Virtual Reality Must Reclaim the Dream

Riding the wake of Second Life’s 2007 publicity blitz, there have been many new entrants into the world of 3D immersion, once idealistically known as “virtual reality”. While Second Life has created an interesting experiment, they have so far seemed unable to turn the exposure into compelling innovation. The new batch of lukewarm 3D-world offerings seem little more than shiny re-iterations without anything truly exciting. Too often they all seem to reduce to fancy chat rooms. VR may be edging into interesting territory in quiet research groups and questionable government projects but the practical applications that hit the street seem to be stuck in the uninspiring rut of fashionable avatars and in-world video streaming. The exciting possibilities of the virtual domain appear to me to be lost in the banalities of the 20th century marketplace.

Way back in the early 1990′s the visionary projections of what VR could become, as touted by Terence McKenna, Jaron Lanier, Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer, Howard Rheingold, and many others, were rich with grand roadmaps towards deep immersion and hyperconnectivity. Great fantastic vistas would rise up in cyberspace while we clothed ourselves in magical representations, walking as telepathic deities in an unbridled world of our own making. The mind would become manifest in a vast psychedelic playground of the Soul. To be sure, this grand vision has been incrementally realized to some degree but the narrative was so compelling and exciting that the world expected it to arrive as soon as the internet started wiring us all together.

The early experiments pointed the way forward but were unrealizable in any practical setting that didn’t require $150,000 of university or milspec hardware. The dream was quickly subsumed by the criticism and the simple limitations imposed by the tech needed to support such visions. Platforms like VRML, ActiveWorlds, and Blaxxun emerged to try and bring VR to the masses – or at least begin to lay the foundations for practical world building – but once again they were assailed by those who wanted the fabled metaverse now and were unwilling to wait for the tech to catch up to the vision. Indeed, the worlds painted by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson – arguably the visionaries most responsible for the general conception of what VR is supposed to be – were so rich and compelling that, in some ways, they set the bar so high that attempts to date have typically been judged on their failure to reach that vision instead of on their movements towards its inevitable realization.

From my perspective, the current climate of discussion around open immersive worlds seems to have internalized the criticism and imposed it’s own self-limitations. The dream is no longer seen as safe or economical. The scope of implementations represented by Second Life, There, Metaversum, as well as the brand worlds like VMTV and Sony’s Home seems restrained and cautious, either sitting on old open platforms hoping the users will create compelling content from faded API’s, or erecting pretty, branded walls around restricted party clubs that are little more than targeted marketing opportunities. The only visible push for innovation seems to be jumping on the social net bandwagon and attempting to integrate Facebook-like features into 3D, but the actual implementations have seemed short-sighted and awkward at best. And why should Facebook just snap into 3D? Isn’t there a different modality that’s more appropriate to immersive worlds?

The need for a safe business model seems to have overwhelmed the value of a compelling forward-looking vision and a willingness to embrace new technology. The new Linden CEO seems to be a business functionary, brought in by the investors to drum up profits. Will they use them to push the platform forward or just make better ad space? And I understand that money is required to do these things and you really *do* need a good business model. But developing proprietary client platforms that try to re-invent the wheel every time they want to integrate a web 2.0 feature is not cost-effective or safe. All of the prevailing social web sites have open API’s that provide query returns and push-data streams. Flash and other rendering layers will happily provide dynamic overlays that enable truly compelling and interactive representations of user data. A safe and valuable business model would be to build a powerful scenegraph with rich material support and an elegant renderer, give it a simple javascript API, then skin it with a dynamic 2d layer. Wire it up and avatars now have pretty callouts that can display their interests and affiliations, their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles elegantly parsed and reconfigured for in-scene consumption; you have dynamic layers in-world that can show Twitter updates and RSS feeds, or media content and push advertising; your personal UI affordances can live alongside unobtrusive world nav controls; you have SMS, IM, and mobile comm support across worlds; you have the ability to have scaled interfaces and affordances appropriate to multiple device interfaces; you have the ability to send your camera feed out-of-world to a web page embed. The possibilities grow exponentially when immersive worlds are designed from the ground up to be cloud-aware, social, and scriptable.

I keep looking out for really interesting developments in this space but nobody seems to be doing it (caveat: I don’t see all and I’m only writing from my limited perspective). The most compelling examples are in the carefully-crafted MMORPG’s and truly immersive worlds like GTA4 but these worlds are closed and financed by huge warchests. Nevertheless, they are the ones who are painting the future and start-ups would do well to study their success and consider the properties that make them so compelling. Do we really need another hokey tween clubhouse? Maybe we do but let’s also take back the dream of truly rich and collaborative worlds that redefine what it means to be human and where the lines between material reality and digital space blur beyond recognition.

I do honestly applaud the efforts to create new 3D platforms but I plead with developers to push against the restraints imposed by critics and markets alike. The hardware is mighty, world culture and communication is going digital, and open networks are becoming the default standard. There has never been a better time to be idealistic about virtual reality and immersion.