We are at a time in history when even the wildest speculations from the realm of science fiction are reaching the potential to become technology we use in our daily lives.
Although the emerging technology of mixed reality is an innovation, it does not necessarily mean that it will improve lives or advance society. As this technology continues to evolve in new and interesting ways, we must not only examine how it will affect our lives at an immediate level through widespread adoption, but also how it will create a ripple effect throughout the society as a whole, often with unforeseen effects, potential risks, or unintended uses (Liautaud). While my presentation (available for viewing here) focused on the emergence of virtual reality with a focus on entertainment, this innovation is used as a case study for understanding the influence that emerging technologies, such as media viewed through a head mounted display, can potentially have on immersive innovations across multiple fields.
This specific innovation fits within this class’s previous material on innovation, entertainment and the arts because it can be applied to many different industries, and it is so new that we are forced to think creatively and critically about some of its longer-term effects on society. Lastly, it is a technology that is changing so rapidly that it might urge students to keep up with its progress even after leaving the classroom, as this innovation could create some major changes for the type of medium that any kind of general content can be received on in the near future.
What makes mixed reality so interesting is that it is simultaneously a new device because of the gear involved, and also a new medium for storytelling through its 360-degree immersion.
Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds, and the coexistence of digital objects with physical ones that interact in real time. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality both exist under the umbrella term of MR, but have a few fundamental differences. While AR blends with reality, usually using a superimposed digital image, VR offers the user a fully immersed experience into a digital environment. In order to experience full immersion, users are required to wear equipment over their eyes called a head mounted display, or HMD. While this particular method is well known by the general public, there are several other systems used to experience virtual reality.
A mirror system is when the user looks at a projection on a screen and sees an image of themselves, mirrored and superimposed, moving within a virtual environment. Vehicle-based systems are when the user enters something similar to a “vehicle” and operates controls that simulate movement in the virtual world and often includes a motion platform, these can be found in arcade games or flight simulators. Cave systems, also referred to as Location Based Entertainment or LBE, is when a user enters an enclosed room where they are surrounded by large screens that project a virtual scene. The unifying thread through all of these systems is that “all true virtual reality displays are normally responsive to user action, especially physical movement” (Biocca 81).
In order to understand both background knowledge and real world application of this technology, I am drawing from several COMM 306 assigned readings, outside readings, and one panel. Most of these readings are optimistic about mixed reality’s future popularity and integration into the mainstream, but they do address concerns like novelty fatigue or equipment barriers that are holding it back.
While one could make the argument that mixed reality could fade away entirely from the public’s interest, for the sake of speculative futures in this essay I am going off of the assumption that this technology will continue to grow in popularity and continue to spread across industries: “All I know is we’re addicted to technology as a society, and once we move forward we don’t tend to go back” (Marantz).
There are many speculations on how VR might change in the near future.
Many experts have compared the current clunky HMD to the early stages of the “brick” cell phone in the 1980s, and many predict that VR technology will undergo a similar evolution that will increase both its functionality and general practicality. Currently, equipment barriers are a large challenge that is preventing widespread adoption of this technology. Some of the proposed changes from Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality that would help bring this technology into the mainstream would be to bring high equipment price points down, find a way to eliminate the motion sickness that some users experience, and increase accuracy with more customized viewing such as accounting for each person’s unique interpupilary distance. They also call for including peripheral vision and utilizing a human’s full field of view, which is 200° by 120°, but the best VR display today offers 110° by 75°. Interaction within the story content itself must also have a low learning curve.
Another issue is the way that HMDs make the user feel sealed off from the world, and “feel as if they are looking at the world through a portal or scuba mask” (Biocca, 78). This is not only impractical, but could be dangerous if a user attempts to walk around, because it renders them blind to the outside world.
“Sealing yourself off by putting something on your head is uncomfortable. Currently, this tech is lacking in practicality.”
Says Dylan Thuras, the founder of Atlas Obscura, a growing company for travel VR and panelist for Lens of Disruption.
Another way VR could work for more people is if it were to be paired with an existing technology so that it could become widespread but with less friction, says Eren Aksu, another panel speaker and director of Emblematic Group. There are current efforts to use VR on already available devices, such as pairing a smartphone with cheap material that users assemble themselves like Google Cardboard, or using AR within popular smartphone apps like Pokémon Go.
This technology is developing and moving very fast, and Aksu predicts that in the future we’ll see something the size of eyeglasses or potentially worn the same way, similar to Google Glass’s design of a lightweight wearable.
The solution to this HMD problem could be found within the next decade. We are currently in the Fifth Kondaratieff Wave, or K-wave, which are “repeating techno-economic cycles that occur in the modern world economy”, and are usually 40–60 years in length (Kipper, 130).
The Fourth Wave began in 1908 and included Petroleum, the Automobile, and Mass Production, and our current Fifth Wave began in 1971 with the development of Information Technology. The upcoming Sixth Wave is predicted to be Nanotechnology; therefore we might see rapid advancements that could make what we consider now as impossible possible, by making the hardware that VR runs on much smaller.
Other solutions are looking even further into the future with Alternative Display Techniques. Instead of a picture surface, “What if you were instead to assemble the image line-by-line on the retina itself?” (Biocca 74). This could be achieved through DRW, or a direct retinal write, which is a pin-point of light that is quickly and systematically scanned to create a virtual image that is suspended in space. Other laser-driven DRWs are vibrating acoustic films, which can build the image onto the retina and therefore turn it into the ultimate screen (Biocca 75).
With a basic understanding of the hardware involved, we can move on to understanding the logistics of this as a new storytelling medium, and much of my understanding comes from the New Yorker article “Studio 360”. There are a few technical issues when filming with a 360° camera, since the operating crew must hide from the shot, or be edited out in post production, which Thuras also mentioned he battled with when filming at locations for Atlas Obscura.
Cinematic vocabulary like a “shot” must be rethought, as a person can move their head a few degrees and the shot is essentially ruined. All editing in post-production, other than a simple fade up or fade to black, is also being figured out, which emphasizes just how new this medium really is. “You cannot produce VR like you make movies,” argues panelist Ela Topcuoglu. “What some might not understand about it is that it’s a completely different language”.
Current movie screening technology is now being referred to as “flattie”, which calls to mind the way that movies were called “talkies” when people were first introduced to sound film in the late 1920s. Topcuoglu similarly explains that there’s new vernacular when it comes to VR. “Instead of “viewer”, we like to say “visitor”. This is because the person has a purpose in the space, and this purpose comes from their interactivity” (Lens of Disruption).
However, one problem that might hurt this innovation’s chances at widespread popularity is something called “novelty fatigue”, which means the newness and excitement around the product begins to fade, and this technology has started to flag in popularity since it went mainstream in 2009 (Kipper 24) and the fact that there is not a lot of money pooling to produce better content is yet another issue (Lens of Disruption).
“We should ask ourselves at every turn what stories we are able to tell with this technology, and what new angles, sensations, plot structures, or other narrative elements are now available to us. Remember: the novelty of the New Screens lies not only in the strangeness of the technology, but also in the new kinds of experiences that are made possible” (Smith 55).
This technology could have significant impact on not only the entertainment industry but could easily expand into other industries as well. This technology has been proposed as being used for many different means, such as virtual travel (Atlas Obscura or Mist), educational purposes, dating services, and many other possibilities like health care or combat training. For example, many patients with a loss of a limb who suffer from Phantom Limb Syndrome have benefitted by using mirrors in the past to visually trick their brain into feeling like the limb is still there, and immersive technology which shows a simulation of your body and limbs might have a similar effect. Additionally, people who suffer from PTSD might find some relief by using this technology to go to a safe headspace, like a calming beach.
However, there is always the potential for detrimental, unforeseen effects with any innovation.
For example, we do not know what the potential long-term effects of this kind of immersion are. Similar to landsickness after too much time at sea, could someone become unadjusted to the real world, such as becoming too sunlight sensitive? Another thing to consider is that too much exposure to an LED screen mere inches from the eye could negatively affect vision. Currently, myopia or nearsightedness is on the rise globally (Welch). It has increased significantly from the 1970’s into the 2000’s, and has been estimated that half of world’s population will be nearsighted by 2050 (Welch). How much of this has to do with light-emitting technologies like computer or phone screens? Would this be worsened if someone uses AR on a pair of glasses mere centimeters from the eye, or if it were projected onto the retina of the eye itself? We also know that the blue light emitted by screens can negatively affect natural sleeping patterns and rhythms.
The long-term health effects of immersion are impossible to study, because it has not been around for long enough.
While “The New Screens” claims that the days of the captive audience are over and that there must now be a respectful relationship between creator and consumer with a mutual benefit (Smith 57), the immersive nature of MR could change this again. It seems that being immersed could bring back “captive ads”, in which people are exposed to them without a choice. Could advertising companies take advantage of an immersive platform and bombard people with inescapable ads, bringing fading captive audience advertisements back to full strength?
We cannot consider VR without also considering how average people could engage with it and become their own content creators. “For each meme there is software to produce it” says Patrick Davison from “Because of the Pixels” (Davison 1). How will MR affect the popularity and production of future memes? What software will amateurs use to create the VR equivalent of memes, because there must be an available technology similar to MS Paint which came pre-downloaded onto computers and was a simple program with a low learning curve.
What are the potential problems with making VR inaccessible to average content creators who do not have the knowledge or skillset to program VR? Memes are a flourishing part of Internet culture, and if the majority of online activity shifted onto this type of immersive platform, I would have to argue that not having an easy and accessible tool to create VR memes could have an unforeseen effect of damaging the popularity of this innovation, or be detrimental to online culture as a whole.
In conclusion, “we can look forward to the next generation of New Screens, and the ones beyond that, as each new technology offers new opportunities that can spark our imaginations, recalibrate our understandings of novelty, involvement, and serendipity, and inspire us to reevaluate what it might mean to communicate” (Smith 65). MR is exciting, terrifying, disruptive, and worth following its journey as its hardware is developed further, and I believe the innovation could have the potential to sneak up on us and suddenly become another average part of our daily lives.
WORKS CITED
Biocca, Frank, and Mark R. Levy. “Chapter 4: Immersive Virtual Reality Technology” Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality. Taylor and Francis, 2013. Print.
Davison, Patrick. “Because of the Pixels: On the History, Form, and Influence of MS Paint” Journal of Visual Culture 13 (3), December 2014.
Aksu, Eren, Dylan Thuras, Ela Topcuoglu, Robert Hernandez. “A New Lens For News.” The Lens of Disruption USC. How VR and AR Could Reshape Media, 6 Mar. 2018, Los Angeles, USC Wallis Annenberg Hall Room 106.
Kipper, Gregory, and Joseph Rampolla. Augmented Reality: an Emerging Technologies Guide to AR. Syngress, 2013.
Liautaud, Susan. “Ethical Innovation Means Giving Society a Say.” Wired, Conde Nast, 12 June 2017, www.wired.com/story/innovation-ethically/.
Marantz, Andrew. “Studio 360.” The New Yorker, 25 Apr. 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/25/making-movies-with-virtual-reality.
Sheikh, Knvul. “Beyond Gaming: 10 Other Fascinating Uses for Virtual-Reality Tech.” LiveScience, Purch, 19 Jan. 2016, www.livescience.com/53392-virtual-reality-tech-uses-beyond-gaming.html
Smith, Francesca Marie. “The New Screens”, The Edison Project, 2016.
Welch, Ashley. “What’s behind the Rise in Nearsightedness?” CBS News, 30 Sept. 2016, www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-behind-the-rise-in-nearsightedness/].
