Oculus Rift Changes Everything

JWise Moments

A bunch of stuff

Everything you think you know is about to be turned on its head. The coming revolution is a wave of tsunami proportions 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.

Paths

JWise Moments, TimefireVR

We have many a path to consider when the road forks and we need to take on a new direction. So it is as we head into Virtual Reality, and the tools we will use are not set in stone. None of us know for certain what the face of VR is going to look like, although we can conjecture that it will look a lot like today, only different. Okay, I anticipate that it will be really different. Like the potential to be out of this world crazy different. The only problem is that for something to be seen that way, there must be a “normal” to compare it to. But before we get to blow the minds of the uninitiated, we have to build the foundation of “normal.”

Today, we can choose to develop “worlds” from a wide variety of tools ranging from Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity, and dozens of other environments to the private engines employed within companies that are used by them exclusively. Along the way, we will learn about textures and materials and how Substance Designer, Photoshop, Gimp, nDo and dDo, Lightroom, and our digital cameras will be needed to paint these places we assemble. Before we ever get to those images, we will also have to decide on which 3D modeling software we are going to take up, such as Blender, Modo, 3DS Max, Maya, Softimage, Houdini, C4D, or a couple of others. Just learning to think in x,y, and z coordinates is a monumental task by itself.

Gaming engines, image manipulation, 3D modeling, and we haven’t even touched on motion capture, puppeteering, animation, sound design, audio editing, or writing and designing a place others might want to visit.

So why not make it simple and just choose a single skill set and focus on being an expert in one area? Because those days are coming to an end.

Forty years ago as the personal computer revolution was getting underway, a small class of the curious sequestered themselves in a corner of their home and started to learn how a computer might be helpful to themselves and maybe to others. The process was slow and laborious; we either learned to code or manually entered instructions as they had been printed out in the back of a magazine. Fifteen years later someone could make good money entering data or typing documents. That industry has since shifted, and no one in Western society is rewarded for being an expert in a word processor or a spreadsheet alone. Ten years after that, in 1998, if you had mad Photoshop skills, you could make bank creating graphics for an up-and-coming internet property. Today, designers often struggle to find work where Photoshop by itself will give them viable employment. Ask any coder/programmer when the last year being knowledgeable in a single language was enough to land them a six-figure income.

The evolutionary writing is on the proverbial cave wall for many; writ large, it says, “Thou shall not gain credibility or a decent job in the next economy without being a master of the suite.”

This “Suite” is an assembly of tools, probably of your choosing, that says, “I have skills that are flexible, and I can demonstrate an ability to adapt.”

And why do I believe this? Because after much of humanity automates itself into a lack of purpose, we will have to ask ourselves, “What else is there?” The only conceivable answer is we must entertain ourselves. If Virtual Reality is the environment we are going to explore as the interface to that entertainment, well, that space is infinitely large. To fill the space of infinity, we will embark on creating “stuff” to play with, to explore, and to give us purpose again.

In effect, we will all become farmers again, except the crops are digital assets that feed the mind. A new agrarian age in which we cultivate the electronic landscape, bringing us full circle to a previous time when the majority of us tilled the land. Except now, we will work the soil of creativity by employing Ableton or Bitwig to sequence our beats and sounds. You’ll pop open Blender to knock out some 3D furniture or 3D-Coat to sculpt up some creatures. Connect the motion capture data from your Xbox Kinect to a digital skeleton and bring that dancing blob of pixels to life in your retro-future-psychedelic-historic-dystopian-sci-fi city on the internet. Maybe a multi-story gallery dedicated to your family will be erected in your new cyberspace environment that will display a living family tree of photos and videos that forever tell the story of the Smith family. Well, you are going to have to be the one to break out Premiere, After Effects, Reaper, Photoshop, and Unity to put it all together – just as your parents shot video on bulky cameras and your grandparents pasted black and white photos into albums.

It’s time to “Get it!” Complexity and adaptability are the order of the day. We no longer tinker in isolation on computers barely faster than a modern watch. We no longer become experts in typing documents. Photoshopping is now a hobby, not a career (by itself, anyway). If there are 1000 people out there mastering a dozen really difficult pieces of software, tomorrow, it will be all of us.

Starting Over….Again and Again

JWise Moments

With gusto, we jump into knowing exactly what we want until those newly acquired skills become refined enough to show us how this is exactly what we don’t want. No problem, clean off the canvas and start modeling new stuff.

Learn how to make amazing materials for those new models; wow, they have so much depth and realism. Oh, there’s something else out there that can make them even better? Okay, we’ll just scrap what we’ve done so far and try this new way. Good thing we’re not a year into this.

Uh oh, there might be a problem with the game engine we’ve chosen to work with. Time to start considering the alternatives. Sure, but all roads bring me right back to where we started. Well, then, we can be secure in knowing our decision was a sound one, at least for the next week or two.

This is the dialogue that goes on nearly every day. Certainty when exploring the unknown is amorphous, requiring a kind of flexibility that reminds me of something I was told while on a white water trip through the Grand Canyon, “Indecision is the key to flexibility.”

Today’s decision is the seed for tomorrow’s exciting new way of doing things; that makes way more sense anyway.

How Do People Play In The Now?

JWise Moments, TimefireVR

3D_Coat

Is it time to leave old habits behind or to at least start adopting new ones? There are many people who will not think twice on any given day about grabbing a video to watch to close out the day. Me? I opt to explore what I can learn about 3D sculpting with the help of 3D Coat this evening. This is not easy entertainment; it is not grabbing a beer with the guys and talking shop or sports; it’s getting into the thick of hurting one’s brain. I’m learning a new language of voxels, live clay, retopo, PTex, UV unwrap, vox trees, and a type of noise called Voronoi. It feels archaic to me that we would fall into routines of computer gaming, watching television, and even reading. What of hardcore learning? There’s an educational version of 3D Coat that only costs $99 or about the cost of five DVDs. With it, I can make cubes with meaningless shapes or bulbous forms as I have today, see above. I can become frustrated that there are almost 150 tutorial videos on the creators of 3D Coat’s YouTube channel, and I don’t really have a clue where to start. Or I can laugh about it and delight that I’m alive in an age where some of the most complex creative digital tools are available to me and that, beyond the cost of acquisition, the materials are effectively free as long as I pay for a constant supply of electricity.

Entertainment in front of a device showing us moving pictures has become an old passive habit our ancestors “participated” in, just as many generations ago primitive peoples sat around the fire under the night sky: though I feel there is big merit in doing just that today. We are once again transitioning, just as we did away from candlelight and books to radio and electrical lights, to TV and microwave oven-cooked dinners; we are now able to warm up to the complexity that pushes our ability to work with our minds and imaginations because we own computers and are connected to the internet. Just as we’ve adopted the ideas of balanced diets, regular exercise, and career advancement, I think it’s about time to explore those things that help us create and explore skills we may have never known we had.

Sharing With Our Loved Ones

JWise Moments

Caroline Wise and Jutta Engelhardt in Frankfurt, Germany

We are all rendered helpless at least twice in our lives: birth and death. Yet, at birth, we are tenderly cared for with love, attention, and laws that attempt to ensure our successful transition into a functionally competent young adult who will be ready to contribute to our society. Approaching death, we are often alone without the love or the attention of our families or our friends, as they may already be gone, or they, too, are suffering the isolation that plagues our later years.

From the wealthy enclave of Santa Barbara, California, to Europe’s banking capital in Frankfurt, Germany, we all too often find the elderly are a burden and frustration while we have all benefited from these parents and workers who probably did the best they could while they were young and able. But in our impatience, we are quick to satisfy our own needs with an indulgence verging on the obscenely vulgar while at the same time seeing the needs of the elderly as unreasonable.

How do we justify ignoring these vigor-impaired people who were once so important to our very existence? How do others live with themselves as they reveal their anger or disdain in the way they treat these people nearing the ends of their lives, as though they are but nuisance obligations that no longer deserve respect?

The negligence we offer the elderly while lavishing doting care and affection on dogs and cats is an abomination of our broken social contract that allows us to merrily put on display our shallowness by only embracing the young and beautiful, in addition to the cute and furry. If it weren’t for the fact that most of us will suffer the pains of time, maybe then I could understand that a fringe was being sacrificed for the betterment of the whole, but these people who paved the way for us are our future, they are who we will be someday.

Alone and often depressed in their private lives, they bloom in smiles and laughter when once again they find themselves in a setting with their friends and family, even when enduring the pain and hardship of illness or loss that has brought them into the situation of being hospitalized or placed in hospice. Where were we when they needed us to help ensure they wouldn’t hurt themselves? What of the societal responsibility to protect them from inadvertent self-abuse through their own neglect?

For a moment, one can find hope in the despairing moments our elderly loved ones spend in hospitals and rehabilitation centers as we once again see their spirit and ability to fit in with those around them. But all too soon, they will find themselves returned to the lonely isolation that distanced them from our ideas of normal. They are not to blame, just as an infant cannot take responsibility for their own helplessness. Babies have not yet made friends, nor can they communicate very effectively in a complex world they have yet to comprehend. On the other hand, the elderly are trying to comprehend a world that has become faster and more advanced in the complexities that often exceed their abilities. Do we help these people or push them to the side?

Too often, our own sense of responsibility to ourselves leaves us with the easy and selfish choice of tossing these once productive and caring people to the curb of obscurity to die alone after suffering a growing sense of failure; why else are they now alone in a world that works best when we are laughing and sharing in our success?

My mother-in-law is a survivor of World War II and, as a young girl, had to deal with the hunger and destruction of the country she was born in, along with the death of her brother in battle and the subsequent abuse from a mother who suffered too with the incomprehensible loss. Now, after the war, she is at the mercy of those around her who try to find the time to share with her while she’s losing her sense of place and likely her home so others may care for her and her encroaching weakness.

During her early life, she studied medicine and gave life to two girls: my wife and her sister. She helped countless others who were in desperate need of life-saving services in her capacity while working for the local blood donor service. Not only are those who give blood of importance to the ill and critically hurt, but those who make it their life’s work to accept these donations enable the conduit between those who are in need and those who work tirelessly to save lives. And yet most of her days are now spent with a newspaper or television. Some of her friends have already passed. Guilt tells her that her needs are not important; one mustn’t burden those who are entangled with lives that surely have no time for someone becoming frail of mind and or body.

This sweet woman needs little more than a buttered bread and her family’s love. Other sweet old ladies have trouble getting either. Even on those occasions when my mother-in-law is, for a moment, the center of attention, I know this will be short-lived, not only because we will return to our “busy” lives but because she can no longer be in this life much longer.

I do not know with any precision how much longer she will be with us, but I do have to face that within weeks, she’ll again be alone. When she’s gone, we, too, will be a little more alone as the cycle of our own aging process moves us closer to the lonely door of death.

The Photo I Cannot Take

JWise Moments

Noise

Are we being conditioned with beeps, bleeps, clicks, rings, jingles, engines, and buzzes of an artificial soundscape that is acting to destroy our relationship to the sounds of the natural world, further alienating us from the nature of Earth?

The espresso machine hisses, the GPS speaks its directions, and the cell phone plays a little song telling you someone must talk to you. The French fry cooker bleats incessantly; the keyboard clicks and the fasten your seat belt alarm beeps to annoyance. We park our car to music played in the lot, music blares at us while shopping, TV’s in restaurants remind us of things we are missing in our attempt to have a moment for ourselves. The microwave sounds the alarm that the meal within its innards is ready to be consumed, the electronic box next to your pillow rattles you awake, and your computer starts up with a bleeping symphony.

How long before your shirt warns you that your deodorant is failing or your glasses alert you with a snappy ad from your optometrist that your vision has deteriorated since your last checkup 14 months ago? Will chirping skin sensors let us know to step in the sun to replenish our vitamin D. Dddrrrinng, dddrrrinng….oh excuse me, my bladder is texting me that I need to drink more water.