Ready or not, the future is virtually here
I’ve always been interested in dystopian visions of our future, bleak fantasies where our fears of today manifest in strange and scary worlds.
Dystopias mirror and accelerate our fears in society today; they also make for great art, in particular in the realm of science fiction. Authors and directors imagine our future grapples with socio-economic meltdown, environmental disaster and technology. It’s bleak but pure entertainment.
I can plot the pessimism back to a love of films like Alien, Blade Runner and Terminator. In my formative years I’d watch these films on VHS with my mates. While they lauded the action, I questioned the motivations of the behemoths pulling the strings. These seminal films share common themes: sinister corporations play god by unleashing frightening technologies.
The classics of the seventies and eighties were borne out a world in which America was flexing it’s muscles as the dominant world power, locked in an arms race with the Soviet Union.
In some respects the future imagined then is happening now and, maybe in some cases, has been and gone or never even arrived. Just think how Back to the Future Day captured our imaginations as we caught up with October 21st 2015.
Very recently in the news, Mark Zuckerberg declared the ambition to build an AI butler, real shades of Blade Runner’s genius scientist/entrepreneur, Eldon Tyrell.
Space X/Tesla boss Elon Musk recently warned of the potential perils of AI arms development, akin to the Skynet system in The Terminator that brought about nuclear apocalypse.
While we hope that Zuck won’t be eye-gouged to death by his robot butler any time soon, the achievements of both he and Musk are remarkable. It is today’s technology leaders who are creating the real Megacorps who are ‘building better worlds’, as voiced in the company motto of the Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien films.
The gap between imagined future and reality recedes, especially as technology products and services knit deeper into the fabric of our lives. It feels that we are getting closer to living the dystopias that these great filmmakers and artists imagine.
This is especially true with VR (Virtual Reality).
2016 will be seen as the year in which VR finally arrives. This year’s CES show in Las Vegas heralds the arrival of Facebook’s Oculus and Sony’s Playstation VR amongst others.
Of course, VR has been around for ages but now is the time for the titans of tech to converge and unleash it — in Vegas of all places: a place where we while away our time (and cash) in the company of machines and forget our worries.
There has been VR-led science fiction for years, especially in the movies. Films such as The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix explored the pleasures and pratfalls of detaching from the world by plugging into alternate realities; virtual worlds designed by overlords with intentions to manipulate and control.
One of the most striking visions of a world where VR is omnipresent is Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One (2011). On the one hand, a wistful and nostalgic tome, jam-packed with obscure 80’s pop culture references; on the other, a bloody scary glimpse into the very near future.
Our hero Wade Watts lives in a really shitty future. By plugging into a matrix-style virtual reality called OASIS, he embarks on a quest to solve a myriad of puzzles left behind by its deceased and benevolent creator: a man who grew up gorging himself on Atari video games and John Hughes movies.
Wade’s quest sees him being harangued by a sinister corporation who want to claim the prize of control and ownership of the OASIS and so monetize its citizens.
The population are addicted to the OASIS, the ultimate habit-forming product in which players constantly strive to level up, gain XP and be rewarded with better avatars, weapons and powers.
It’s a model pioneered by companies such as Facebook and a system many tech start-ups look to emulate today, as has been explained with real clarity in Nir Eyal’s seminal product strategy book, ‘Hooked’ .
Much like social media and gaming, the OASIS VR world can become a place of escape. It’s the tension between Wade’s grim existence outside the virtual world and the seemingly infinite possibilities within where the book creates some stark visions and prophecies that are already starting to come into play.
To maximise enjoyment from the OASIS all the senses are heightened; it’s not enough to simply take part via a headset. Those with enough earned currency can buy special rigs and skin-suits, to heighten the experience. Players can purchase ‘smell towers’ for full sensory immersion.
In order to maximise the effect of the haptic sensors, players shave off their body hair. They then become overweight and unattractive, but it doesn’t matter because their in-game avatars are a more palatable vision of themselves. Their private selves are masked by a cloak of anonymity.
The problem with VR is that as a concept it is remarkably easy to understand, However, until now technology has only just properly caught up in order to execute to a decent level. The first wave of VR included very noble but ultimately flawed efforts from Sega and Virtuality. Graphics were anything but ‘reality’; pricing was prohibitively real. Virtuality’s full kit clocked in at $70k plus.
During a recent visit to Mohawk’s neighbours at Inition we were given a tour of some of the latest consumer VR tech, much of which is being launched proper to the world at CES.
I’ve been fortunate enough to try Oculus, Gear VR, HTC Vive and Google Cardboard through my work at Mohawk where we’ve been exploring VR and AR (augmented reality) for our clients across a wide berth of sectors from financial services to global newsbrands for some time.
By far the most memorable VR experiences for me are those that engage and fire the senses beyond simple vision.
The Skydiving demo at Inition is a good example of an immersive VR experience. The unit uses fans and vibrating pads to heighten the sensation of free-falling. Yep, you look like a berk but there’s enough suitable distraction for you not to care.
When I jokingly asked Inition producer, Dan Munslow, about missing the experience of smelling aircraft fuel, he explained a recent case study for a Gin company.
They had transported the user into a VR distillery and simply wafted a shot of the good stuff under their snout. It was an effective and low-tech approach that made everything feel that little bit more real.
Other insights into understanding how to harness further our sense of smell had been developed by Dan and his team partnering with non-tech companies who help the blind to recognise dangerous smells, such as gas leaks through ‘smell tuition’.
Unfortunately for me the overwhelming feeling I get from VR is often nausea. This is a common bugbear and one that in time will hopefully be overcome. The basic Oculus dev kit roller coaster demo at the wonderful Centre for Computing History in Cambridge had me reaching for the sick bag - but my five-year-old son loved it!
VR sickness is the whopping great elephant in the room. BBC reporter Zoe Kleinmann was hit hard during a demo at CES. The game producer, understandably crestfallen was quick to cite hardware settings rather than acknowledge the root of the issue.
Head honchos of VR firms recognise the problem but the consumer hardware is near launch, it feels to me like it’s being swept under the carpet somewhat. For a large proportion of a potentially massive global audience, the first iteration of VR is likely to be a non-starter.
Perhaps we’ll see a grey market open up in super strength anti-sickness pills. Who knows what people will ingest for extended VR sessions? Pills for nausea, fatigue, headaches and even recreational drugs for extended ‘Chem-VR’ sessions, but that’s another dystopia.
My experiences have been generally mixed. The best VR I’ve tried is the HTC/Valve Aperture demo which was pretty mind-blowing and really shows the potential of the medium.
What was different was that a dedicated room was rigged up with motion tracking cameras and hand-held peripherals for this ‘experience’ which allows you to roam and play concurrently.
The quality of the HTC display was of a high resolution that I’d not experienced with other headsets. This clarity and the spatial awareness allowed me to actually walk around within the confines of a virtual robot workshop, negating any feelings of sickness that occur with visually-induced perceptions of self-motion, such as sitting static in a moving rollercoaster.
Great fun, but the trouble with this set-up is that not everyone has the space within their homes to set-up a VR room and to ‘feely wander’ around safely and aimlessly without knocking the carriage clock off the fireplace!
Some clever ways of tackling this have you effectively walking around in a circle, but through the visor you would seem to be moving in a straight line. A concern about offering VR brand experiences at events is the potential that someone could end up breaking an ankle or worse.
Josh Taylor argues that the lack of physical space in our home and the desire to enhance the experience through accessories and peripherals (rigs, smell towers, skinsuits, environmental controls) will mean that VR will bring back the amusement arcade, dedicated spaces where people can experience VR with the best possible kit.
Ready Player One vividly imagines the future of VR beyond simply the headset, as Wade increasingly ‘gears-up’ throughout his quest for the marginal gains, even at the expense of his own health and wellbeing. Wade deteriorates through sleep deprivation, lack of real exercise and proper nutrition.
Steven Spielberg, who is adapting Ready Player One for the screen, cautions that the future Cline imagines is nearer than we think.
“[Ready Player One is] a crystal ball into exactly what is going to be happening not in 30 or 40 years but in between 5 and 10 years from now, where a virtual world becomes almost like a drug of choice and where we are spending more time in a nonorganic space than we are breathing and eating and interacting in real life.” Steven Spielberg
At $599 you will shortly be able to experience this for yourself, for better or worse, as Facebook’s Oculus launch their Rift headset. The hardware yield on your PC plus all of the added peripherals means your home VR experience is going to whack you hard in the pocket; this could be a nightmarish prospect for your finances.
Google of course would like to prove to you that you can achieve the same experience for a fraction of the cost with Google cardboard, but cardboard is VR-lite and leaves you actually reaching for more immersion and sensation.
What’s really exciting about the future of VR is how increasingly it is becoming an important platform for storytelling with great content across low and high-end devices.
Beyond gaming, there’s a thriving movement in the realm of ‘immersive journalism’. Newsbrands such as The Guardian, and The New York Times following the lead of Nony de la Pena, who has pioneered in a space that affords the opportunity to think and feel what it might be like to be locked in solitary confinement or be a war child in Syria.
For something less grounded in reality we can head to the stars with The Martian VR Experience on Oculus. Players can virtually inhabit the stranded astronaut that Matt Damon plays in Ridley Scott’s 2015 sci-fi epic, The Martian, in a bid to escape the world before his life support system expires.
Scott plays executive producer on The Martian VR. The man who imagined the worlds of Alien and Blade Runner thirty five odd years ago is now playing with new tools to entertain us, exposing our everyday fears and desires.
Not much has changed really has it?
Mark Doyle is Strategy & Innovation Partner at the creative agency Mohawk.
