could be a music track or ambient sound — each experience is designed by a different creator who’s been to that place.
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078
Contacts.
A large immersive browser of your contacts (or prospects, or whatever group of people you want to group in a group). Pics, videos, notes on interactions, jump links to their LinkedIn and social feeds. Current and past locations, phone/email/WhatsApp etc. Insights, memories, birthday, last restaurant you went to with the families. A memory bank for the people in your spheres. Rearrange panels and tag what’s important. Customize for each person.
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079
Mind map.
Connect anything to anything in 3D space. Build your constellation of ideas and the connections between them, with dimension and scale that you can float through. Design themes for all aesthetic tastes, or dynamic visual themes that are never the same twice. Integrate with Spotify or Binaural for your soundtrack.
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080
Screencap.
A utility overlay available in any experience. Independent of your platform or where/how you’re engaging with VR. Set up your screencap destination drive and capture video, stills, anything/everything from your POV within a VR experience, and send to [wherever] for easy media access later.
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081
Blobs.
A Zen experience with floating blobs of liquid light — like droplets of water in the space station. But huge (or tiny — scale has no reference point here). Merge them together with gesture controls, adjust gravity/weightlessness. Add more, clear back to none, build a floating collection of amorphous blobs that react to one another based on the physics you put in place. You are not an avatar in this space, just the bodiless conductor of your visual symphony.
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082
PiP.
Bring your TV/streaming service along on your VR experiences with a picture-in-picture floating 2D viewer. Layered over whatever it is you’re otherwise doing. Two experiential sources in one headset.
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083
Piano.
AR layer through the headset with exterior cameras on, showing that DIY how-to-play overlay you find on YouTube with Guitar Hero style graphics. On your phone or tablet you have to lift your hands from the keyboard to pause and rewind when you’re learning a song, which breaks the flow. In VR you can use voice or head gestures (tilt your head left to rewind) to scrub the timeline and repeat that tricky part. Set the position of the overlay away from the keys, or just above them. Level up to AI — which recognizes your keyboard like a barcode and highlight the keys as they’re meant to be played in real-time.
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084
Medium.
Oversized clean and minimalist viewer and reading experience for Medium content. Like you’re reading on a giant edgeless movie screen. Choose dark or light mode, turn on a voiceover reader in whatever voice/accent you like best, or choose the audio track provided by the author. Line up articles in the order you’d like to read them. Rearrange, put side by side, cross reference in your infinite viewing environment. Open links from posts in panels off to the side without losing your focus on the main article.
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085
History.
3D recreation of the rapid passing of time in a historically interesting place. Stand in the Roman Forum and hit go — watch in 3D, walk around or stay put, as the scene evolves over 2,000 years from the height of the Roman empire to modern Roma. Historical accuracy is key. Control the speed of the ‘timelapse’. Try NYC from 1785 to to 1985. The great pyramids of Giza from 2,500 BC to 1,000 AD. Broad strokes architectural and civil evolutions would be fascinating to see and control from within the space.
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086
Remote photography.
Use lo-fi VR connection to control a fully HD high-res DSLR with an amazing lens to take still images that are then sent in full-res to your computer or dropped in a directory somewhere. A VR control layer that lets you take actual photos from places you might never be able to reach and photograph on your own.
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087
Forest merger.
Each geographic region and zone/sub-zone have unique forests — the types of trees, plants, vines, flowers — but these unique forestscapes never mix. Through VR, we could ‘build’ a forestscape that merges the canopy of Panama’s jungle with old-growth oak trees from Canada and Cork trees from Portugal. Computing power might be the hold up here, but the aesthetics could be amazing.
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088
Trainsurf.
Pick your country, your route, your time of day. Tap in to a 360º roof cam and enjoy the ride in real time, or load up a recorded trip and scrub the timeline, or play back at 2x/10x/whateverx. Sights, sounds (actual audio or layered ambient sound), movement, but always smooth.
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089
Storm anatomy.
Look down on 3D models of tornados, hurricanes, monsoons from a Zeus-like perspective. Real wind and humidity and precipitation data is in action. Watch in real time (would seem slow from so high up), or control playback. Could be data from real storms, or simulated storm data. Maybe you control the parameters and see what happens (storm design). Add or remove layers of information and visibility (just moisture, or just wind direction, or realistic detail as if viewing from low orbit). A giant storm could be the size of your coffee table, in front of you within VR. Walk around it, lean into it, scale up or down.
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090
Robowars.
VR control of an analog robot within an actual arena. Use cameras on the actual bot to find your way around, but we layer in competitor locations and other technical info to help you navigate the battle (or obstacle course, or whatever — but battles are fun). Could be destructive, or it could be laser-tag style hit or get hit competitions, where the bot survives intact to be used by you or the next VR pilot in the next round of competition.
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091
All things.
A visual catalog of everything. Any object that exists or has ever existed — if someone makes a 3D model of it, it goes in and can be explored — spun, flipped, scaled up or down, if it has moving parts, you can move them. Wikipedia style community oversight of what’s included. All open source. Download the ‘wheelbarrow’ model. Or the ‘Airbus’ model. The ‘space needle’ model. The ‘tardigrade’ model. Scale is irrelevant. Are you building a VR experience and need a quick model of a ‘Honda Insight’? Grab it and go. Or do you want to show your kids what a ‘rotary phone’ looked like, and how it moved? Pull it up and let them explore it with their own (VR) hands.
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092
Echolocation.
What is it actually like to ‘see like a bat’? VR offers a very simple way to visualize — as best we can as fully sighted humans — what a bat’s echolocation ‘looks’ like.
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093
Illustrator.
Or Figma or Autodesk or whatever’s next, and then next again after that. We will design vectors (2D and 3D) from within a VR experience — not talking about designing VR spaces here, just designing anything/everything that graphic designers design. Gesture-based everything, collapsable menus, get right up into your work in VR. Even if it’s just a pancaked Adobe Illustrator, there will be a VR environment — maybe soon — that lets us do everything we do now on a flat 15” monitor, but in an endless and endlessly flexible 3D space.
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094
Archeological archives.
Interactive 3D maps for archeologists and students. Macchu Picchu, Giza, Tikal, Rome. Known structures and pathways and tunnels. Much of that data exists in 3D already — bring it together in one place for exploration, spin/zoom, speculation on what else might be there, still unfound. Simple/low-fi for the broad strokes only. Basic but accurate models.
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095
Product customization.
3D design tool for product customization. Custom kicks, backpacks, apparel — load up your artwork or choose your colors/textures/materials based on surfaces and panels that are open to customization. Test it out in 3D mockups after you build it. Add to cart and transact.
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096
Currency.
The art of the bill. A 2D/3D exploration of current and past currency designs from around the world. Explore the flat designs, then check out the elements in 3D. Architectural models from the back of US banknote designs, bridges and archways from the Euro, tropical animals from Costa Rican Colones. 2D portraits of historical figures become 3D busts. Exploding layers in 3D of all typography and graphic elements. A 3D artists’ delight to take our richest flat designs and bring them to life in interactive 3D.
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097
Medication tracker.
The VR version of your grandma’s pill case. Each day of the week is presented visually and with reference points to which bottle contains which pills. Managed by your doctor using a CMS, you’d have a day by day guide, visually presented, with accurate quantities, pill sizes, colors, and informational layers for when to take them, with/without food, refill reminders, explanation of potential side effects. Use it every day, or check on it only when you need a reminder.
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098
Dark room.
Converted closet, or small room, built out for darkness to facilitate a more immersive VR experience. Cozy chair, cozy temperature, go all in.
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099
Alt triggers.
Remote buttons/triggers from the handsets that can be placed on real items — a steering wheel for driving experiences, golf clubs, kitchen utensils, whatever physical objects are otherwise replicated on the universal hand controllers — take the triggers/buttons off and allow them to be used and reused in different ways on other physical objects.
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100
VR futurism forum.
A hall of knowledge, accessible only by VR, for futurists and technologists and sociologists and thinkers who want to continue pushing the platform forward. Independent of corporate interests, a place to connect, share, document and archive ideas for what VR can mean in the near and distant future. You have to dream it (and share it) before the technology can move forward in the right direction/s. A revolving door of contributors from a wide set of backgrounds, with all concepts logged and attributed. A VR-only magazine each quarter shares the ideas from the forum that will drive evolution and imagination for the future in VR.
