John Wise

Food, minerals, pottery, metal, music, religion, books, art, adventure, transportation, technology, the Oculus Rift

Everything you think you know is about to be turned on its head. The coming revolution is a wave of tsunami proportion that will fundamentally alter humankind’s course. This historic moment will be instigated by the Oculus Rift, though the impact will only be seen through hindsight.

Most who know me likely think I’m a bit too liberal with the hyperbole regarding my enthusiasm for how I perceive the future. That’s okay, as I don’t claim to be clairvoyant and readily admit I may be quite wrong, but I really believe I’m being too conservative – even if my timeline proves to be short. You see, I think we are on the precipice of extraordinary change on the scale of when humans discovered how to work with fire, pottery, metal, or agriculture.

For nearly 150,000 years, while reality has been all around us, our mark on it, our art, has been in front of us – and it wasn’t always portable. What I mean is that when we learned to map a location, our ancestors likely drew a diagram in the dirt; this might have led to our recognition that we could use a rock to mark a tree and then mark a wall. Art was born. Since that time, we have become more sophisticated in our ability to place art before ourselves by putting it on statuary, canvas, celluloid, glass tubes, and now on thin, flat glowing panels. What all these things share, from the cave wall to a bendable OLED screen, is that they are before us; they are in front of our faces and are an element of our reality.

We are about to embark on a new paradigm, one where art is no longer in front of us; instead, it will supplant reality, placing us in the middle of a new reality. Some may look at this merely as a means to play a video game, and that is how it will be sold. Others will think it is a perverted tool that will make pornography all the eviler, though they themselves will likely have to know that first hand. Hollywood may see it as a savior that will deliver more eyeballs to see the same movies all over again as they work to remake yet more sequels; this time, though, they’ll be immersive. The paradigm I speak of is virtual reality, also known as VR.

What the Oculus Rift, and a host of similar products I’m sure, promise to bring, is the ability to be anywhere – except where we are. I won’t argue that it will take time for a generation brought up on shooting everything that moves to shift to taking an interest in exploring the sublime. This is in part because those of us venturing forward to create such content will need a lot of time and probably some external capital to allow us to employ artists, scientists, programmers, and musicians. But I see a problem with this: curiosity leads to…well, curiosity. Why is that an issue? Curiosity is a cornerstone of greater intellectual capacity, and we are on a 50-year binge of banality and conformity that has intentionally or inadvertently commercially benefited a certain segment of the population from our dumbing down. How will those interests either cede control or evolve their own content away from being manipulative and trivial?

Without simulated rape, drug use, chainsaw death, torture, shooting, and other negative stimuli to rail against, how will the powers that be leverage media hysteria on how “Educational” or “Enlightening” VR is, corrupting whichever segment of society should be targeted for being its victim? Is it really by consumer demand that our movies, books, and video games nearly always have an evil character? Why, then, when we travel, do we spend time exploring the arts, music, exotic cuisine, and beautiful nature instead of dodging zombies or going on shooting sprees? We explore because life is interesting, amazing, and full of learning opportunities. Media-contrived art is not imitating life; it is extorting the masses.

When the individual returns to painting on the virtual cave wall, to drawing in the digital dirt and watching the flicker of electronic light bouncing off a 3D caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly in an immersive world as seen through the Oculus Rift, they are going to feel in control and even more curious. They will wonder what they’ve been missing while they’ve been living comfortably numb in a society that has been celebrating mediocrity. Virtual reality is going to peel back the facade that ignorance is bliss; it is going to have us all dreaming of where we can go next and wondering what the story is behind those Mayan ruins, folding proteins, supernovae, and the mechanics of how a flower unfurls in the morning sun.

Watch out, world; here comes curiosity.

Started a free online class today titled “The Future Of Storytelling.” This eight-week “MOOC” or Massive Open Online Course is being presented by the Design Department at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, in Germany. The map I’ve included shows where participants are located. Fifty-thousand people from around the globe have signed up, not everyone has noted on the map where they are, but I think it’s probably fairly representative. Think about this for a moment; the average size class at this university is between 10 and 30 students and they are all present on campus in Potsdam, Germany, but online there are 50,000 of us participating. How many more people would have signed up if they’d heard about the MOOC?

While this is my first semi-formal online class, my wife has been busy off and on for the past few years taking online courses, most recently a free Python programming class held by Coursera and Rice University. What really drew me into blogging about this is the map above. If you have any doubt about our world being a global community, just check out where my classmates live. They are from everywhere, including Nunavut, Canada, Bhutan, and Timor, to southern Chile and Namibia. Sure, we all know the internet is a global medium, but when was the last time you were in a classroom with people from around the world WANTING and voluntarily learning the same thing as you?

So why is this important to Virtual Reality? Because education is going to move into the 3rd dimension and it’s going to change our relationship to wanting to learn, that’s why! How, you might ask? In the case of VR and then the arrival of positional tracking, we are going to be able to reach out and manipulate the avatar we are trying to animate, for one example. Then, with AR (Augmented Reality), we will have a 3D model that will hover between us and our computer screen of, say, a giant weta (you really do need to click this link) that we can spin around, zoom in to, and see its movement. Matter of fact, we can all have the world’s largest 3D natural science museum in our homes that will allow us to explore everything from molecules and cells to interstellar gas clouds. This has been the promise of these technologies for decades, but the time of their arrival is now just around the corner. Today, I learned about castAR and felt that I’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks; how did their Kickstarter campaign get past me? castAR is an inexpensive Augmented Reality headset that looks like it might be in competition with the Oculus Rift, but I think it will more likely be another amazing stepping stone to what is shaping up to be the most rapid development phase we have yet seen regarding our relationship to the virtual and augmented world we will one day soon start to explore. Check them out; their magic wand is going to get a lot of attention.

Like the industrial revolution that accompanied the advent of the steam engine or the modernization of roads and housing following World War II, we are entering an era where millions of people are going to be needed to build our new infrastructure using skills in jobs that only existed in small numbers as those advancements first started to be developed. Game companies will continue to make games. Movie studios will learn how to make immersive 3D movies we can be in the middle of. But it will be an entirely new economic engine of small companies and individuals that will give us new planets to explore, bizarre creatures to interact with, and scientific processes we can see and play within the safety of virtual exploration, for just a few examples. If you are going to participate and be one of these new “Virtual Construction Workers,” you have a long road ahead of you where you too better be signing up for free online courses and learning all you can about digital arts, music, programming, animation, and science that might prepare you for building your own version of how this virtual world might look.

We are explorers of the digital plains, miners extracting bits in order to build new towers of light that only exist on the frontier of our electricity-amplified world. Numerically derived substances become emissive with properties that have been designed in the mind and transferred between one another like so much binary noise, making the transition from wet organic matter to traveling hair-thin strands of glass before riding a copper route to a box of transmogrified sand that allows me, the operator, to be a creator.

I harness the brains of countless people who have sacrificed banality in the effort to capture maths in such ways that they have become code, tools, and software that do stuff. My gratitude extends from Euclid and his theater of geometry to Galileo, who once said, “The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”

Today, digital artists are using those triangles, circles, and geometrical figures to construct dynamic environments that have pulled the masses into witnessing the illumination of the “dark labyrinth.” Video games, computer graphics, electronic music, and 3D animated films are but a ploy to pull humanity forward where the border of the known universe unfolds. Our ancestors first observed the work of fire before entrusting those “crazy” enough to play with it. Once made safe, everyone could utilize the dangerous but useful energy contained within. Today it is at our fingertips, and we think nothing of bringing it into our homes with a twist of a knob so it may cook our food.

Similarly, we have a pipe that now delivers the fire of the mind directly to our homes, and most of us have grown accustomed to its ubiquitous presence, not only via wire but in the very air around us. Like fire, the presence of information is not only used for the warming of leftovers, it can be used in the forging of the new from the unknown. It was fire that allowed us to make ceramics, glass, steel, electricity, propulsion systems, and much of what makes the world around us convenient. Now that electronic bits have made us comfortable in our surroundings, how will the exotic uses of that potentiality alter us going forward?

We must begin to comprehend the “next” word. That word is creation. It is what we humans do; we create. One does not need to be a God to enter this domain, just as one does not need to be the Shaman of the Fire in order to warm the home. The magic is no longer external; it is within. Within our minds and transmutable through our hands, we can bend, fold, and manipulate the flow of the visual universe. We are set to become the architects of this electronic domain in ways larger than our consumptive selves allow us to yet realize. The Age of Creativity stands before us, but the gulf of ability still looms as a chasm of uncertainty.

It is time to smash that divide to recognize it is our self-imposed and media-manifested doubts and fears that have erected the barriers between the consumptive self and the creative self. These past three decades of personal computing and the thousands of years of prior advancements have all been leading us to this point where humanity’s rarest tools and skills in the forms of knowledge and education are being offered to nearly all people. They arrive within the time it takes to understand that they are free or, at a relatively low cost, available to all. Software is the tool that lends each of us the brain trust of thousands, if not millions, of minds whose collective ability is brought to our front and center with a mouse click or a simple gesture.

Learning to read and create the universe with a visual and audible language that allows us to communicate across barriers is what our new digital tools are laying out before us. Complexity and creative fun can and will be synonymous. It is up to us to share our sense of amazement that is brought on when we employ these evolving digital tools of creativity.