A Quick History of Virtual Worlds
Two weeks ago i got the GreyHound from LA up to San Jose to attend the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo. It was a technical and full-on introduction to the world of VR, with Oculus, Sony, WeVR, Leap Motion, AltVR, Samsung Gear, Dreamworks and many others showcasing the latest headsets, motion tracking software, immersive experiences and social applications.
Why was project pen — a creative content book publisher — interested in this space? Because Virtual Reality is a new storytelling medium that could, potentially, shape creative content, communication and memory for several generations to come.
We wanted to explore a new technology, examine market barriers and opportunities, learn about technical standards and means of production, and get a sense of how Virtual Reality would evolve and emerge in the consumer market.
With that in mind, we invested in the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2. The experience is unlike nothing else — there’s a tantalizing hint of greatness, of a one-day-soon-to-come revolutionary artistic experience, in some of the demo’s freely available on the Oculus Rift Store.
So why should book publishers, writers, illustrators, historians and English Lit students be interested in VR?
The short answer is this: writers, storytellers and dreamers pondered what is real, and what is virtual, before the first microchip, the first moving image, or the first snow-cone.
The question of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ is at the center of art. Maybe the center of knowledge.
Let’s consider a short history of VR, right here, for the sake of argument.
Plato, the Allegory of the Cave, 380 BC.
In the allegory of the cave, Plato compared our perception of reality to shadows projected on a wall. Prisoners in the cave, the shadows are the closest approximation to reality we ever have. The light outside the cave is real, but few get to see it — and they can’t return with it successfully.
Descartes, Dreaming Doubt, 1647
Descartes distrusted the way the mind interprets reality; asking how can we know that a candle and a pool of candle wax are really the same thing, when the objects are so different, and changeable?
Fiction, Thomas More, Utopia, 1516
Thomas More imagined what a perfect world would look like; his ‘Utopia’ was imagined on the basis of an imperfect England at the time. The creation of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ always seem to take reality as a starting point.
Architecture, The Duomo, Milano, 1510
Cathedrals, temples and synagogues are a threshold between the real and the divine; portals, spire’s and sanctuaries reflect this in the architecture.
Art, The Persistence of Memory 1931
How will time work and geography work, in virtual worlds? Will there be jurisdictional and legal barriers, depending on what territory of the world you’re in?
TV, StarTrek, The HoloDeck 1974
Virtual Reality systems are the final iteration of the human ability to dream; to imagine far-off worlds and build them in the here and now. To walk into the Duomo or Machu Picchu is, in a way, to walk into an imagined space, a threshold between places — the temporal and the eternal.
Our lives are shaped by things we can’t see; fear, love, relationships, religion, ideology. The aim of art, of fiction, and of film has always been to replicate imaginary and inner-worlds, to transport viewers into other spaces; to probe and explore consciousness by exploring behind the veil of the ‘now’. As far as Pysche is concerned, the “reality” around us as human beings, has only ever been half the equation.
Which is why we all love stories.
For the past six-hundred years in the western world, the greatest virtual reality devices have been books and art — with film and gaming as much more recent technologies. Writers and artists have been at the fore-front of communing with the unconscious and the unreal.
Today, a new language has emerged that requires an ability to code for computers. Developers who can create the most realistic experiences — like Renaissance painters who mastered light and shadow — will have an edge in VR. Practical skills, will need to be combined with artistic ability.
So the tools have changed. The essential human need hasn’t.
There are dozens of potentially market changing applications for VR. But don’t forget where it all started; in a very old fashioned instinct, to build and experience cathedrals in the sky. The future of VR is so promising, because it promises to tap into that human need in a magical new way.
Some books, are about much more than publishing. The future of VR, will be about much more than entertainment.
John is the founder of project pen currently based in LA. Add him on Linkedin here and twitter here.
