mediageek Discussion with Dave Salinsky
1
I would like to respond to mediaGeek's interview of Salinsky, a virtual reality programmer2, on the grounds that they managed to ignore major applications of virtual reality. The interview stuck too closely to the mode of "virtual reality" (VR) as an immersive and/or responsive sensory experience, specifically directed at human eyes and ears. This was especially confusing because, as they pointed out repeatedly during the interview, this old conception of virtual reality is long-since dead.
Since immersive VR systems proved too complex and bulky to be made marketable, the "death of VR" has meant it's relegation to firms and institutions with large budgets and complex design and observation requirements (a point which Salinsky makes pretty clearly). What both he and the interviewer ignore, however, is that the original idea of virtually realized systems never went away; it's simply been modified to meet current, affordable technological limits.
The idea behind virtual reality is, in essence, the manufacturing or simulation of pseudo-real interactions between or among two or more objects in some non-real space. At first, this was mainly thought of as projection of real objects or sensations into some sort of false-space, i.e., VR "cages" and the "feelies" that Salinsky mentioned. From a technology perspective, this approach has yielded fairly little in terms of ersatz realities. Cages, fake cockpits and bulky headwear notwithstanding, there has not been a technology that readily replicates real objects with convincing fidelity and simultaneously allows the user to be credibly interactive with them. Hence, the "death" of commercial VR.
But that is not the whole picture. Physical objects are not the only things that can be virtualized. Indeed, we can see that VR has invaded many areas of what Salinsky identifies as interactive forms of entertainment. Video games, especially Everquest and World of Warcraft, are excellent examples of this virtualization.
If you step back from game and the hardware platform on which it runs, you will begin to see that the user's experience of the game is not rooted so much a convincing representation of "real-space and -time," but rather a virtualization of society itself.
Anyone with first-hand knowledge of an Everquest junkie will attest to the following points:
To take point number three somewhat further, and bring me around to my point, the social rules of the Everquest world are more or less the same rules that govern the player's societies. What this means is that the game can offer players a reasonable facsimile of real-society, complete with social hierarchies, social "events" and even economies. 3 Furthermore, this community mimics or recognizes real-world events; this was demonstrated in 2000, when an alleged suicide rocked the Everquest community both in and outside the game.
Because this community is exclusive and contains organizing principles (among them an ersatz mythology), I would suggest that it displays several, although not all, traits of the anthropological definition of a culture.4 This is, I would argue, a virtual simulation of reality. Moreover, it is much more in-depth and interactive than early physics-based VR simulation.
If we expand our definition of virtualized realities even further, we could incorporate what Jon Udell refers to as "shifting time and folding space." In this instance, what is virtualized is the commoditization of time and space. TiVo and podcasting both allow the user to transport data away from the place and time of it's creation or broadcast. TiVo is a more limited example5, where only the original broadcasting parameters are simulated. 6 In podcasting, however, the user can transport data in both time and, with the aid of an MP3 player, space. In a sense, the podcaster is thus recreating the (recorded) conditions of the data outside of the show's real-time (broadcast time) and real-space (the recording studio).
As a functional version of a new definition for virtual reality, this second example may prove too slippery, but it is important to discuss ways in which non-tangibles are virtualized. To understand and discuss the impacts of VR technologies, we need to move away from the idea that the main goal of virtualization should necessarily be the replication of real-space and –time in some virtual environment. Accurate physical simulation makes VR technologies valuable to companies, but beyond the more or less trivial trickle-down effects into society, that does not mean much to the average end-user.
To the user, virtual realities are not pie-in-the-sky technologies; they exist as real and current aspects of his life. In order to understand their effects, we need to start seeing virtualizations in fewer dimensions, not more.
I would like to respond to mediaGeek's interview of Salinsky, a virtual reality programmer2, on the grounds that they managed to ignore major applications of virtual reality. The interview stuck too closely to the mode of "virtual reality" (VR) as an immersive and/or responsive sensory experience, specifically directed at human eyes and ears. This was especially confusing because, as they pointed out repeatedly during the interview, this old conception of virtual reality is long-since dead.
Since immersive VR systems proved too complex and bulky to be made marketable, the "death of VR" has meant it's relegation to firms and institutions with large budgets and complex design and observation requirements (a point which Salinsky makes pretty clearly). What both he and the interviewer ignore, however, is that the original idea of virtually realized systems never went away; it's simply been modified to meet current, affordable technological limits.
The idea behind virtual reality is, in essence, the manufacturing or simulation of pseudo-real interactions between or among two or more objects in some non-real space. At first, this was mainly thought of as projection of real objects or sensations into some sort of false-space, i.e., VR "cages" and the "feelies" that Salinsky mentioned. From a technology perspective, this approach has yielded fairly little in terms of ersatz realities. Cages, fake cockpits and bulky headwear notwithstanding, there has not been a technology that readily replicates real objects with convincing fidelity and simultaneously allows the user to be credibly interactive with them. Hence, the "death" of commercial VR.
But that is not the whole picture. Physical objects are not the only things that can be virtualized. Indeed, we can see that VR has invaded many areas of what Salinsky identifies as interactive forms of entertainment. Video games, especially Everquest and World of Warcraft, are excellent examples of this virtualization.
If you step back from game and the hardware platform on which it runs, you will begin to see that the user's experience of the game is not rooted so much a convincing representation of "real-space and -time," but rather a virtualization of society itself.
Anyone with first-hand knowledge of an Everquest junkie will attest to the following points:
1. The game simply is not very photo-realistic. Ignoring the problems of the graphics capabilities of older computers, the aging engine on which the game was built, the designers' presumed intention to maintain a balance between realism and a broad computer platform, and the real limits of data transportation across networks, the "art" of the game suffers from real problems of perspective; objects are often just too out-of-proportion to be convincingly real.
2. For obvious user-driven reasons, Everquest-time and -space are not accurately modeled on a 1:1 scale with real-time and -space.
3. Social interaction is what many (I'd be willing to bet "most") players say they enjoy about the game. Furthermore, the game is designed to reward players who conform to the social rules of the world.
To take point number three somewhat further, and bring me around to my point, the social rules of the Everquest world are more or less the same rules that govern the player's societies. What this means is that the game can offer players a reasonable facsimile of real-society, complete with social hierarchies, social "events" and even economies. 3 Furthermore, this community mimics or recognizes real-world events; this was demonstrated in 2000, when an alleged suicide rocked the Everquest community both in and outside the game.
Because this community is exclusive and contains organizing principles (among them an ersatz mythology), I would suggest that it displays several, although not all, traits of the anthropological definition of a culture.4 This is, I would argue, a virtual simulation of reality. Moreover, it is much more in-depth and interactive than early physics-based VR simulation.
If we expand our definition of virtualized realities even further, we could incorporate what Jon Udell refers to as "shifting time and folding space." In this instance, what is virtualized is the commoditization of time and space. TiVo and podcasting both allow the user to transport data away from the place and time of it's creation or broadcast. TiVo is a more limited example5, where only the original broadcasting parameters are simulated. 6 In podcasting, however, the user can transport data in both time and, with the aid of an MP3 player, space. In a sense, the podcaster is thus recreating the (recorded) conditions of the data outside of the show's real-time (broadcast time) and real-space (the recording studio).
As a functional version of a new definition for virtual reality, this second example may prove too slippery, but it is important to discuss ways in which non-tangibles are virtualized. To understand and discuss the impacts of VR technologies, we need to move away from the idea that the main goal of virtualization should necessarily be the replication of real-space and –time in some virtual environment. Accurate physical simulation makes VR technologies valuable to companies, but beyond the more or less trivial trickle-down effects into society, that does not mean much to the average end-user.
To the user, virtual realities are not pie-in-the-sky technologies; they exist as real and current aspects of his life. In order to understand their effects, we need to start seeing virtualizations in fewer dimensions, not more.
--Endnotes--
1. Sorry to Dave, but I do not see your name anywhere on the mediageek webpage. So, if I have misspelled it, please forgive.
2. mediageek podcast. "The Myth and Reality of Virtual Reality," 11 February, 2005. http://www.mediageek.org/radioshow/002492.html#002492
3. My best supporting evidence of this is a spill-over effect into real-space. I have seen Everquest players carry over ideas of status developed in the game into real-societies by mimicking their Everquest-assigned social role around other players in their daily lives. A more common and notorious example of spill-over is the Ultima Online marriage, which also includes marriage of two players who met online. Also, the in-game economy has it's own reflection in the eBay trade in game-space items and game accounts, which have been known to sell for thousands of dollars.
4. More likely, this is a cross-cultural subculture – a culture that can be contained within another culture but is capable of crossing many different ones.
5. Although, I now see that TiVo is advertising something called TiVoToGo, which promises to allow you to "take your favorite shows anywhere." (It seems that if we even stop for a second, we'll be overwhelmed by change.)
6. "Simulate," I admit, is a big stretch. In this case, I include "replay" in the definition of a simulation, although recordings and simulations are technically and rhetorically different.
1. Sorry to Dave, but I do not see your name anywhere on the mediageek webpage. So, if I have misspelled it, please forgive.
2. mediageek podcast. "The Myth and Reality of Virtual Reality," 11 February, 2005. http://www.mediageek.org/radioshow/002492.html#002492
3. My best supporting evidence of this is a spill-over effect into real-space. I have seen Everquest players carry over ideas of status developed in the game into real-societies by mimicking their Everquest-assigned social role around other players in their daily lives. A more common and notorious example of spill-over is the Ultima Online marriage, which also includes marriage of two players who met online. Also, the in-game economy has it's own reflection in the eBay trade in game-space items and game accounts, which have been known to sell for thousands of dollars.
4. More likely, this is a cross-cultural subculture – a culture that can be contained within another culture but is capable of crossing many different ones.
5. Although, I now see that TiVo is advertising something called TiVoToGo, which promises to allow you to "take your favorite shows anywhere." (It seems that if we even stop for a second, we'll be overwhelmed by change.)
6. "Simulate," I admit, is a big stretch. In this case, I include "replay" in the definition of a simulation, although recordings and simulations are technically and rhetorically different.