Of course Burning Man could not take place as usual this year. So in a very noble and heroic effort, the organizers of Burning Man took created a version of the festival in virtual reality — in particular, in AltSpace VR.<\/p>\n
I tried VR Burning Man together with some friends, and I learned a lot. I could see the immense effort that went into it, and the artistry involved.<\/p>\n
Yet there was something unsatisfying about the experience. And I don’t mean in comparison with an in-person version of the festival — of course a virtual festival can never replace a real festival.<\/p>\n
I mean that various design choices were made that in retrospect didn’t work. The most notable was that there didn’t seem to be a way for our group of friends to travel together, the way one travels together in a car.<\/p>\n
Sure, we could individually navigate our avatars to the same place. But if I saw something in the distance and wanted to teleport there, I could not take my friends with me. We’d all need to try to jump to the same spot, and hope for the best.<\/p>\n
This is important because what really matters is not the cool things one sees, but the conversations with friends — the bonding that occurs when we go on an adventure together.<\/p>\n
If you keep needing to interrupt the conversation just to get to the next thing, then what is the point of going together on an adventure? It would like going on a cross-country road trip with everyone driving in a separate car.<\/p>\n
There are that things that I’d also like to see improved. But fixing that one would be a very good start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of course Burning Man could not take place as usual this year. So in a very noble and heroic effort, the organizers of Burning Man took created a version of the festival in virtual reality — in particular, in AltSpace VR. I tried VR Burning Man together with some friends, and I learned a lot. … Continue reading “Virtual Burning Man”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22560"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22561,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22560\/revisions\/22561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}