Virtual reality firms look to science fiction for inspiration
By Nick Wingfield New York Times News Services
Tech companies have spent years developing better, cheaper devices
to immerse people in digital worlds. Yet they are still figuring out how
to make virtual reality the kind of technology that people cannot live
without.
So for inspiration, they are turning to science fiction.
At Oculus, a leading virtual reality company, a copy of the popular
sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” is handed out to new hires. Magic Leap,
a secretive augmented reality startup, has hired science fiction and
fantasy writers. The name of Microsoft’s HoloLens headset is a salute to
the holodeck, a simulation room from “Star Trek.”
“Like many other people working in the tech space, I’m not a
creative person,” said Palmer Luckey, 23, a co-founder of Oculus, which
was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. “It’s nice that science
fiction exists because these are really creative people figuring out
what the ultimate use of any technology might be. They come up with a
lot of incredible ideas.”
Those ideas are especially relevant now, as some of the biggest
technology companies are nearing a major push of a new generation of
virtual reality products. In the next few months, virtual reality
headsets from Oculus, Sony and HTC go on sale. Venture capital money is
pouring into the industry.
But how people will interact with the imaginary worlds remains
largely unknown territory. And that is where science fiction comes in.
Science fiction is shaping the language companies are using to market
the technology, influencing the types of experiences made for the
headsets and even defining long-term goals for developers.
“Science fiction, in simplest terms, sets you free,” said Ralph
Osterhout, chief executive of the Osterhout Design Group, which builds
augmented reality glasses.
Perhaps no fictional work resonates more throughout the industry
these days than “Ready Player One,” written by Ernest Cline and now
being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg.
Much of the action in the book takes place inside the Oasis, a
global virtual reality network. Characters in the network attend school,
socialize and take part in a high-stakes treasure hunt. Through virtual
reality, they can inhabit the perspectives of actors in classic movies.
The book was published in 2011, around the time Luckey began
building an early prototype of the Oculus headset. Luckey said he
appreciated Cline’s portrayals of characters controlling their avatars
through full-body suits rather than plugging “Matrix”-style cables into
their brains.
“One of the things I like about ‘Ready Player One’ is all of the
depictions in the book are pretty feasible,” Luckey said. “None of it is
crazy, far-out tech.”
Oculus gave out 3,000 copies of the book to attendees of an Oculus
developer conference last year. For good measure, Oculus named the
meeting rooms at its headquarters after famous fictional versions of
virtual reality, including the holodeck, the Oasis and the Matrix, from
the movie of the same name and, before that, William Gibson’s “Neuromancer.”
Cline said he wrote “Ready Player One” partly because he could not
figure out why virtual reality had not taken off in the real world.
“I think that was the same impulse that drove Palmer,” said Cline,
who has visited Oculus several times to speak to employees. “Growing up
with ‘Neuromancer’ and Max Headroom, it had the same effect on me as a
writer as it did on businesspeople.”
Techies do not need any encouragement from their employers to read
or watch science fiction, long a pillar of geek culture. Throw a rock in
Silicon Valley and you are likely to hit a software engineer who can
cite how long it took the Millennium Falcon to make the Kessel Run in
“Star Wars.” (Less than 12 parsecs, according to Han Solo, whose use of
a term for distance — one parsec equals about 3.26 light-years — rather
than time has been the subject of entire articles.) The genre has
influenced many corners of technology, from smartphones to robotics to
space exploration.
But there is something unique about the interplay between science
fiction and virtual reality, a technology that is essentially an
instrument for fooling people into believing they are someplace — and
often someone — they are not. Virtual reality is a medium, like
television or video games, that can borrow liberally from the virtual
worlds experienced by fictional characters.
Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Fla., and which counts Google as
one of its big investors, has gone even further than most companies by
hiring three science fiction and fantasy writers on staff. Its most
famous sci-fi recruit is Neal Stephenson, who depicted the virtual world
of the Metaverse in his seminal 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”
In an interview, Stephenson — whose title is chief futurist —
declined to say what he was working on at Magic Leap, describing it as
one of several “content projects” underway at the company.
More broadly, Stephenson said science fiction books and movies are
often useful within tech companies for rallying employees around a
shared vision.
“My theory is that science fiction can actually have some value in
that it gets everyone on the same page without the kind of expensive and
tedious process of Power-Point,” he said.
But the influence of the genre within tech companies is “surprising
and mysterious to me as well,” he added.
There is a regular theme in science fiction that its fans in tech
talk less about, though: the dystopian aspects of virtual reality.
Addiction, disconnection from relationships in the real world and
alienation from the environment are often side effects in narratives
about virtual reality. It is hard to make that into a selling point for
the technology.
“Entrepreneurs are optimistic and upbeat by nature, which is why I
enjoy hanging around with them,” Stephenson said. “They’ve got an
admirable ability to completely ignore the more dystopian elements
you’re talking about and see the cool stuff and positive potential of
where it might go.”
Of course, authors and moviemakers get to overlook details of their
own — like the tough technological challenges that real tech companies face.
“You never have to reboot the damned thing” in sci-fi books, said
Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist who works at Intel and has
written about the interplay between technology and science fiction. “The
mechanics are less interesting to most science fiction writers than the
experience.”
Sometimes science fiction plants seeds in the minds of inventors
that take years to sprout. The holographic chess game that Chewbacca
played on a tabletop aboard the Millennium Falcon was pretty far-out in
the 1970s, when Jeri Ellsworth saw it in the original “Star Wars.” It
took several decades before technology caught up.
In 2013, Ellsworth’s startup, CastAR, gave the first public
demonstration of the company’s augmented reality glasses, which overlay
digital imagery on the user’s view of the real world.
By now, the experience shown in the demonstration should come as no
surprise — the glasses enabled the person wearing them to play a
holographic chess game on a tabletop.
“It’s something I’ve been dreaming about my entire life,” Ellsworth
said. +
--
*================================================
Duane Whittingham - N9SSN - Fort Mitchell, KY
(ARES/RACES, EmComm, Skywarn & Red Cross)
http://www.radiodude.info
================================================ *
_______________________________________________
Medianews mailing list
Medianews@etskywarn.net
http://etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews_etskywarn.net
