Creating in VR is Different
By: Tom Nickel
Tags: VR, Virtual Reality, Quantum Physics, Creativity, Augmented Reality

No More Things

Creating in VR is different for me because I’m not very good with things.

I don’t mean ‘things,’ like, the situations. I mean ‘things,’ like objects. Especially devices. Players and screens and consoles and mixers.

They stop working for no good reason. No one knows how to repair them. Most of all, they are inflexible. They only do what they do.

Virtual things generally aren’t like that.

Virtual screens, for example, aren’t just whatever size you bought in the first place, like, 60". Virtual screens can be much much bigger, or smaller, in a second. Then they can be placed anywhere without back breaking labor.

That might sound mundane but I think creativity is linked to what is possible.

When it’s easy to try something, it’s more likely that we will. It might not even be a good idea, but while we’re trying it out, maybe something else that’s great comes up, something we wouldn’t have stumbled on unless we tried the other idea that turned out to be not so great.

Virtual screens also have a big cost advantage. They’re free.

When I wanted to see what it would feel like to be enclosed in a video room, I needed six really big screens — all four sides, the floor, and the ceiling. I made them and assembled the video room in about half an hour at a cost of nothing. Each screen was set up to play something different.

Next I would like to synchronize the displays as an additional option to the random juxtapositions happening now.

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No More Gravity

As a direct result of No More Things, we can overlook many Laws of Physics. Gravity, for example, has everything to do with any performance. It is a force that seriously restricts where everyone can be and what can happen between all of us.

Generally speaking, viewers sit across from and sometimes slightly above the object of their viewing. And they stay there. True, the audience moves in several of the featured attractions at EPCOT Center, but not much and at an enormous initial cost.

In VR, the audience could enter high above the bottom layer of the space.

People can fly in VR and as they glide down they could see they are above a gigantic map, say, of India. Soon they could see large screens set up in different parts of the country.

Less than One Minute Videos play and re-play, recorded in that place, in Varanasi, the oldest settlement on earth, founded by Shiva. The Event Host opens up for any less than one minute stories about this place. Or a less than one minute check-in — what does the video and the India World bring up for you?

And then we fly to New Delhi or the India-Pakistan border.

I had already produced the videos. Assembling the scenario and bringing in some friends to test it out took a few hours.

At first I saw it as a special VR kind of Gallery. Then I realized this type of World can be used socially, to help create Events and interaction.

Quantum Effects

Virtual Reality externalizes the way we co-create a consensus physical environment and call it the real world. We’re made of Lego-like pieces at every scale until the bottom, where things aren’t things any more, just like they aren’t in VR.

I’m not sure our conditioned rational mind can comprehend the way it is at the bottom layer of everything, but I think some of the operating principles can be taken in experientially.

To me, Quantum Effects start with Superposition. As the Firesign Theater titled their magnificent second comedy album:

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All

My non-physicist understanding of this most basic of all Quantum Mechanical concepts is that once you get to the bottom layer of Legos, stuff isn’t definitely in one place any more. There is only some probability that the most elemental stuff is in a whole bunch of places.

I doubt that we can experimentally validate Superposition in VR. But I think we can create something like a Superposition experience.

VR has a Many-Worlds aspect built into it because there is a limit as to how many people can be present at the same time in the same World. On a Social VR platform like AltspaceVR, that limit is usually set to forty. When the forty-first person tries to enter, if the right technology is employed, that individual will find themselves in a new Instance of the Event. The Host is present in all Instances and the Worlds are identical, but the people in them are not.

What if Ted is a Host and Tom and Tim are each in an Instance of a World, with the limit set to one by mistake?

Ted tells them they are in separate Instances but doesn’t notice the mistaken limit setting. Just as they each issue a command to Go-To the other World, Terry joins the Event and doesn’t hear Tony coming up behind him yelling, ‘hey wait for me.’

Finally Ted the Host notices the ridiculously low limit setting and moves it back to forty. Tony can now get into any of three Worlds without triggering a new Instance, but where is his friend Terry?

The random timing of interfering behaviors makes the position unknowable. From Tony’s perspective, Terry’s existence in each of the Worlds has some probability and is not determined. Terry is in a sense, in all three and also in none.

Now imagine we had four hundred people, in ten Worlds set to forty.

We would ask all them to try moving to a new World at the same time, right when forty new couples come with the assignment of finding a specific person out of the original four hundred who just sent them a message saying ‘Click Here to Join Me.’ One member of the couple would do that, but they might not be able to enter that Instance or if they did, that person might not still be there.

From the perspective of the remaining member of the couple, their partner intentionally went somewhere, but could be anywhere. They can even be ‘observed’ by the other people in the Instance they arrive at, but that would not establish their position for everyone.

The only Observer that matters is Ted the Host, who sees all Instances. Maybe Superposition ends when Ted sees where everyone is, but the Superposition experience wouldn’t end for all the remaining members of the couples until Ted the Host displays the information on a large billboard.