Dreaming in Pixels
The Promise of Mobile Virtual Reality in Developing Countries
My father, a dual major mathematics and physics materials engineer, had an early TRS-80, one of the first really mobile laptops. I wasn’t allowed to play with it much until I promised him that I would code my own videogame. I tried gamely for some time (read: years) to make something happen. Coding in BASIC, I eventually succeeded in creating what we would now call an in-game cut-scene consisting of a few ascii characters fashioned to look like a space ship scrolling across the screen, traveling to a distant planet. The pure excitement and the vivid sci-fi photorealistic dreams that I experienced because of this achievement cannot be overstated and I will forever blame my dad for my obsession with all forms of mobile technology.
Growing up in Zimbabwe in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, surprisingly, I rarely felt out of the loop of global technology trends. This was mostly due to my father’s techy obsessions which he imported with a regularity, and also the presence of a computer lab at my high school where myself and an unlikely band of school-boy futurists founded an internet club with a 14.4kbps dialup modem shared between the 8 monochrome screened workstations. This was unusual and unprecedented as the “tech” scene in Zimbabwe was largely non-existent and if not for a forward thinking headmaster who foresaw the incoming technological boom, I would not have had such exposure. At Internet Club we witnessed the birth of mp3s, online credit card spoofing, the first pixelated gifs on CompuServe and Vocaltec’s first voice over IP implementation. Through an unusually privileged place for someone growing up in a developing country, I was afforded the ability to dream big things about the future. Yet even then as a wide-eyed youth with an even wider imagination, it did not occur to me that just two decades later we would be witnessing the birth of a new world. Hyperbole perhaps, but once you fully grasp the changes that will come with the maturation of VR and AR applications, you never go back.
I pull the headset over my head, it’s a plastic box with a Samsung Galaxy S6 plugged into it. So far, it’s all just blurry video and pixels. I try adjusting my perspective a bit. If this is Virtual Reality, then so far it’s definitely underwhelming and perhaps slightly embarrassing. As I turn around my perspective shifts smoothly and naturally and I can see behind me completely, I look up and down. And then I begin to feel it, the magic of presence.
Since that first VR experience I have spent hundreds of hours in virtual worlds creating as a digital producer, using the Valve’s Vive and Facebook’s Oculus rift which are much more refined experiences, but I can never forget that first time when I removed that Samsung Gear VR headset and as I adjusted back to reality reality, a small ‘wow’ escaped my lips. I had seen the future and it began with a mobile phone strapped to my head.
As a self-described technologist and hacker I’m often on the front end of the technology curve, an early adopter of most gadget driven technology. Just as the internet ushered in the age of free movement and access to information, I believe that VR will eventually usher in an age of free movement and access to presence, situation, and instruction—the impact of which cannot be overstated. It’s simple to see once you grasp the potential of what can happen when you unleash a shared place to think, interact and simply be without language barrier, without a literacy barrier, but with the added visual fidelity and movement cues to feel as if you are actually translocated into an alternate space, reconstructed or completely reimagined.
It’s one thing for us in the privileged west to turn our noses up at the relatively low-fi low resolution mobile headsets such as cardboard, but that experience handed to a child who has so far been unable to look beyond fetching a pail of water for the family’s sustenance for the day might just be life changing. Little things that seem so normal to us living in the west can be revelatory to someone who can never experience them. Envision that little child feeling the head rush of an American roller coaster, being able to look around a busy Leicester Square and hear all the different languages, or stand at the base of the Burj Khalifa and accurately sense its immense scale. Imagine the impact on that child’s sense of the world, their curiosity and their own existence. It’s not too much of a stretch, even though much of first generation VR experiences are sub-par, to see that one needs not be able to read to get the pure visceral thrill of riding a rollercoaster and one doesn’t need to speak English, Spanish, or Hindi to experience the immenseness of some of our biggest man made and natural structures. Regardless of which social class you are stationed and your literacy level, VR capable smart phones will proliferate through the globe and there will be a huge impact.
The internet for all of its egalitarianism has by and large been for the literate and languaged. VR turns that on its head by providing what can be a purely experiential interface and an entrance into what can surface the reality of a two-way movement of thoughts, ideas and yes, the ultimate VR buzz word, empathy. Anyone who has read or watched anything about VR by the pundits has heard the empathy argument about how presence engenders empathy for a subject in a way not seen with legacy media. Some of the previously geo-locked experiences and visuals at the core of our ideation and thought creation can be shared and opened up between worlds allowing everyone an opportunity to contribute and add to the conversation with a better sense of empathy and understanding.
VR has its fair share of skeptics and rightfully so, many of us have seen the promise and been victims of oversold technology (3d, haptic touch and of course VR itself), but I truly believe that the convergence of accessible digital technologies, connectivity and global manufacturing capabilities at this specific time has created the perfect storm needed to usher in a global paradigm shift. 16K display technology, widely regarded as the pixel indistinguishable display technology needed for true immersion, is being developed and upon release it will be commoditized within a few short years and available relatively cheaply on mobile devices. The sheer volume of the mobile business essentially guarantees that the economics will work in the favor of the manufacturer. It’s the ongoing onboarding of more and more people into the mobile connected world where you can begin to visualize the future and ubiquity of mobile VR platforms. The experience of “being there” really can and will become a right. Just as the right to free movement of information over Twitter, Whatsapp and Facebook has become a core individual right and part of the global trade of information.
My regular online handle is Mobiledivide, a nod to my belief that the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots of the world would be brought closer with the proliferation of mobile IP connected devices. The mind boggles when you think about the changes in perception that can be brought to people around the world with VR. That child in a war damaged village in Afghanistan can escape even for a few moments into a reasonable facsimile of a world far away and exist for a few moments in a serene wooded forest, an undersea trench or an MIT classroom. VR as therapy, as education and as a life and idea forming experience.
I am one of the first to admit that despite a few decades of PhD-level research into the medium, these are still the penny farthing days and the experiences and hardware economies I dream about are at least many years away, but then again, remember that this is the worst it will ever be. Even in this nascent state, the medium has the capability to profoundly affect the digital divide and most importantly the experiential divide.
VR will impact almost everything we do in ways we can see and numerous ways we can’t even imagine, both physically and mentally. At the heart of strapping on a headset and surrendering to the pixels found within, is presence, experience and memory creation, that most human part of our existence. Everything that occurs within our virtual experience is something that can affect each person differently positively and negatively. It’s not just information exchange or simply entertainment. So when I think of initiatives like Facebook’s Open Cellular and Kenya’s BRCK, the slowed/failed One Laptop Per Child, I imagine a one headset per child scenario, something that is doing more to educate and bring people together through experience than anything we have witnessed before. This makes me believe that perhaps the future of an empathetic connected global world is being born in 2016.
