Author Ernest Cline is joining Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar for a conversation to promote his new book, Ready Player Two.
The sequel is due out on November 24th after 2011’s Ready Player One ignited imaginations with its vision of an 80’s-inspired future taken over by VR. The movie version, of course, came out in 2018 directed by Steven Spielberg. The Q&A session with Cline and Shankar will be streamed in Bigscreen on December 5th at 5 pm Pacific. According to Bigscreen, the event will be free to anyone with the Bigscreen application and a supported VR headset.
“Bigscreen is by far my favorite VR application and it’s also the one I’ve used the most this past year,” Cline said in a prepared statement. “I get together with my friends inside Bigscreen at least once a week to hang out, watch movies, and play games together, even though we’re scattered across the country. I’m so grateful to Darshan and his team for turning something from my imagination into a reality, and for doing it decades before I thought it would be possible.”
We’re interested to check out the new book and see how it stacks up to the original. There’s even been talk of a prequel as well that would explore the founding of the virtual Oasis that’s central to the story. It’ll be a little different reading the sequel in 2020, though, with VR headsets like Oculus Quest 2, HP Reverb G2, and Valve Index in homes around the world transporting people to virtual worlds.
Are you planning to give the book a read? Let us know in the comments.
Ernest Cline’s breakout novel Ready Player One is getting a sequel on November 24th, which is slated to delve back into the massive multiplayer VR world of the OASIS.
Aptly named Ready Player Two, the upcoming book is being published by Penguin Random House subsidiary Ballantine Books.
It’s already available for order on and available for pre-order on Amazon, both in Kindle and hardcover format.
Released in 2011, Ready Player One casts a dim vision of the year 2044. Like much of humanity, Wade Watts lives most of his life connecting to the massive multiplayer ‘OASIS’, which acts as a VR escape amid famine and social unrest. It’s a tale of ’80s nostalgia which flows recursively back into fashion thanks to the very Willy Wonka-esque prize hunt the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, left behind him after his death. That’s the bare bones, no spoiler version of it anyway.
RPO has celebrated its fair share of success; it spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was adapted into a film, produced by Steven Spielberg.
Another big endorsement: Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder and inventor of the Oculus Rift, liked the novel so much that in the early days all Oculus employees received a copy of the book. Of course, not everyone appreciated it.
i dislike Ready Player One, for a lot of reasons; one of those reasons is that at oculus (circa 2015?) all new employees were given a copy & told it was the future of VR. so i started performing a sort of trash collection service & using them to prop up my trackers at work. pic.twitter.com/9Efdt1EQlN
Besides the book’s page count (384) and ISBN, there isn’t any further info on Ready Player Two just yet. The cover shows a single Pitfall (1982) style character lunging for what appears to be a diamond—so definitely some amount of ’80s references to play off of here.
Love it or hate it, it’s going to be interesting to see whether Cline has changed his views on virtual reality since writing the first in the series, which came two years before the original 2012 Oculus Kickstarter campaign and resultant relaunching of VR headsets into the consumer market.
Ready Player One: Oasis beta (2018), the free mini-game sampler with experiences inspired by Steven Spielberg’s latest film Ready Player One (2018),is finally on Steam, which includes support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
RPO: Oasis beta previously launched on Viveport, HTC Vive’s app store, shortly after the film hit the theaters late last month.
Just like in the book/film, the Oasis beta launcher divides the universe into discrete ‘planets’:
Planet Gauntlet– Navigate through a seemingly endless dungeon while the undead seek to destroy you. Collecting gold will improve your score and eating food will restore your health, but only your bow skills will ensure that you make it our alive. (Developed by Directive Games)
Battle for the OASIS – Help to save the OASIS by defeating waves of IOI Sixers. Advance through the trenches of Planet Doom towards the snowy planes that surround Anorak’s Castle. With an arsenal of potent firepower, you must stop the Sixers from controlling the fate of the OASIS. (Developed by Steel Wool Studios)
Rise of the Gunters – Fight against a nearly invincible army of highly trained IOI Sixers alone OR with up to two of your friends! Proceed with caution as you defeat Sixers, collect their coins, find power ups and survive a merciless onslaught of hyper-explosive kinetic action for as long as you can survive. The OASIS is yours. Take it back from IOI by yourself or with up to two fellow Gunters! (Developed by Drifter Entertainment Inc.)
Smash – Smash is a futuristic and action-packed arcade game. In Smash, players step into a futuristic arena with powered-up paddles in each hand. The goal is to strike balls past opponents and block incoming shots on goal. The game adds obstacles and power-ups such as multi-balls and power-balls to up the pace and challenge. (Developed by Vive Studio’s 2 Bears Studio)
There’s also a bespoke Avatar Creator from Morp3d so you can style yourself just like the ’80s retro-future-neo-noir-cyberpunk you always knew you were inside.
Ready Player One was released on March 29th, and the current VR experience that comes the closest to realizing the vision of the OASIS depicted in the movie is the social VR experience of VRChat. By 2045, I predict that we’ll have a decentralized open metaverse that’s built on WebXR, and that it’ll be the open web that realizes the educational potential of OASIS that’s depicted within the novel version of Ready Player One. But I think we’ll continue to have open and closed systems just as we do today, and it’s likely that there will a closed, walled garden metaverse of interconnected worlds that is more akin to the vision of the OASIS that’s built by Gregarious Simulation Systems. But if you want to experience the OASIS today, then VRChat is the experience to check out.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to talk with VRChat’s CEO and co-founder Graham Gaylor and Chief Creative Ron Millar at GDC where we talked about the recent growth of VRChat, what type of trends they’re seeing, what they’re doing to support streamers, and where they’re going in the future.
VRChat was one of the first social VR experiences to enable fully customizable avatars, but they also allow creators to upload their own worlds. VRChat went through some exponential grown in the Fall of 2017 thanks in part to a number of YouTubers including Jameskii & Nagzz21, and Twitch personalities like pokelawls, dyrus, greekgodx, and LIRIK who discovered the unique user-generated VRChat worlds, customized avatars, a fusion of pop culture references & memes, as well as opportunities for live action role play, cosplay, social games, and serendipitous social interactions in these virtual worlds.
VRChat has the most advanced friend-finding features of any Social VR experience, but they also have the user experience of traversing between virtual worlds with a group of people by dropping in-world portals. They also have a diverse range of different private social VR experiences including invite-only instances or instances where anyone invited can invite their friends.
VRChat has enabled a 2D desktop version of their experience allows non-VR PC players to participate in the social VR worlds, but with limited functionality including not being able to use their hands. Not all of the concurrent users on VRChat are in virtual reality, but it’s an experience that’s been inspiring a lot of people to buy a VR system in order to enhance their experience in the game. This support for non-VR participation has contributed to their rise in popularity, and this success means that they’ve had to deal with various moderation challenges that come with operating virtual social spaces at this scale.
There aren’t any VR experiences yet that realize the full potential of the ‘OASIS’, the VR metaverse depicted in the novel Ready Player One, as there are a lot more educational aspects to the OASIS that didn’t make the cut for the movie version. I think that it’s most likely the these types of educational experiences will be built on the open web using open standards like WebXR, and currently Google’s Expeditions is the probably the closest platform that is realizing the more educational aspects of the OASIS. It was encouraging to hear the Google Expeditions team talk about using A-Frame to build experiences that target the web, and so by 2045 I expect that there will be a combination of centralized walled gardens as well as decentralized open metaverse worlds that are built upon open standards like WebXR.
VRChat has opted to create the best experiences possible today by creating a centralized solution where they are hosting all of the content, and they’re in charge of moderating content and social behaviors. The long-term business model for VRChat hasn’t been announced to the community yet, but Chief Creative Officer Ron Millar told me that they want to be sure that there’s a way for the most successful content creators to be compensated for their creations.
CEO Graham Gaylor said that VRChat is open to exploring various decentralized solutions if it’s something that the community of users starts to ask for, but they’re currently focused on creating the best user experience that’s possible using the technologies that are out there. They’ve been focused on supporting Unity with their SDK which has allow existing VR creators to jump into creating worlds for VRChat.
AltspaceVR actually put a lot of engineering effort to be able to integrate the open web into their platform. JanusVR has the most advanced implementations of seamlessly integrating with the open web, and Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity has always taken a hybrid approach of blending together a centralized and decentralized approach. An updated version of the networked A-Frame plug-in was just released, and it should provide a foundation for social VR experiences on the open web. These more decentralized solutions take more time, effort, and energy to design experiences for, and they’re using web technologies that still aren’t consistently at a level of quality that native applications can run. High Fidelity is probably the closest to achieving experience parity with their framework that’s built using JavaScript as the primary coding language, but it still doesn’t have the same consistency or quality as native code—even though it’s rapidly improving all the time.
It’ll be interesting to see how VRChat continues to grow and expand, and they have a publicly listed set of feature requests listed on their VRChat feedback page that provides a sense of their roadmap and popular feature requests. After WebXR 1.0 launches later this year, then I expect to see some of the more decentralized open web approaches to start to rapidly improve, but I expect that it is still going to take a number of years before these open web experiences will be able to catch up to the quality of the social VR experience that is currently provided by VRChat.
But Rosedale believes in the power of Metcalf’s Law, which says that the value of a network increases with the square of the nodes that are included in this network. This means that as more people start creating experiences for the open web, then the network effects start to make the value of the open web exponentially more valuable. Rosedale expects to see the evolution of the metaverse mirror what happened when people started to use the open web over the more curated and polished, centralized walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve, and CD-ROMS.
The recent privacy backlash against centralized companies like Facebook is an indication that the general public is starting to realize the dangers of a centralized entity growing to the scale of billions of users, and the antidote is decentralized architectures that protect user privacy. Chris Dixon’s essay “Why Decentralization Matters” documents how most of the VC funding and smartest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are starting to build decentralized systems based on the blockchain, and so there’s a larger trend in the tech industry that’s starting to focus more on building a more viable decentralized economy that’s not as susceptible to a handful of centralized players like Facebook or Google from completely dominating the online ad marketplace thanks to their business models of surveillance capitalism.
Another recent announcement at GDC was High Fidelity & JanusVR announced the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance that emphasizes portable identities, registering assets, and acceptance of virtual currencies. It’s these types of decentralized architectures that are more forward-looking, and are building for the future, but VRChat’s Gaylor says that it has taken these companies a lot longer to build a user experience that’s been as compelling as what VRChat has been able to create. VRChat has opted for pushing the boundary as to what is even possible that inspires the decentralized solutions to have a design goal.
So in conclusion, I think that VRChat is still the closest VR experience that exists today that starts to realize the vision of the OASIS depicted in the Ready Player One movie, but I suspect that by 2045 that the open web built on top of the WebXR open standards are going to realize the full vision of the open metaverse and the educational potential of the OASIS that’s depicted within the novel. Both are important parts of creating the social VR metaverse that we all want to see in the future, and hopefully the dystopian sci-fi visions of the future depicted in Ready Player One can help us recognize the downfalls of centralized power, and inspire us to build an open and sustainable metaverse on a decentralized architecture that we all deserve.
HTC showed off eight Ready Player One-inspired experiences at the film’s debut event at SXSW. Now, the company has released three of these experiences on Viveport in a single download called Ready Player One: OASIS Beta.
Here’s the full list of mini-games available in Oasis Beta:
Planet Gauntlet – Navigate through a seemingly endless dungeon while the undead seek to destroy you. Collecting gold will improve your score and eating food will restore your health, but only your bow skills will ensure that you make it our alive. Developer: Directive Games
Planet Doom – Battle for the OASIS – Help to save the OASIS by defeating waves of IOI Sixers. Advance through the trenches of Planet Doom towards the snowy planes that surround Anorak’s Castle. With an arsenal of potent firepower, you must stop the Sixers from controlling the fate of the OASIS. Developer: Steel Wool Studios
Planet Doom – Rise of the Gunters – Fight against a nearly invincible army of highly trained IOI Sixers alone OR with up to two of your friends! Proceed with caution as you defeat Sixers, collect their coins, find power ups and survive a merciless onslaught of hyper-explosive kinetic action for as long as you can survive. The OASIS is yours. Take it back from IOI by yourself or with up to two fellow Gunters! Developer: Drifter Entertainment, Inc.
The download is available for free from Viveport, although at least one of the games is launching on Steam soon—Drifter Entertainment’s Rise of the Gunters—which includes support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
If that’s not enough to satiate your need for Ready Player One goodness before the film officially launches on March 29th, social VR platforms Sansar is still hosting an Aech’s Garage experience, and TheWaveVR has reimagined the film/novel’s ‘Distracted Globe’ nightclub, replete with ’80s hits and plenty of nostalgia to keep you spinning like a record, baby.
There’s still no word on when Morph3D’s Ready Player One – Avatar Creator will arrive. You can sign up for more information on the Morph3D website.
Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel Ready Player One is hitting the big screen later this month. As a story based in a world where virtual reality headsets are omnipresent and everyone is connected to the massive multiplayer online universe dubbed ‘The Oasis’, many are wondering what role the film will play in VR’s continued push towards mainstream adoption. While basically none of the technology portrayed in Ready Player One reflects the current state of VR devices or software, leaving a clear gap in its ‘advertised’ benefits and the reality of the experience available to VR users today, it still has the potential to be a significant factor in VR adoption. To what extent? Well, that comes down to how many eyeballs see it and if it sucks or not.
In case you haven’t read the book, or heard anything about the movie, here’s the spoiler-free summary from Warner Bros.:
In the year 2045, the real world is a harsh place. The only time Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) truly feels alive is when he escapes to the OASIS, an immersive virtual universe where most of humanity spends their days. In the OASIS, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone-the only limits are your own imagination. The OASIS was created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who left his immense fortune and total control of the Oasis to the winner of a three-part contest he designed to find a worthy heir. When Wade conquers the first challenge of the reality-bending treasure hunt, he and his friends-aka the High Five-are hurled into a fantastical universe of discovery and danger to save the OASIS.
Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, save film critics and the people who attended a limited early debut, I haven’t seen the film yet. I do have a pretty good idea of what’s in store though; I’ve read the novel a few times, seen every trailer, dragged my eyes across every behind-the-scenes image currently available, and even skimmed the supposedly leaked screenplay; call it my duty as a journalist who both says and types the letters “VR” about 50 times per day. I am allowing myself one unfounded prediction though before seeing the film: even though HTC Vive is the official VR partner of the film, you won’t see the protagonist Wade Watts wearing an HTC-branded headset. In every image I’ve seen of Wade (Tye Sheridan), he’s wearing a variety of fictional headsets emblazoned with the story’s evil corporation ‘IOI’, so there doesn’t appear to be any VR-specific brand placement in the film. So, the film isn’t overtly making any specific claims about current tech—something that ought to help people avoid making erroneous connections between the film’s idealized VR tech, and what really exists on shelves today.
image courtesy Entertainment Weekly
Inevitably some people will mistake Ready Player One‘s ‘perfect’ version of VR tech for the technology available today, replete with the still-fictional ability for complete sensory immersion inside a photorealistic MMO—something that plainly doesn’t exist. After all, to the uninitiated, the outward appearance of a person wearing a VR headset is pretty much the same as in the film. It’s probable most people will implicitly understand that it’s no more possible today than the augmented reality objects and characters seen in recent sci-fi flick Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Ready Player One is set in a fake future set 30 years from now; most people will get that.
Despite the gap between film and reality, fiction can still be a powerful motivator in driving public behavior though, and presenting the viewer with a place or activity can be just as powerful as flashing a well-positioned can of Coke on the screen.
Compelling movie-goers out of their seats and into a specific location, activity, lifestyle doesn’t appear to have a fool-proof recipe, although it’s clear that a fantasy-based, 2 hour-long advert has done the trick for a few very successful films. And in that vein, Ready Player One is an advert for VR.
Case in point: Hobbits don’t exist. Cheery old Hobbiton, although maintained as a tourist destination today at a family run farm five miles west of Hinuera, New Zealand, isn’t a ‘real’ place either. Just the same, New Zealand’s Tourism Board continues to capitalize on the success of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Trilogy by essentially advertising it as the ‘Land of the Middle Earth’ thanks to the country’s role in serving as the main filming location. New Zealand’s International Visitor survey found that 16 percent of international tourists cited The Hobbit Trilogy as the initial reason they considered a trip to the country in 2015. You could call it The Lord of the Rings Effect. You could also equally call it The Top Gun Effect, or The A River Runs Through It Effect.
image courtesy Hobbiton Tours
A River Runs Through It (1993) starring Brad Pitt is well-known by many a Montanan as the main reason for the massive influx of fishing tourists looking to live the poetic fly fishing lifestyle famously espoused in the film. Having lived in Montana in the late ’90s and done my fair share of fishing there, A River Runs Through It was on the lips of nearly every crotchety fisherman, who would incessantly blame the movie for the fresh rash of Californians walking in with a pair of brand new waders and trying his/her hand at slapping a fishing pole against a few low-slung tree limbs. It wasn’t just a Montana phenomenon though, as it was the impetus for a 40 percent increase in fly-fishing gear sold by major mail order firm The Orvis Company.
After Top Gun, the US Navy saw a 500 percent surge in interest to become a Navy aviators after its 1986 release, attributed directly to the film’s portrayal of the idealized lifestyle and drama surrounding rock star-level naval pilots. Whether actual enlistment numbers were dramatically affected still isn’t really clear, as the Navy hasn’t released any hard numbers, however what is clear is people saw the possibility of a lifestyle portrayed in a work of fiction and wanted a piece of it.
While direct product placement is a bit of a different beast in terms of motivating movie-goers to open their wallets, it’s interesting to note that in Risky Business (1983), Tom Cruise’s prior film to Top Gun, where Cruise dons a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, resulted in a near doubling of in sales of the iconic shades in 1983 alone. Like I said, Ready Player One‘s ability to drive VR adoption isn’t so much about direct product placement because it’s a sci-fi film without a direct link to a specific product, although you might consider the VR tech of today to be Ready Player One-adjacent enough to drive significant interest. Effectively converting that interest into a headset purchase doesn’t come without some barriers of its own though.
Possibility for Disillusion
There’s plenty of different options to choose from, but there’s also a real possibility for disillusion. It’s not so much tied up in the technical state of current VR hardware either, as you can really have some life changing experiences in VR right this second, but it’s more about disillusion with the hardware’s barrier to entry. Movie-goers fresh from the theater looking to spend money on a headset will have only a few real options, and starting out from scratch (ie: no gaming computer, no VR-supported flagship phone, or no PlayStation 4) means newcomers will have to drop a few hundred dollars minimum as the price of admission for a decent quality experience.
image created by Road to VR
While Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have come down in price significantly since launch in 2016—a Rift now at $400 and a Vive at $600—combined with the need for at very least a middle tier gaming PC, the overall investment in the highest-quality experience is still prohibitively expensive for a good chunk of the film’s target audience, which is likely gunning for males aged 13-30. Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream require specific flagship smartphones, which if you already own will only set you back about $130 for just the add-on headset and controller. The level of immersion for these more limited mobile VR headsets, while great starter devices, doesn’t really have the depth of gameplay possible with positionally-tracked headsets such as Rift, Vive, or Windows VR headsets. PlayStation VR is a much better candidate for the target audience, although without a PS4, you’re still looking at a total of about $600 by the time you buy the console and headset.
There are future headsets on the rise, such as the $200 Oculus Go standalone headset and a still-hypothetical Western release for HTC Vive Focus standalone, but with no official launch date for either, they simply don’t factor in yet. However, the $400 Lenovo Mirage Solo standalone could stand to benefit, though it won’t launch until May 5th, outside of the film’s prime time. People might also try a cheaper Cardboard smartphone holder and decide it’s not worth investigating further.
These aren’t insurmountable barriers, but they will add friction in the vital process between exiting the theater and heading to Best Buy for that first headset purchase motivated by seeing a cool adventure that uses virtual reality.
Please Don’t Suck
If it’s anything like the book, Ready Player One the film will excel at selling a single idea more than anything—the ‘wow, VR is going to be really cool and I want in now no matter what’ idea we all had at some point before jumping into the deep end. Of course, there aren’t any guarantees that Spielberg’s Ready Player One will pan out as one of those instant classics on the level of Top Gun either.
image courtesy Warner Bros.
It’s impossible to fit a book’s-worth of content into a two hour-long film, so there’s bound to be discussion surrounding whether the movie truly captured the soul of the book while not managing to lop off the important bits for the sake of brevity and traditional movie pacing. Whether it resonates with the audience or not is really the only metric that matters here though. On that front, Rotten Tomatoes currently gives the movie an aggregate critic score of 80%, so it’s poised to do at least an average job of getting butts into seats on its own merits. Also, it’s a Steven Spielberg flick, so it certainly has name-brand appeal.
We can really only wait and see if the film will be considered a successful ‘activation’ of VR. That said, if the film isn’t spectacular and doesn’t really ‘stick’, it certainly won’t hurt VR adoption, it’ll simply fade into obscurity and cease exist in the collective consciousness.
HTC today announced it’s bringing 8 VR experiences inspired by Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film Ready Player One to its official South by Southwest (SXSW) event. If you’re not going to be able to make it to Austin this week, you’ll be able to download all of these experiences at home for free before the film’s March 29th release.
HTC says in a blog post they’ve partnered with “many of the top developers in VR to build experiences that capture the essence of the Ready Player One universe.”
The company says all of these titles will be free to download for home users later this month from Viveport and Steam, or alternatively play in VR arcades across the United States.
Ready Player One: Avatar Creator
People come to the OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay for all the things they can be. With millions of permutations, the Avatar Creator lets you create your own highly detailed OASIS persona. Share your custom Avatar with friends and fellow Gunters. Developer: Morph3D
Battle for the OASIS
image courtesy HTC
Help save the OASIS by defeating waves of IOI Sixers. Advance through the trenches of Planet Doom towards the snowy planes that surround Anorak’s Castle. With an arsenal only possible in the OASIS, you must stop IOI from gaining control. Developer: Steel Wool Studios
Rise of The Gunters
image courtesy HTC
Fight against a nearly invincible army of highly trained IOI Sixers. Proceed with caution as you defeat Sixers, collect their coins, find power ups and survive a merciless onslaught of hyper-explosive kinetic action for as long as it takes. The OASIS is yours. Take it back. Battle the IOI by yourself or with up to two fellow Gunters! Developer: Drifter Entertainment, Inc.
Gauntlet
image courtesy HTC
Navigate through a seemingly endless dungeon while the undead seek to destroy you. Collecting Gold will improve your score and eating food will restore your health, but only your bow skills will ensure that you make it out alive. Developer: Directive Games
Aech’s Garage
image courtesy Sansar
Walk into the extraordinary world of Aech’s Garage in VR as interpreted from the original ILM design for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One.” Inspired by the virtual universe of the OASIS in 2045, Aech’s Garage represents the culmination of VR as it exists in the year 2018. Developer: Sansar
The Distracted Globe Music Experience in TheWaveVR
Step inside the fantastical space inspired by The Distracted Globe zero-gravity dance club scene from “Ready Player One.” TheWaveVR experience will let anyone immerse themselves in the dance club scene with specially designed avatars,`80s visuals and music, plus the ability to fly to the music in zero gravity. Available at SXSW and in participating VR arcades across the country on March 9. Launching on TheWaveVR’s free app on Steam in the U.S. beginning Thursday, March 17 at 9:00 p.m. CT. Developer: TheWaveVR
Smash
image courtesy HTC
Enhance your hand and eye coordination in this nod to OASIS creator James Halliday’s favorite`80s arcade games. Developer: 2 Bears Studio (Vive Studio partner)
Fracture
image courtesy HTC
Heighten your spatial awareness and reflexes in this throwback to` 80s brick smasher games reimagined in VR. Developer: 2 Bears Studio (Vive Studio partner)
Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film Ready Player One—based on Ernest Cline’s eponymous New York Times Bestseller—is getting plenty of buzz at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year ahead of the film’s March 29th release. According to Warner Bros., SXSW attendees will get a chance to “immerse themselves in vivid glimpses into hero Wade Watt’s world, experience the OASIS using VIVE VR, enjoy live artist performances, and more.”
The event will take over a two-story, city block of Brazos Hall, and will run from March 9th to March 11th. There are specific operating hours for the event’s VR experiences, so make sure to check the official schedule here.
With HTC as the film’s official VR partner, VR demo stations will include a number of experiences such as an Avatar Creator, a WaveVR DJ set by the film’s star Tye Sheridan (who plays Wade Watts), and VR versions of classic arcade games and experiences inspired by the universe of Ready Player One.
image courtesy Ernest Cline
SXSW is well-known for offering these sorts of giant ‘brand engagement’ events, but this is by far one of the largest to date that puts VR at its core. To deliver on the film/book’s virtual vibe, the exterior of Brazos Hall will be transformed into the Stacks, the vertical trailer park where people live. Attendees will receive an RFID wristband, and enter the venue through Wade’s van, the protagonist’s hideout, and also experience a slice of the fantastical online world of the OASIS through both VR and physical installations.
Here’s the full list of things to do:
The RFID wristband will keep score as guests test their knowledge of ‘80s trivia, play arcade games, or look for hidden clues, to move up the Leaderboard to win fun prizes, including one grand prize per day: an HTC VIVE VR System.
Visitors can browse at Avatar Outfitters, offering the Hot Topic “Ready Player One” Pop-Up Shop. Guests will have a chance to score officially licensed gear, including exclusive t-shirts, caps, jewelry, backpacks, collectible pins and other cool accessories, as well as fan-favorite Funko Pop! vinyl figures and Copper, Jade and Crystal key sets, and much more, all available for purchase.
Guests can try out the “Ready Player One” Avatar Creator by VIVE to choose their new digital identity, and then send the avatar to their personal email.
Drop into 2045’s hottest nightclub, The Distracted Globe, where infinity mirrors create the impression of being gravity-free for a cool photo op, and guests can enjoy “Ready Player One”-themed specialty cocktails.
From the stage: ‘80s trivia happy hours and nightly artist performances, with special guest DJs and performers, including a WaveVR DJ set by Tye Sheridan, who stars in “Ready Player One”; Them Jeans; FM-84; Bird Peterson; and a special performance by a surprise guest.
On Saturday, March 10, the SXSW Film Festival will hold its 25th Edition party, celebrating the anniversary of the film festival, at the Experience.
On Sunday, March 11, the venue will hold a livestream, “Ready Player One” LIVE at SXSW, powered by Twitch and IMDb, hosted by Aisha Tyler and correspondent Alex Correa. The stream will be live on Twitch and IMDB and will feature some of the stars and filmmakers from “Ready Player One,” including cast members Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao and Ben Mendelsohn; screenwriter Zak Penn; and author/screenwriter/co-producer Ernest Cline.
Ready Player One, the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, is getting turned into a movie by none other than Steven Spielberg, who is directing the film. As the movie’s March 2018 release date approaches, a new trailer, ‘Dreamer’ debuted this week.
Ready Player One follows the story of Wade Watts, an orphan whose life is centered around a virtual reality metaverse called Oasis. As it turns out, the creator of the Oasis has hidden a key which controls the entire metaverse, leading to a mad dash among users to find the key and assume control.
The latest trailer overviews the central conflict in the movie (as trailers these days always seem to do), and briefly explores the Oasis.
Ready Player One: Dreamer
Set to debut widely on March 29th, Ready Player One has already seen preview screenings, and seems to be faring reasonably well with critics thus far, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting an aggregate score of 79% ‘Fresh’ among critics at the time of writing.
Virtual reality (VR) has been a hot topic in the media and the tech sector for the last couple of years, but it is about to hit a new level of buzz, thanks to the internationally best-selling book Ready Player One (2011) by author Ernest Cline, and movie adaptation from award winning director, Steven Spielberg, premiering in theaters today. The Ready Player One (RPO) novel is often cited by industry experts as one of the top recommendations for VR-related book lists. The story’s primary backdrop is a world where VR is intertwined into every aspect of our daily lives, what I call a ‘VR-First future’. RPO follows the adventures of a teenager and his friends as they overcome untold challenges on their quest to win a global online scavenger competition and its gigantic prize.
Guest Article by Alvin Wang Graylin
Alvin Wang Graylin is the China President of Vive at HTC leading all aspects of the Vive/VR business in the region. He is also currently Vice-Chairman of the 300-member company Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance, President of the $15 Billion Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance, and oversees the Vive X VR accelerator in Asia. He has had over 22 years of business management experience in the tech industry, including 15 years operating in Greater China. Prior to HTC, Graylin was a serial entrepreneur, having founded four venture-backed startups in the mobile and internet spaces, covering mobile social, adtech, search, big data and digital media. Additionally, he has held P&L roles at several public companies.
Update (3/29/18): With today’s premiere of the Ready Player One movie, Graylin has added some additional thoughts to this article, originally published in August, 2017, after screening the film.
Image courtesy Warner Bros Pictures
I was fortunate enough to have gotten access to see the early preview of the film a couple of days ago and am happy to report that it’s a delightful film that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats for over two hours. I was originally a little concerned that the extensive references to 80’s American pop culture and complex topics related to the technology would make the film hard to appreciate for global audiences, but Spielberg has again worked his magic and found ways to give it appeal to audiences of all ages and cultures. Even in the film preview night in Beijing, the audience seemed to cheer and laugh at all the right moments, and every face coming out of the cinema bore big smiles.
The impact of this movie will go far beyond an entertaining evening for the audience. It’ll go a long way toward making VR better understood by the general public around the world and, just as important, help normalize VR headsets. I’m sure the actual VR devices of 2045 will be far less bulky that what’s depicted in the movie, but I’m actually glad Spielberg decided to use more current day form factors in the film as this will help general consumers better related and accept current devices. I’m excited to see how RPO will change the growth/adoption trajectory of the VR industry. For those that have only watched the movie, but haven’t read the book, I’d still recommend going back and reading it to get a deeper view. Both are enjoyable in different ways.
Although some would describe the world of 2045 depicted in RPO as a bit bleak or dystopian, I would argue that there are numerous positive lessons we can glean from this envisioned future world that should give us hope and guidance. In fact, I have asked everyone in the China Vive team to read the RPO book and that our HR department give all new staff a copy of the book as there are so many relevant concepts and use cases I believe all can benefit from. Given it is a fictional story written more to entertain than educate, there are a number of technical details I may not fully agree with, so let us not take all the content too literally as some technical readers can tend to do. On a whole, RPO is surprisingly insightful for a novel about a technology that has the potential to create truly transformative impact on our future lives.
I was first exposed to VR over 25 years ago and as most involved in the HIT Lab, we saw its potential from our very first experience. Over the last 1.5 years in my current roles with VIVE, Vive X, IVRA and VRVCA, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluated hundreds of immersive computing products/content, reviewed thousands of VR startup companies and given exposure to the industry’s long-term roadmap. I have tried to take those learnings into account when providing my takeaways from the RPO story. This book and its future adaptations into other media will make the concept of VR accessible for a mass audience, in turn helping bring broad understanding of VR to the general public.
RPO will do for VR what Avatar (2009) did for 3D in general awareness. A form of the ‘VR-First’ future from the book will become a reality in the not too distant future, and the RPO will play an instrumental role in accelerating its realization. What form of the future is finally realized is ultimately up to us as a people, and how we decide to leverage the potential of this disruptive technology.
To help both our internal team and the broader public better understand the takeaways from the story, here is my summary of the key points from the book we can use to guide our actions in the near to mid-term to create a more positive future. It can also be used as a guide to highlight potential business opportunities for budding VR entrepreneurs. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, it’s only the ones I wanted to highlight at this time. I welcome all readers to append other lessons they think worthwhile in the comments section.
Spoiler alert: I have tried to make book references vague enough not to reveal the plot of the book in these learnings, but it may provide hints to the plot. So if you want a pure reading experience of the book, best you go read the book before reading the rest of this article.
16 Key Takeaways from the Ready Player One Novel
1. We will be more dependent on VR devices than we are our phones today
It is clear from the story how VR can be applied to all aspects of our lives from work to school to play, and is our key access point to all information we would ever need. Given that essentially no other devices are mentioned in the book, it shows the potential for a future world to have replaced all other screens/interfaces with VR devices. For those not yet familiar with VR, it’s probably worth you and your family’s time to go find a VR arcade to try some high-end VR or at least pick up a mobile VR shell to get acquainted with low-end VR.
2. VR may play a bigger role in our future lives than AR
Many analysts have forecasted that AR applications could outpace VR in the future. I believe the two technologies will naturally meld together over time into an integrated experience materialized on a single device, so there’s no real need to so clearly delineate. Some early high-end VR devices already have such capabilities built-in. However, it is notable that in the book, very few AR type use cases were actually cited. Which does make sense when most people in a VR-first future can live a large portion of their lives without leaving their homes, their dependency on AR applications will actually be less frequent than their VR requirements. Developers should take some time to start thinking about how AR concepts and technology can be applied to enhance VR experiences and vice versa.
3. Network speeds and cloud computing capacity will be the key utility of the future
In a world where most our interactions with the world are via a VR device, connectivity/computing speeds will impact our lives more than other utilities we care about today, i.e. water, gas, electricity. 5G, fiber-to-the-home and server farms will be increasingly important to our daily lives. In fact, without VR proliferation, the impetus for these capabilities becomes much less. In this future world, we will prefer to be without water or gas for an hour vs. than without constant high-speed connectivity. Startups looking into cloud computing capabilities that fully leverage the coming fat/fast data pipes to deliver innovative services could reap huge rewards in the future.
4. Everyone will become ‘Gamers’ & watching game streams will be a major pass-time
According to Mary Meeker’s recent Internet report, in 1995 there were 100 million gamers, and today, there are 2.6 billion. In the VR-first future, much of our lives will have become ‘gamified’ in a virtual world and we will essentially all be gamers. Games today is often seen as an activity that wastes times and produces little economic value. In the VR-First future, that is no longer the case when gamified work and education can make our careers more enjoyable and help use learn in new ways.
E-sports has become a phenomenon over the last few years, and its gaining momentum as more and more people spending their time playing online games and watching others compete for large cash prizes. In the book, the entire story unfolds around the playing of the largest e-sport game imaginable where essentially the entire globe is playing a single game in an effort to win the ultimate prize and hundreds of millions of users are watching real-time updates via live game streams. E-sport athlete avatars will become more famous than real-world celebrities. In fact the VR-First world, the most famous movie stars of the future, may not even be real people.
5. Virtual Schools will democratize high quality education to the world
I deeply believe that our education model can be revolutionized by VR technology and quality education made universally accessible. Quality and quantity of education has been directly linked to one’s career success and income. In the VR-First future, every child (and adult) will have access to the best school/teachers. The planet Ludus where all children can get access to quality education via VR is a potential model that does make sense. Governments giving free VR equipment to all students worldwide to learn in virtual schools can actually be far more economical than operating physical schools around the world. Studies have already shown VR can help kids learn more and retain information longer vs. traditional teaching. Vive is already working with hundreds of schools and universities around the world to pilot VR educational methods as well as building education-focused tools and content. School administrators and governments need to start looking into how to better leverage VR to teach our future generations now.
6. Remote work via VR will become the norm
Most of the work and meeting scenarios described in the book took place in VR equipment. Although physical offices were mentioned for certain companies, given all the actual interpersonal interactions actually took place in the virtual world, we can derive that the physical need to be in the office really doesn’t exist for most cases. Think of how much time we can regain in our days be eliminating the need for commuting and business travel. Even today, many industries such as design, engineering and healthcare have already show significant increases in productivity by conducting a significant portion of their work in VR.
7. VR can erase race and gender inequality gaps
In the book, one of the characters disguises his/her race and sex by selecting an unmatched appearance in the chosen avatar in an effort to avoid the innate negative biases that exists in our society. When most of our interactions with others are conducted via our avatars, we truly can allow people to be judged solely on our creativity and intellect vs. our physical traits or social status. In our world today, females and minorities generally earn ~20% less for the same role. In the VR-First future, that doesn’t have to be.
8. Gathering experiences and access will be more important than gathering wealth
When we can have any life we want in the virtual world, gathering physical possessions becomes less important and so does gathering monetary wealth. What affects our personal or social status in the VR-First future will be our experience level granting us greater influence and access. Even in the current world, why not take guidance from the future and spend more of our time/money on life experiences vs. material goods.
9. Virtual currency will become more relevant to our lives than traditional currency
Cash today is already becoming obsolete in places like China where you can effectively live fully via only mobile payment. In the VR-first future, traditional national currency itself may also go away entirely in our daily lives, replaced by completely digital currencies such as bitcoin. This future will come much faster than we think and create massive opportunities for entrepreneurs in the fintech world.
10. A huge economy is coming for virtual goods and services
As our time spent moves increasingly from the physical world to the virtual world, virtual items and services will become a much larger part of our lives. The money we spend today on travel, entertainment, education, transportation, apparel, etc will largely move to the virtual economy. Examples of such cases were frequently cited in the book where users had to pay for virtual travel or buy virtual powers. We already see that trend happening already today where hard-core gamers and live stream audiences put a large part of their discretionary spending on virtual goods/services.
11. Home food delivery may become the most common way to eat
Even when we spend most of our time in the virtual world, there is one physical thing we will still need to do, eat! As our homes get smaller and the need to go outside reduces, the need for food delivery will increase dramatically. In Mary Meeker’s recent report, she cited US home food delivery growing at 45% YoY, and in China, that number is even higher where in most cities, customers can get essentially free delivery of food from any restaurant in about 30 minutes. I have my dinner delivered more than 50% of the time when I’m actually in Beijing. Low-cost high-speed food delivery can be an opportunity globally.
12. VR platforms should put in safe guards for managing physical health into future systems
As users spend more of their days inside the virtual world, many will worry that there will be negative health consequences. In the book, Wade turns on a system function that requires users to perform sufficient physical exercises before he can login to his VR rig. This kind of feature is less needed with room-scale VR system like the Vive, which already provides plenty of activity, but there certainly will be a market need over time for such functions. Given all the sensors and wearables that will be integrated into VR devices in the coming years, it’ll be quite easy for the systems to intelligently ensure that users have both an enjoyable and healthy experience.
13. VR can make physical distance irrelevant in our daily lives; VR natives may never meet their best friends in person
During the majority of the book, all the main characters were located physically apart from each other, and some were even constantly mobile in the physical world. However, in the virtual world, their interactions were seamless and relationships unaffected. Being able to effectively live, work or study from any location gives us a newfound freedom never afforded us in the past. This is going to have dramatic impact on the real-estate market as location will no longer be the key factor in choosing a home or office.
In the book, best friends and even siblings had never actually met each other in person, but they had the emotional connections we would expect from people who grew up together. In the VR-First future, interpersonal relationships will be redefined as we build deep friendships based on the substance of others’ souls and digital records of their lives vs. physical appearance/social status. We can already see this trend happening now for online friendships built upon connections in social networks around the world today.
14. Privacy and data security will be critical to enable an acceptable VR-First future
RPO describes a world where essentially all users’ data are centrally kept online and nearly all interactions with other people will happen online and can be tracked. In such a world, information security and access control becomes even more critical than ever. Our avatar identity is our key to the world and how that ID integrates with all facets of our lives will not be an easy problem to solve. We will also need the ability to create anonymous identities to allow users to confidently utilize these centralized system without fear of being unknowingly tracked or our personal data being abused. These are all opportunities for security minded firms today.
15. VR can reduce our ecological footprint to enable a more sustainable environment
As the earth’s population continues to grow, our natural resources continue to be depleted, and our environment is increasingly impact climate and health, it’s clear something needs to be done. Mass adoption of VR may offer a long-term solution for us to naturally reduce our drain on limited resources. We would need to travel less, commute less, reduce the need for most office buildings, live effectively in smaller homes, and be geographically distributed in a way to lessen environmental impact. If we accomplish these things in a global scale, there’s a good chance we can reverse the damage we’ve done in the last hundred years and create a truly sustainable planet. Although in the book, the global environment wasn’t in great shape, if we take the right actions over the next 20-30 years, our real-world future can be much different.
16. Even in a virtual world of abundance, humans still have a need for greater purpose
When we do arrive at the VR-First world, it should seemingly satisfy the natural human drive for happiness by giving us access to any experience/object we can dream of, but clearly the population of the RPO future still were not satisfied. They needed the quest in the story to drive themselves forward. Humans differ from other animals in that we strive for more than just survival and pro-creation. We need to have a sense of purpose and it’s this purpose that drives us to excel and achieve more. I challenge all those who read this article to take on the purpose of taking part in realizing a positive VR-First world and giving our future generations a planet we can all be proud of. Whether the future is utopian or dystopian, it is really in our hands.
We’re interested to check out the new book and see how it stacks up to the original. There’s even been talk of a prequel as well that would explore the founding of the virtual Oasis that’s central to the story. It’ll be a little different reading the sequel in 2020, though, with VR headsets like Oculus Quest 2, HP Reverb G2, and Valve Index in homes around the world transporting people to virtual worlds.
CEO Graham Gaylor said that VRChat is open to exploring various decentralized solutions if it’s something that the community of users starts to ask for, but they’re currently focused on creating the best user experience that’s possible using the technologies that are out there. They’ve been focused on 
