Transcriber: Cindy Yeh Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Computer, turn on
Load: Charlotte and Kent Garden Program.
Resume chapter.
Isn't it lovely that Mr. Collins isn't in the garden today?
(laughter)
Virtual reality.
Virtual reality is a rich, visual, multi-sensory,
computer-simulated environment
in which we could immerse ourselves
and with which we could interact.
For some time now, it's been possible
to construct super realistic 3D models for us to fly around in,
interact in virtual worlds,
a la gaming,
don head-mounted displays, and haptic gloves,
even walk around rooms, life-sized rooms, in projection spaces.
In science fiction films, too,
they've shown us how virtual reality may play out.
Academics like Janet Murray, who wrote the book "Hamlet on the Holodeck",
have created design frameworks
to help us design virtual reality experiences.
And technologists, like Ivan Sutherland,
who first invented the head-mounted display in 1968 in MIT,
and Jaron Lanier, who founded VPL research
and indeed popularized the term "virtual reality",
have created the building blocks for the virtual reality industry.
But despite this big headway,
(laughter)
the technology for many years just wasn't there yet.
It was "unwieldy," to say the least,
it made you throw up,
and it was expensive for mass consumption.
Fast forward September 1, 2012.
A young guy by the name of Palmer Lucky,
and yes, this was in his basement,
invented a head-mounted display that solves the problem of lag.
Virtual reality without nausea.
He launches this Kickstarter campaign
and raises over $2 million, way above the $250,000 that was his goal.
Occulus Rift, his company was called,
was then, two years later, bought by Facebook for ...
Can anyone shout in the audience?
$2 billion!
Same time this year, you're going to be able to buy an Occulus Rift headset
for a price point that's a little less than the iPhone 6.
So many people in the interactive story-telling community
have been waiting for this for a very long time,
including myself.
When Norman Jewison invited me to create the new media laboratory
at the Canadian Film Center some twenty years ago,
a skunk works for the creation of visual forms of storytelling,
I was already dreaming about starring in my own "Pride and Prejudice."
Thank you, TEDx, for letting me make one.
But it wasn't really until recently
that we've started to explore forms in the virtual space,
like Google Glass applications or augmented reality applications,
companies that were accelerating.
And most recently, we've actually developed
our first Occulus Rift experience,
with a company called Occupy VR,
with Blair Reno and Jay Lee WIlliams,
where we took our award-winning interactive storytelling project
called "Body Mind Change," starring David Cronenberg,
and stuck it in this virtual reality space.
It's decidedly creepy, and it makes you feel like
you're living inside this dream.
So, I know that we're poised along this trajectory
of creating virtual reality applications, tools, and experiences.
But, as I was planning our future strategies
and how we would help develop the virtual reality industry,
I was struck by how...like it was 1994.
I had this feeling that it was like 1994 when Netscape,
the first commercial web browser, .was launched.
And this feeling made me pause and take stock.
And so what I want to do now is extract
the lessons of the internet experience of the past twenty years,
because I think these lessons will help guide us in the creation
of the commercial virtual reality industry in the next twenty years.
So let's go on to the first lesson:
Business model.
For this, I need to use a metaphor,
and it's a bit of a thought experiment,
so I need your help.
I want you guys to look around you,
look at the stage, look at what's in front of you.
Now imagine you're in a transparent bubble.
Everything looks the same as when I asked you to observe this space.
Now imagine that instead of being able to see
through the bubble, into the stage,
that an exact image of the same space
is being projected onto the surface of the bubble.
Again, everything looks the same.
But, of course, it's not the same.
It's virtual reality. And this image that you're seeing displayed on the surface
is a manufactured and synthetic one.
And we rely on the person who's doing that displaying
to send us an accurate image.
Now it's clear that in this situation,
we have absolutely no idea if what we're seeing,
this virtual reality that we're experiencing,
is indeed accurate or true.
Now imagine that the person who's projecting this image
is not only doing that, but collecting information about you,
about how you're responding to this image.
It would be like you being Jim Carrey in
Now the people on the balcony there might go,
"Well, Ana, we've seen that movie before."
But, in fact, it should feel familiar,
because vast areas of the internet
resemble this, but in a low-tech way.
The reality that we see, when we look at our Facebook homepage,
has been carefully constructed by Facebook.
The Google search results that Google displays
are different for everyone.
In effect, on the Internet, we all see a different version of reality.
Now the reason for this is that technology is not neutral.
In fact, it never has been, and it never will be.
The advent of the internet was supposed to bring
this democratized access to rich communications and information
through e-mail and the web, etc.
But instead, what we've seen, that's been driving
the evolution of the internet economically,
is the relentless focus on the internet user as consumer.
Now, a good way to understand this even more clearly
is to use another framework. The "moments of truth" framework
popularized by Proctor & Gamble.
As their CEO, A.G. Laughley, once said,
"The moment that the consumer stands in front of a store shelf
is the first moment of truth.
Without that moment, there will be no second moment
when the consumer consumes the products and benefits from them."
Now what happens when we insert the internet into this framework?
This image that you see, in some retail circles
would be called the "Zero" moment of truth.
The time at which you recognize you need something,
and you'd go online and search for it.
That behavior now is called "Googling it."
When we add social media to the mix,
you have the third moment of truth,
where you love a product so much
that you can't help but Tweet about it
or post it on Facebook.
So, really, to go back to this business model,
the business model of Google, Facebook, Pinterest,
and the firms who dominate the Internet today,
is build upon the successful manipulation
of the first and third moments of truth.
And they've become so good at this
as they learn more and more about us.
As they learn more and more about you.
Now, they didn't do this overnight.
What we've actually seen over the course of the last 20 years
is the gradual incursion of the large providers
into more and more of you,
sucking up data at a more and more granular level.
Now the data that I'm talking about includes,
at first, search behavior, then it was instant messaging content,
click-throughs, Likes, location,
and now, even today, since we all know that we live in a post-Snowden world,
our own private e-mail content.
The effect of this is that more and more of what you do
has become the basis of a microtransaction
The addition of one more data point
carrying potential economic value for the large data warehouses,
leading one-time CEO Eric Schmidt to remark,
"Technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people
to watch or consume something that has not, in some sense,
been tailored for them."
So this brings us to lesson 2.
So this is where we are now.
Right?
Now what happens when we bring VR into this situation?
VR into this situation?
To life inside the bubble?
Well, VR places the consumer in a tightly controlled, synthetic, trusted space
in which microbehaviors like the way my eye moves,
or the way my head tilts,
can be monitored, and can be closely monitored.
Now, if you add the addition, no element of context,
provided by wearable, quantified-self devices, like the FitBit,
I heard RC Alexander today Tweet out that he's got a FitBit in the audience,
or the Apple iWatch, which I tried to buy eagerly last week,
then all of a sudden, indicators of emotional state
can also be closely monitored.
This leads to ever more granular data collection.
Imagine if Google knows if and when you're happy.
Okay?
So, now if go back to our earlier framework,
what this really tells us is that the VR experience illuminates
the period prior to the "Zero" moment of truth.
A time when, cognitive psychologists tell us,
we are uniquely out of control of any sentient decision-making capability,
and, hence, more vulnerable to manipulation.
I call that "The Sub-Zero" moment of truth.
The bubble knows what you want before you even want it.
The last lesson I want to talk about is this:
it's the network, stupid!
The stupid person in that regard is actually me
because I forget this all the time.
I'm a content gal, so even though I know
that content distribution, like Netflix,
is a significant part of it, the internet,
and I have to remind myself this all the time,
is dominated by many-to-many applications.
Like e-mail, or instant messaging, social media, etc.
We know that as we move into a VR saturated world,
this will be part of that.
So, you may live in a VR bubble, but the good news is
that you won't be alone in it.
The porn industry knows this very well.
(Laughter)
So, among the many virtual realities that you'll experience,
will be spaces in which you meet other people,
and these are going to be glorious, wonderful, immersive spaces
that you can play games in, or spaces that you can meet
for virtual rock concerts, or even spaces in business
that will have a little bit more heart,
now that they're more immersive.
The thing that I have to remind myself though,
is that with network use comes network effects,
and some of them are good, like Flashmobs and Kickstarter,
and some bad. So network effects explain why
so few firms dominate the internet.
Network effects also explain why we all watch
the same dumb Buzzfeed and Upworthy videos.
So, to summarize, the wide-open,
democratizing internet of the mid-1990s,
is now, unfortunately, barely recognizable.
Absent any effective regulation
of its economic infrastructure,
the Internet has become an economic engine
devoted to converting big data from billions of people
into large profits for a small handful of players.
This commercial focus has squeezed out the public commons.
In cyberspace, those are spaces in which people congregate
outside of the economic interference
that typically shape their behavior.
So, what has once been a vast expansive view
has now become a constrained and homogenized one,
despite the fact that the internet also ushered in a Golden Era
of peer-to-peer communications.
So where do we go from here?
Well, I think VR is going to evolve in ways
that we can't anticipate,
but we don't have to repeat the errors of the past,
or to allow them to be amplified.
As Alan Kay said,
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Now, with VR, we're tasked with a design challenge.
Because VR amplifies the pressures that has defined
the internet as we know it today,
the stuff that I've been talking about.
So if we want to do something about it,
we need to work at it. So I"ll close very quickly now,
with three design goals that I think we should have:
the first one is let's link payment to consumption.
Free has a price. We may not want to pay that price,
in an internet augmented by virtual reality.
The second design goal is
we need to allow for an unfiltered perception of cyberspace.
The pixels on my bubble are not for sale.
Or, they are for sale, but only on my terms.
And the third design goal is to restore the public commons.
We need to have walled-off areas
that are free from economic intrusion.
I think I haven't been clicking my clicker --
I got so interested in my talk.
(laughter)
So - this is where we are now.
This is my son, Néo.
He's five years old and he's playing the Occulus Rift there, on Portal 2.
And yes, he was actually named Néo from
(Laughter)
Except, my partner's French, so we thought we'd put the accent on the "e."
(laughter)
So, in my mind, he's been living in this virtual world
for a lot longer than before he was born.
And I want him to be successful
in this augmented reality he's growing up to experience.
I don't want him to be some kind of unaware, exploited participant
in a hostile, Matrix-style world.
So, I think we have the power to shape what this world will be.
And I, for one, am going to try to do just that.
Thank you.
(applause and cheers)