Ken’s Blog

When people are not where you are
Zoom only gets you so far
You will only get faces
When you want to share spaces
The future belongs to VR

I have been working on building a VR space for a while. I have been doing it at home, so I have gotten used to walking around in the VR room while in my actual physical room.

Today for the first time I brought my VR headset somewhere with me to show the space to somebody else. You could say that it was the first time my virtual room has been outside my physical room.

There was something both disorienting and empowering about the experience. I suddenly realized, on an emotional level, that my VR space could be anywhere in the physical world.

I had known this intellectually, but it hadn’t really hit me on a gut level: A VR room is as portable as a Web page. It exists nowhere in the physical world, yet at the same time everywhere.

For the last quarter century or so we have been living in the age of portable documents. Now we are about to enter the age of portable rooms.

The idea of buildings with movable walls is not new. Reconfigurable spaces have been around in architecture for centuries.

But until now they have been considered a specialty item. The underlying technology is difficult to implement properly, and there are issues around temperature management, airflow, safety and security.

The advent of computers changed the conversation around reconfigurable architecture. Rather than needing to move walls around manually, the users of such spaces could, to some extent, “dial in” their preferences, and a building could then adjust room dimensions accordingly.

Now that many people can walk around in buildings even before they are even built — thanks to newly accessible consumer-level VR technology — I wonder whether we are on the brink of another evolution of reconfigurable architecture. After all, in VR it is quite easy to move walls around, and to get a sense of how that might be of benefit.

Widespread access to such capabilities may lead to thinking of physical interiors in a whole new way. Perhaps, when it becomes the norm to design one’s house in shared VR, movable walls will start to become the norm rather than the exception.

The lives of great geniuses are often very complicated. Genius is an odd phenomenon. It visits people and very uneven amounts and often it very surprising ways.

The life experiences of three geniuses of the 20th century, in very different fields, had remarkably similar arcs. Walt Disney was a pioneer in animation, Frank Sinatra in popular music, and Steve Jobs in personal computers — three very different fields.

Yet the overarching narrative in each case was oddly similar. The early career was an example of a naive and idealistic young person achieving rapid success and recognition. Then there came a time when the young genius was cast out and betrayed, followed by a period of disillusion.

Then, some years later, there was a return to success, but with an important difference. The Disney, Sinatra and Jobs who eventually returned to triumph to build an empire was very different from the original young idealistic genius who had started out.

Each returned as a hardened and ruthless businessman. In each case there was still an appealing populist message, but now both the man and the ethos behind that message had been transformed.

The shared pattern here, once recognized, is remarkably specific. I wonder how many geniuses throughout history have had lives and careers that have followed a similar arc.

I was having coffee today with friends, and the subject of Pride and Prejudice came up, as it often does. In particular, we were discussing how it would be be easier in real life to be some of Austen’s characters, rather than others.

I pointed out that the most difficult character to be in real life would be Mr. Collins. He is, in a very important way, the most pure of all the characters.

After all, he is the only character in the novel who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is perfectly fine exactly as he is, without the slightest need of improvement.

He is also, of course, by far the most annoying and insufferable character in the book. To understand why, see the previous paragraph.

Reading our national news of the last few days, it occurs to me that this would be an apt time to rewatch The Madness of King George. It seems to parallel our current situation uncomfortably well.

Although I must admit that my general feeling about the situation of watching a leader go gradually mad was summed up by Dorothy Parker. Upon hearing of the death of former president Calvin Coolidge, her first response was “How can they tell?”

Suppose everyone could program computers. In other words, suppose computer programming were taught as a basic skill to every child, starting in kindergarten, and continuing on to the senior year of high school.

I’m not suggesting that little children be taught C++ or Javascript. I would imagine that they would first be introduced to the concepts of programming in an age-appropriate way, perhaps through simple play, then progress to a blocks language like Scratch, and eventually move on to something like Python, supported by a well designed user interface.

I am guessing that if we were really to do that, we would think about programming differently. For one thing, it would be used for different purposes than it is now.

Rather than being a specialty craft — akin to being a plumber or an electrician — it would be something done every day by hundreds of millions of people, like cooking. I also suspect that programming languages themselves would evolve to meet the needs of this much broader user population.

Advances in user interfaces to support programming would have a very different flavor, once the ability to program is no longer just an advanced professional skill, but also a basic literacy skill. The kind of programming language that ends up getting used by everybody might look very different from anything we have seen so far.

If there were a completely safe, non-toxic, not physically addictive way to put people into a good mood, would that be a good thing? I’m thinking just of some sort of ostensibly benign pill that helps people to chill, to accept each other, to relax and enjoy the moment.

On the surface, it seems like a good thing. But maybe such a thing runs counter to what people really need.

Perhaps our human tendency toward irrational moods and behaviors has actual survival value, despite its seemingly disruptive effect. Maybe, on some fundamental level, we need to argue.

If that is the case, then a perfect “good mood pill” might actually be destructive in ways we cannot yet measure. It might end up taking away something essential that is needed to give our lives meaning.

There is a strong argument that movies were inevitable. We are, after all, a storytelling species, and we seem to turn any available tool toward the task of telling stories.

In 1800, movies were pretty much unthinkable. In 1900, they were a budding novelty. By 2000 they had, in many ways, long displaced all other forms of storytelling.

Of course there were key geniuses who advanced the medium at many points in its development. But even in the absence of specific individuals such as Edison, the Lumière brothers or Eisenstein, others would have taken up the challenge.

The gating function, I think, was not the genius of any individual, but the emerging technological possibility itself. Once technology had advanced to the point where movies were possible, they were bound to be invented and developed in short order — because we are humans, and that’s what we do.

One reason I find this line of thought fascinating is in its implications for possibilities in the future. What storytelling technology is just now emerging, which today seems like a mere novelty, but will soon grow in its influence by leaps and bounds?

In short, what will be the successor to movies?

I have been designing a VR environment, which does not exist in the real world. There is a chance, however, that it might one day exist in the real world.

I am not sure how to classify my experience of walking around within and spending time exploring this environment. What relationship does it have to my experience of the physical world?

If this VR environment never gets built in the physical world, then it is merely a thing of exploration and conjecture. Like any novel or movie, it exists only in the collective minds of those who experience it.

But what if it does end up getting built? What if it eventually becomes a physical place where I end up living some fraction of my actual life?

Will that retroactively change the meaning of my current experience? Will I have, in some real sense, gotten a jump on living in my future life?

And what if my VR experience today causes me to make a change in the design or construction of that future physical place? It would be fascinating if a sensorily immersive yet entirely imaginary experience of today should end up causing a significant change to how I physically inhabit my future reality.

As VR becomes an increasingly common part of our everyday lives, I suspect that such questions will become more important. They may eventually become central questions of our existence.