Session 3: Non-Verbal
2000 Central Standard Time, late June, 2014
It started to become a habit. Like many addictions, it included the heart-racing anticipation of the novel. Every evening after dinner, I would fire up JanusVR, don my Oculus Rift DK1, and teleport into the floating platform beset by doors that was the lobby of the application. I would twist my head about and then head toward the door at the bottom of the ramp to www.vrsites.com. It was a virtual space that was much like the web rings of the early web, where you would browse each site in turn as you went. In this case, it was a gallery of doors hosting webspaces you could explore. This evening, something was very different.
The Oculus Rift DK1 had a better field of view than other HMDs I had played with before. You still had a sensation you were wearing a diving mask, but things could still catch you out the corner of your eyes. Across the platform, I saw a simple blocky human shaped body, complete with a cube shaped head. What’s this? I moved closer to it.
Oculus Rift DK1 Source: Sebastian Stabinger CC 3.0
The head moved.
It moved in an analog fashion. It didn’t move like some Bezier curve of something scripted, nor some key framed animation. No, this shook with the uncertainty of sinew. The other end of this cube was alive. I had ten years of playing multiplayer games until that moment. You knew an avatar was controlled by a human by motions that were clearly the result of a mouse gliding on a pad combined with keystrokes. This was different. This was a one to one translation of the rotation of a physical object. The DK1 was a three degree of freedom headset. This meant that it only detected how you turned it every direction, but not how you would slide it in every direction. This gave the effect of the blocky head to spin about, permanently staked at the top of the body, even if the user took off the headset and put it aside on a desk. However, one could make out such wobbles as the other user settled the HMD comfortably on their head.
This head wobbled a bit, then fixated one side of the cube toward me. A bubble of text appeared before its body, “Hi Press T to talk :)”. “Hi”, my blind fingers fumbled on the keyboard. “Oh, it worked!”, his bubble exclaimed. After a short chat conversation exchanging pleasantries and wonder, I left the developer of JanusVR back to his work. Before I ducked through the vrsites portal, I saw a clone from his second computer popping in and out of existence with a clever visual effect of shrinking in size to oblivion.
2235 Central Standard Time, 2 July, 2014
Ventrilo is a voice communication application for people to play video games together. One was set up for the budding JanusVR community to meet online and talk. “I just uploaded the latest installer,” James, the creator of JanusVR said over the voice channel. “Give it a try, and see if it works!” I went to his University of Toronto website and downloaded the latest posted build. James was a recent PhD from that school, and initially had built the JanusVR, formerly known as FireBox, as a lightweight 3D model viewer. The advent of the Oculus Rift changed his direction. I unzipped the folder and launched the executable and was once again teleported to the floating platform of the lobby. The lobby wasn’t a video game level. The data that created the scaffolding for this place was indeed a website. The code embedded in the webpage gave the blueprints for how JanusVR would create the webspace in three dimensions. I put the HMD on and the lobby came into view. This time it had people! Bobbling heads were everywhere with text floating around it. As humans naturally do, we gradually formed a circle and shared amazement to each other. Some new users weren’t on the Ventrilo server and were receiving instructions via floating text in VR. There was a way to plaster an emoji on your head block. Everyone had a go of trying variations of letters and punctuation with varying degrees of civility. Being together in VR with someone else wearing an Oculus Rift DK1 wasn’t exactly brand new. There were multiplayer games and social applications already being tested and enjoyed. This was the first time this new headset was used with other people inside a website. What happened next was a “one giant leap” moment.
The SnowCrash Tribute created by power-user and modeler Ataco. A hand resting on a keyboard is visible.
Someone clicked on a portal at the edge of the platform, and stepped through it. That action moved their avatar to a new website--hosted somewhere and by someone that was not the University of Toronto. Then another popped through the portal. Soon the rest of the gaggle of users had squeezed through the doorway and were in a webspace hosted by a user named Drash. We spread out around the space and looked at everything like visitors at a museum. Someone chimed in on the Ventrilo channel. “You guys know what we just did was a big deal right?” We just seamlessly moved from one webpage to another, together.
The next few months would usher in weekly achievements by James. The DK2 would arrive soon allowing for six degrees of freedom—which brought about disembodied heads next to the bodies of absent users. Leap Motion would serendipitously realize that gluing their device to your Rift would allow for early hand tracking in VR. I would shake “ghost hands” with a stranger as well as fly through the virtual worlds by moving my hand through a floating sphere next to my avatar. We would then be able to drag websites, pictures, 3D models into our shared space. I found myself playing video games much less now. Planetside 2, with its fast paced action reminiscent of contemporary games, and accompanying micro-transaction scheme made me feel less like a player and more like a cash cow. I spent my free time creating instead. Every evening I would see a new space featuring a new concept or utilizing the latest feature, and I knew I had to step up my game and make better webspaces. JanusVR to me wasn’t a shopping mall, a public square, nor a place to find new, trendy, friends. It was really a place to show off places. The dynamic settled in where someone would drop a link in either the subreddit, Mumble, or Discord, and people would log in to experience it. Once a good sample of the new webspace was done--you logged off. “The Oasis” for us wasn’t a vast ocean where you lost yourself, unless you were winding down an evening of drinking. It was a backyard pool you either dipped a toe in when you were on your phone, or went for a swim if you had your hand controller charged up and didn’t feel like getting your heart rate up in a full game.
One way to use JanusVR became very compelling, however. It would be a way to know another person via their art in a very intimate way. This is how I soon came to know a curious human who went by the handle: The Techn0shaman.
An example of an advanced webspace. A photogrammetric scan with a deep learning texture.