Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual reality real estate. They’re selling an initial offering of the currency they call ‘MANA’, from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they’ll have up to 2 million plots of virtual land that will be sold for 1000 MANA. They hope to create a virtual city with different thematic districts that will help with content discovery.
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The blockchain contract will contain a Bitorrent link or IPFS hash that contains the content for each virtual plot of land. They have a Unity plug-in, but are also planning on using A-Frame and other WebVR technologies to create their virtual city. They’ll be using using other blockchain technologies like district0x for secondary markets for reselling land, Aragon for distributed governance, uPort for self-sovereign identity, Ethereum Name Service for human readable names. More specific architectural details are described in their Decentraland Whitepaper.
I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano in San Francisco to talk about how Decentraland is using blockchain technologies to manage their virtual world, and why it’s important to create artificial scarcity to help with the discovery of virtual worlds.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as a “samadhi” within the ancient Vedas, he decided to start a science institution dedicated to studying the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is the “hard problem” in that there’s no widely accepted theory for how the mind is connected to the body, but IONS has been on the frontiers of researching this mind-body connection over the past 44 years.
They conducted a 10-year study researching the commonalities in different wisdom traditions that bring about a transformation of consciousness, and they published their findings in a book named Living Deeply. They’ve further refined a model of consciousness transformation, and are interested in applying virtual reality in invoking states of awe and exploring what types of latent human potentials might be unlocked.
I had a chance to catch up with Cassandra Vieten, the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to talk about how the vastness of awe leads to an experience that forces you to stretch your perspectives & accommodate new information. We also talk about how they’re starting to use virtual reality in their research, the impact on our environment and experiences in our lives, and the potential of unlocking latent human potentials through different contemplative practices & potentially mediated through technology.
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Here’s the model of consciousness transformation that IONS uses
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is its power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University’s iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of invoking awe using Google Earth VR. She was inspired by Frank White’s work on The Overview Effect, which documented the worldview transformations of many astronauts after they observed the vastness of the Earth from the perspective of space.
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Quesnel wants to better understand the Overview Effect phenomenon, and whether or not it’s possible to use immersive VR to induce it. Anecdotally, I think that it’s certainly possible as I reported my own experience of having a virtual overview effect in my interview with Google Earth VR engineers. Quesnel won the best 3DUI poster award at the IEEE VR conference for her study Awestruck: Natural Interaction with Virtual Reality on Eliciting Awe.
I had a chance to catch up with Quesnel at the IEEE VR conference in March where she shared her research into awe, how it can be quantified by verbal expressions, chills, or goosebumps, and how she sees awe as a catalyst for the transformative potential of virtual reality.
Here’s a short video summarizing Quesnel’s research into using Google Earth VR to study the induction of awe:
Here’s Quesnel’s poster on Awe summarizing results:
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of Presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR Presence. His gaming experience showed him how much of his feeling of immersion was related to the content of the game. He wrote an essay published in the journal Presence where he laid out what he saw were the two major limitations of VR Presence theory at that time.
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“First, many models tend to focus heavily on perceptual issues while focusing less attention other facets of virtual experiences, such as cognition and emotion,” he says. Second, “these models fail to provide an interpretable, extensible framework with which to understand and apply the theoretical principles to practical applications.”
Chertoff finished his Ph.D. thesis titled Exploring Additional Factors of Presence in 2009, and then published his Virtual Experience Test questionnaire in the 2010 proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. Presence researcher Richard Skarbez first alerted me to Chertoff’s work after I asked him if he’d seen any prior research into Presence looking at the different dimensions of my elemental theory of presence, which breaks down the subjective quality of an experience of VR into different combinations of Embodied Presence, Emotional Presence, Active Presence, and Social & Mental Presence. I was encouraged to see that Chertoff had independently come to an identical framework through his survey that was designed to holistically “measure virtual environment experiences based upon the five dimensions of experiential design: sensory, affective, active, relational, and cognitive.”
I had a chance to catch up with Chertoff in San Francisco during GDC this year, and we each concluded that our experiential design frameworks are functionally equivalent. We talked about his FearlessVR company that he co-founded where they design VR exposure therapy experiences for different phobias, but we spend the bulk of our discussion exploring how he came to looking to looking at the field of experiential design to inform Presence theory. We also compare and contrast how each of our experiential design frameworks create tradeoffs and amplify different qualitative dimensions of an experience.
Chertoff’s Ph.D. thesis “Exploring Additional Factors of Presence” has a great survey of Presence research (see his summary graphic down below), as well as inspiration he’s drawn from flow theory and video game design frameworks like GameFlow. He summarizes Forlizzi and Battarbee’s definition of “experience” by saying it’s “something that can be articulated, named, and schematized within a person’s memory. Experiences of this type have beginnings and ends, but anticipation of, and reflection on, the experience may take place before or after the event.”
The idea of experiential design is that deeply immersive experiences form stronger memories, and that it’s easier for us to store new information along when we’ve had related experiences. Chertoff says, “Experiential designs are successful when they encourage people to create meaningful emotional and social connections—personal narratives that involve episodic memories, and positive associations with the artifacts of that experience.”
Chertoff cites Joseph Pine & James Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy as his source of inspiration for the five dimensions of his experiential design framework that make for a memorable and immersive experience, which map nicely over to my elemental theory of Presence.
Embodied Presence corresponds to Chertoff’s sensory dimension which he says “includes all sensory input—visual, aural, haptic, and so forth — as well as perception of those stimuli.” I’d also include different virtual body representations, as well as the virtual environmental components which help transport you into another world and trick your perceptual system into believing that you’re in another world. Most Presence researchers research embodied Presence as virtual reality uniquely stimulates our sensorimotor aspects of perception beyond what any other communications medium can do.
Emotional Presence corresponds to the affective dimension which “refers to a participant’s emotional state. For simulation, this dimension can be linked to the degree to which a person’s emotions in the simulated environment accurately mimic his or her emotional state in the same real-world situation.” For me, this includes the storytelling and narrative components as well as music, colors, symbols, and deeper myths that all engage the emotions. Emotional Presence can also come into the experience through social engagement with other people.
Mental Presence corresponds to the cognitive dimension, which “encompasses all mental engagement with an experience, such as anticipating outcomes and solving mysteries. For simulation, much of the cognitive dimension can be interpreted as task engagement, [which] is related to the intrinsic motivation, meaningfulness, and continuity (actions yielding expected responses) of an activity.” Game designers often talk about mental friction, and if there isn’t something in an experience to stimulate your mind then you’ll risk getting bored.
Social Presence corresponds to the relational dimension, which is “composed of the social aspects of an experience. For simulation, this can be operationalized as co-experience — creating and reinforcing meaning through collaborative experiences… Experiences that are created or reinforced socially are usually stronger than individual experiences and they further enable individuals to develop personal and memorable narratives.” I combine mental & social Presence into the air element, because they both deal with the abstractions of thought and communication. But it also emphasizes the fact that not every experience has to have a social dimension to it, and that solitary experiences can be just as immersive and engaging to your mind.
Finally, Active Presence corresponds to the active dimension, which Chertoff described in the interview the degree to which you can express your agency, and physical engagement through taking action within the experience. He also sees it as a form of subjective engagement by saying “Does he or she incorporate the experience into his or her personal narrative; does he or she form meaningful associations via the experience?”
Chertoff assigns a few things to the active dimension that I would categorize elsewhere. For example, I think empathy is more of a function of emotional engagement, and that connection to the environment, avatars, and identity are more related to embodied Presence. I tend to think of active Presence being primarily as an expression of agency and will that includes exploration, curiosity, creativity, physical or virtual locomotion, and any type of interactivity.
There are qualitative dimensions of an experience that are sometimes hard to clearly schematize into a single category, and I believe that all of these different dimensions are happening at the same time all the time. But I do see that there are tradeoffs between active Presence and emotional Presence that I explore in much more detail in this introductory essay about elemental theory of Presence.
Mel Slater’s Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you’re transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what’s happening in that world is believable). Presence researcher Richard Skarbez thinks of these two components as “immersion” and “coherence,” and we previously discussed his presence research where he found that both illusions are vital for a deep sense of presence. The place illusion is largely enabled by the objective details of the VR technology with features such as 1:1 head tracking, low latency, and large field of view. But all of the different dimensions of what makes an experience plausible are still widely unknown, not very well researched, and also difficult to isolate and determine.
Skarbez was back at the IEEE VR conference in March of 2017 showing some of his efforts to break down presence into different factors that included interactions with virtual humans, high-end VR tracking to get fully immersive body tracking, interaction abilities within the environment, as well as whether or not the scenario was coherent and believable. He also deployed a new research method where the subject would experience the full fidelity of the screen, and he’d slowly dial up the fidelity of these different factors to determine which ones were the most helpful in cultivating presence. Presence surveys are not that great at aggregating multiple individual subjective rating the degree of presence on any type of scale, but you can judge relative degrees of presence based upon your own previous experiences. Skarbez was able to determine that full body tracking was one of the biggest indicators of the depth of presence that someone felt within their experiment.
I had a chance to catch up with Skarbez in Los Angeles at the IEEE VR conference where we talked about his presence research as well as how his different components of presence plausibility mapped over to my Elemental Theory of Presence.
Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in the Terra Gallery space. There were physical posters of scenes showed around 15-20 VR stations featuring an individual piece of art, as well as opportunities to try some of the VR art tools like TiltBrush. Most of the VR art pieces featured some dimension of scale or vastness that showcased some of the unique affordances of art within VR, and the intention was to inspire the art scene within San Francisco for how VR could be used as a medium for expression and storytelling. I had a chance to catch up with Magik Gallery founder Ochoa the day before the showing to talk about his efforts to get art within VR to be taken more seriously within the larger art world.
Magik Gallery is going to be focusing on holding VR art shows in physical spaces as there are a number of other virtual art gallery initiatives and efforts for virtual spaces.
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund’sTipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smartphone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within the investment community. But despite the adoption being slower than some had hoped, Chennavasin still sees a lot of optimistic indicators for the long-term investment of companies that are driving the evolution of the medium in different industry verticals.
I caught up with Chennavasin at the Silicon Virtual Reality Conference on March 31st to talk about the state of the VR ecosystem. We talked about how he sees Chinese investors could be shifting focus to AI and local Chinese companies, the market challenges for educational VR companies, and why he thinks that the lack of revenue in the 360 video could bring a reckoning moment for 360 video technology and content companies.
After traveling to 36 VR conferences over the past year and seeing over 2,000 VR demos, Chennavasin sees some of the most promising VR industry verticals as being healthcare, advertising technology, collaborative meeting and product design apps, enterprise applications, as well as architecture, engineering, and construction. He’s been advising companies try to create applications that could only be done in VR, and that if you build something of value then you can find a way to get someone to pay you for it.
He provides some updates on some of VR Fund’s investments including Owlchemy Labs (which was acquired by Google in May), Against Gravity’sRec Room,Vivid Vision, and InstaVR. He’s seeing enough positive indicators form his portfolio companies to continue making strategic investments in the VR ecosystem for the long-term path towards more ubiquitous adoption.
In March 2016, Oculus announced their Oculus Launchpad program with the idea that in order for VR to be successful, then there needs to be a diverse range of content created from diverse set of creators who are informed by different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and gender identities. Oculus brought together over 100 diverse content creators for a one-day training, and awarded scholarships to 11 projects from the dozens of prototypes submitted at the end of the program. Oculus Launchpad participant Dale Henry wrote up a detailed critique of the Launchpad program that provided a lot of constructive criticism for improvements that he’d like to see.
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I reached out to Henry to unpack his feedback on the lessons learned from the Oculus Launchpad program, but we also talk what the larger VR community can do to support diverse initiatives such as different community-driven mentorship models. We also talk about his personal journey in using VR to help children on the autism spectrum deal with bullying, and some of his struggles as an aspiring VR developer. We also dive into some deeper systemic issues, and have some difficult conversations about how only 1% of funded start-ups have black founders, larger diversity in tech issues, some of the unconscious biases that women and people of color face in raising funds, and whether or not VCs even know how to evaluate people of color.
I reached out to Oculus for a comment on the improvements that they’re making for the second iteration of the Oculus Launchpad program, and it looks like they’ve integrated a lot of the specific critiques from Dale and expanded their mentorship program. Here’s the kickoff message from Oculus VR’s program manager for diversity and inclusion, Ebony Peay Ramirez.
Henry would also like to see more transparency in how the money is being allocated, some of the metrics for success, a more detailed roadmap that shows how to grow and sustain these diversity initiatives, whether there are other external diversity initiatives that Oculus/Facebook is supporting, and some candid feedback of their own internal lessons learned so that other VR companies can learn from these programs.
Henry argues that everyone benefits from diversity in VR initiatives, and that he’d like to see more openness and transparency in these efforts to provide more opportunities for feedback, but also the possibility for more collaboration amongst competing VR companies to share insights and combine resources to support larger diversity efforts in the VR and tech ecosystem.
There was an amazing projection-mapped, immersive theater piece at Sundance this year by Heartcorps called Riders of the Storyboard. Trained street performers interacted with virtual projection-mapped 2D objects, and through the sleight of hand magic broke these flat objects into the third as glowing 3D props.
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There were 15 people packed into a small room with about half a dozen performers for a 13-minute show about these 2D characters who interact with the performers who are playing Alchemy of Light gods in the third dimension. It was an awe-inspiring performance, and the projection mapping technology provided a shared experience akin to what future augmented reality technology could provide.
Heartcorps is proving out some of the techniques with projection mapping technology that should also work really well in the future of live performance and immersive theater designed for AR glasses.
I had a chance to catch up with the Heartcorps member and performer dandypunk, who talks about their process, ritual inspiration, and mixture of immersive theater and cutting-edge projection mapping. Be sure to check out the trailer and clips from their show at Sundance down below.
Here’s the Trailer for the Heartcorps Riders of the Storyboard piece that showed at Sundance New Frontier:
Final three minutes of the Riders of the Storyboard show at Sundance:
VR World NYC is a new VR arcade that opened on June 24th in New York City right next to the Empire State Building. They have three floors with 55 different VR experiences, and they’re using an all-you-eat buffet business model of paying $39–$49 to have unlimited access to play all of the available experiences. It’s a great opportunity for tourists and New York residents to get their first room-scale and 360 VR experiences, but it also has a bar, plenty of places to hang out, as well as a number of different multi-player social VR experiences.
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I happened to be in New York for the grand opening of VR World, and had a chance to catch up with Chief Creative Officer Drew Arnold and HR Manager Katya Stepanov to talk about the process of experiential design and curation of VR experiences. I also had a chance to check out the IMAX VR experiences at the AMC IMAX theater, as well as see The VOID’s Ghostbusters VR experience at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum
The challenge for a business like VR World is to market themselves to first-time users and foot traffic of casual tourists who are willing to explore for a couple of hours, but also have a streamlined system for if and when they do get really popular to still have it be a good user experience. They have a queuing system where you can sign up for a single VR experience if it’s busy, and then you can try out one of the other 50+ experiences that don’t have a line. But if they have too many people and get too popular, then they’re going to face what most VR events & digital out-of-home experiences struggle with which is throughput and long lines. But they’re using an innovative approach of buying access to every experience, and then not trying to overplay or schedule it from there.
Other VR arcade options like IMAX VR has the approach where you have to buy individual $10 tickets for each experience that you do. IMAX VR also tends to have a number of premiere experiences not generally available yet, as well as some special VR equipment like DBOX chairs or a helicopter platform simulator with StarVR headsets for The Mummy VR experience.
Both Sundance and Tribeca have moved to models where you have carte blanche access to all of the available experiences for a limited time, and this is a great blend of scheduled and unscheduled time that I feel like works really well for VR. There’s a certain amount of unpredictability for when a VR experience will begin or end, and having carte blanche access makes it so that you’re not constantly evaluating whether or not the individual experience that you’re having was worth the money that paid for it. With carte blanche access, it sometimes becomes more of question of is it worth waiting for other people to finish an individual experience, but overall you tend to feel like you got your money’s worth when you get to have a variety of different experiences.
VR World is perfect for first-time VR users or even for existing VR owners who want to try out a number of different commercially-available experiences without having to purchase them yourself. The price of admission is about what it would cost to purchase a single high-end VR experience, and there are plenty of the most popular VR experiences available to play. There are also a few experiences that use unique hardware peripherals that you’re likely not going to have at home, and I’d expect to see more and more of these types of experiences over time.
If you know anyone who is traveling to or who lives in New York who is interested in trying out VR for the first time, then VR World is the perfect place to send them. It’s located at 4 East 34th Street, and is open from 11am to 11pm Tuesday to Sunday and extended hours to 1am on the weekends.
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is its power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. 
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and 
In March 2016, Oculus announced their 
