Spending time with dad in Virtual Reality
I wrote this piece to clarify what about VR has captured my attention and to give a taste of what I see as its immense potential.
Virtual reality and my father
Why VR? Like all emerging technologies, I’ve paid attention to VR. That’s my job after all. In that sense, it’s no different than Bitcoin, drones, AI etc.
VR rose to prominence when I saw the opportunity to leverage the technology to do something that’s very important to me: Spend more time with my dad.
My dad, Gary Martin, will turn 66 this year. He’s lived in Florida, some ~1100 miles away from me, for the past 10 years. Which is to say that I don’t get to see much of him these days.
As a poignant wait but why article that I read from my sick bed in Myanmar on Christmas day pointed out, the time we have left with the people most important to us is relatively limited. Compared to the time we’ve shared, the time I have remaining with dad is nearly extinguished.
And thus, I want to make the most out of the time we have left. Given that it’s not professionally feasible for me to move to Orlando and my father can’t be bribed to step foot in NYC, I need a different strategy.
The immense potential of VR as a communications tool
That’s how VR caught my interest. I saw in the technology the possibility of spending more quality time with my father, and the other people I love.
I’ve founded two companies to date — Sonar and Switch — both of which use technology to connect people. So the idea of using this new technology, VR, to connect people was an almost default conclusion. While I’m keenly aware of the potential for the tech to isolate and alienate, I’m optimistic about VR. The internet is fundamentally about connecting people — to share information, to share stories, to share events, to engage in commerce and so on. That’s why Facebook constitutes 1/4 of the page views on the (US) internet. It covers much of what we need.
When I think about what will the big hits on VR, the safe bets will be on letting people do the things that they already do, but better, cheaper, and more conveniently. In that sense, communication is an obvious application of VR if it can help me communicate things that were previously hard to convey. Can VR make teleconferencing better? I believe it will.
The need for virtual, non-verbal, online communication
For example, I manage a small, seed stage venture capital fund. My investors are Greek. This requires me to spend several hours a day on the phone, on uberconference, on Skype, on email, on whatsapp, on slack, on iMessage etc. I use every tool available to communicate and yet I am starving for something better. Anyone who has given a presentation via conference call knows the terror of finishing a 20 slide soliloquy, not to applause but to deafening silence of five people on mute. Communicating remotely for work still sucks. Badly.
The many nuances of in-person communication — hand gestures, facial expressions, foot tapping, long sighs and short breaths — are all lost in every form of communication listed above. How can you identify what is important or what should be skimmed when you have no way of reading the room? Skype doesn’t cut it.
I think VR will improve business communications, but it’s spending time with my dad that gets me excited. Can this new technology put time back on the clock for us? Can it deliver the feeling I experience, a few times a year around holidays, when after a long plane ride, I put down my my bags and sit down across my dad, say nothing but smile, and enjoy the presence of the man that created me?
Virtually not present
It’s no coincidence that so much of the VR literature talks about presence, the feeling associated with being here and aware, of whats going on around you. Perhaps that sounds ironic for a technology that many people think of as escapist.
Many recent advances in communication from email to Facebook to Whatsapp have focused on asynchronous communication. They acknowledge that people usually aren’t present, that they are distracted, that they only have a few milliseconds of attention to sift through what is presented to decide whether or not to react. Everyone, and by everyone I mean Mark Andreessen, talks about how visceral VR is. It has the ability to truly grab your attention. Maybe VR can help us focus on what we are trying to pay attention to.
On the other hand, perhaps VR can help us convey our presence, or lack thereof, in a more nuanced fidelity than the technologies that preceded it. Read receipts on iMessage can help temper when one is waiting to hear back about tonight’s plans. Perhaps the concept of gaze in VR will indicate whether the person you are talking to isn’t listening or simply hasn’t responded yet. One of my girlfriend’s favorite quotes is by Kahlil Gibran “Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.” Perhaps VR can help us recover some of the love we’ve lost amongst the billions of misunderstood emails, texts and phone calls.
Unfortunately, realistic, affordable, and realtime video capture is still a ways a way. For the moment, we still need to strap a phone onto our face to immerse ourselves in a virtual environment. How technology will simultaneously capture and communicate our facial expressions is TBD. Companies such as 8i are working on this problem, but it feels a ways away.
Don’t replicate, Create
That said, reality might be overrated. If uncanny valley, the loss of presence when a virtual encounter is not quite believable, is one of the major pitfalls of VR, why try to mirror reality at all? The opportunity is virtually represent our physical reality but to build an Alternate Reality, with its own unique benefits and trade-offs.
Just like we invented emoticons to convey emotions via text, we will leverage VR to create new ways of expressing old concepts. Take Oculus Social, a VR chat app, and its early attempts to represent non-verbal communication. When two avatars “look” at each other, there can “make eye contact.” How else do you know if the Magic Fox that you are chatting with is actually paying attention?
Anyone who has laughed at a friend’s Bitmoji, the popular app that thats you turn yourself into a cartoon character, can attest to the power of caricature to convey feelings. Just like the technologies that preceded it, VR will enable us communicate in ways that are not possible in our physical reality.
Alternate, not virtual
If presence is VR’s Yin, experience is its Yang. As discussed above, maybe it’s a novice mistake to try to replicate the experience of sitting with my dad on his Orlando porch. The tech isn’t there yet. More importantly, if we could hang out anywhere, why the hell would we choose Orlando?! We should sit on a beach in Fiji, lounge in our childhood home, ride a rover on mars, or float in a castle in the sky.
That all we can do in the leading VR chats rooms is watch 2D movies and play 2D boardgames is a testament to the nascence the medium! Soon we will be taking a part a 57 Chevy, watching Lebron James from courtside, and journeying to the center of a black hole.
Fitting the message to the medium
Filling a 3D world with 2D content is crazy town but not unprecedented. Whenever we invent a new medium, we inevitably begin by shoehorning in our message using the old format. Early radio shows were just someone reading the newspaper. Early films were nothing more than single room plays. Early websites simply broadcast static information. It took years to develop sound effects, editing, and “web 2.0" concepts like UGC and social. Only with time and experimentation, can we develop new languages that respect the novel contours of our new canvas.
When pondering where VR is going, I try to guess which conventions from our current media will appear absurd and anachronistic in retrospect. 2D movies, “hamburger” menus, and joy sticks will also go the way of the dodo, IMO. Navigation and discovery will look completely different.
Skeuomorphs and your virtual “home”
People will not strap on their headset, flip through a set of menus on their home screen, choose between a set of icons surrounded by text and stars, download then play an “app.”
No.
“Home” will look like a lot more like our living room, or maybe Bill Gates’s living room. Or a 14th century king’s living room, replete with grandiose chandeliers, a roaring fireplace, and plenty of squires and servants to fetch what we want. Whatever the form, home will be personalized and filled with the people, places and things that are important to you.
Just as early mobile app designers used the analogy of ripped lined paper to designate a notebook and we still use the “phone” icon to represent the dialer, VR designers will use skeuomorphs to highlight the capabilities of our new environment. Initially, “Maps” may be represented by a the globe in the corner of the room and telephony maybe accessed by a virtual phone in your virtual pocket but eventually we will adapt to the medium and learn to simply say, “take me to Saigon” or “Hey, is Brittany around?”
Apps → Experiences
Good designers already think about applications as experiences but holistic thinking will be mandatory in VR. In our new living room, “apps” could be tickets to Lakers game with Jack Nicholas, a role playing adventure modeled after Settlers of Catan, or maybe a pet velociraptor that for $0.99 cents a month “in food” I can pay to unleash into my friend’s virtual home. Maybe I can pay $0.99 cents to download and outfit my avatar with the new Jordan’s. Maybe Nike will give me the Jordan’s for free if my virtual experience with the shoes makes me more likely to buy the real ones. Where will I find the shoes in the first place? Maybe Amazon will build a virtual mall and populates it will AI-customer service NPCs (non-player characters). Maybe someone else will beat them to it?
The most egalitarian technology
Of all the tech that’s going to change the way we live in the next 10 years, VR has caught my attention because of it’s seemingly limitless potential as a leveling force. Yes, it’s expensive right now but eventually it will becomes ubiquitous via mobile phones. A technology capable of delivering any experience to anyone at the world, for no more than the cost of streaming data. It’s hard to image something more egalitarian.
I’m just starting to explore this world and would love to speak with anyone working in it. In subsequent posts, I’ll dig deeper into things like the technical stack, the process and art of content creation, what distribution looks like, and how things might be monetized.
Hit me up at Brettlucasmartin at gmail if you want to get in touch.
Thanks for reading!
