Session 7: Deallocating The Lead
1800 Pacific Standard Time, 28 Oct, 2016.
I have a disdain for MacBooks that goes beyond professional preference. The sight of a partially digested phosphorescent fruit wells up a series of irrational emotions, many non-productive. If you don’t watch Louis Rossman videos, you may think they are adequate technology. I will share the one reason that is most germane to this post: they are horrible for VR. They are often the tools of the trade for those that write about VR.
We had journalists try to check out JanusVR before. The problem was they often used an underpowered MacBook that was averaging four years behind the state of the art. JanusVR, at the time, did not have an in-browser capability. The render engine had also not yet been fully optimized. This is all to say, in that year, to run JanusVR, you needed a VR ready computer. An ultraportable laptop wasn’t going to work well. The journalists would attempt to install the application and enter the world, only to be very confused by the small learning curve needed to get underway. These skills, however, came natural to any geek that had any PC first person shooter experience. There was always a period of patience as their avatar spun, lagged, and wobbled in the world. It usually ended with a defeated comment that nothing was moving on their end. Years later, I know we were doing it wrong: we were supposed to have a glitzy studio and a demo rig primed and ready at any moment. But between working on near nightly builds, that just wasn’t in the plan. They journalists weren’t exactly lining up.
By 2016, there was a lull in the coverage. The first round of non-development VR goggles had finally started to ship. Many journalists hook eyeballs by dangling hope into the internet. Could VR cement your long-term relationship? Could VR end bigotry? Could you design a whole building in VR? People had started wearing the goggles en masse. It was definitely great, but the dreams and hopes extended further than the tracking volume. The population began to see what VR could really do now, so the VR beat slowed down for the “normies”.
So if that doesn’t get attention any more, that means it’s time to fall back on some solid standbys.
Techn0shaman was eliciting help from the JanusVR community that day. Apparently Techn0’s work caught the eye of a journalist from a large radio network. Techn0 wanted help recording the event and to have other people to answer questions in VR.
In my small apartment in Tacoma, I had two VR systems. One was the Oculus Rift. That was for sitting down, coding, playing seated games, and 3D modeling. The two cameras used to track the headset were precise, but didn’t allow for much movement. That was compounded with a cable that had a good deal of its length wrapping around the rear of the computer. The other was the HTC Vive, primarily used on the weekends when I could push all the obstacles away from striking range. It was also connected to my powerful travel laptop, a seven pound hunk of metal--the nemesis of a MacBook, which was reserved for marketing demos while at trade shows or visiting customers. If I was going to help my friend, this workaday Rift with a tiny tracking volume wasn’t going to do. No, this day called for my VR finest. If it was good enough to clinch sales in the military sim industry, it was good enough to help Techn0 put the best foot forward, even if we lacked foot tracking.
If you are really curious about the two VR work spaces you can click here.
Everyone who answered Techn0’s call started to appear in the lobby of JanusVR. A bright Unity developer from Brazil, a 3D modeler from Arizona, an Australian, and eventually me as I lowered the headset and started up the application. The all too familiar stumbling from the journalist came. The default avatar’s head rotated about drunkenly. This was also followed by the familiar giggles, reminiscent of keeping one’s balance on an ice rink. “Be nice,” I said to myself, “it’s probably another damned MacBook”
Once we were all at a point that we knew that we could see and hear each other the interview began. We went around the fountain and introduced ourselves saying what we did in the sphere of JanusVR, and what our backgrounds were. I was really hoping the journalist would spot something off as I said that I used to fly in AC-130s and had spent a good portion of my life training to be and being in the military. Now I was helping make simulators to train warfighters. I thought too much of myself I suppose.
The questions turned back to Techn0, who answered them with grace, crediting the friends made in JanusVR, speaking of the community of creative people that were helping each other build out virtual environments to share. I don’t think the journalist was interested in that.
The line of questions turned to a perceived oppression of Techn0. What were the struggles? Where was the harm being done? How was VR helping deal with being a member of an underserved population? This was not what I was expecting to hear when I logged on. The journalist was obviously seeking confirmation, not investigating. This journalist wasn’t interested in what Techn0 created, just who Techn0 was. This made me consider what else in the world of VR journalism was confirmation seeking and not curiosity.
Techn0, of course, deflected these slyly and with the same grace in the beginning. Whatever the journalist was looking for, it wasn’t within the striking range of my Vive’s tracking volume, and it wasn’t within me.
As the interview was winding down, I looked around me. Here were avatars hailing from around the globe that decided to log in with little warning and help someone. Here were people who were truly diverse sharing a common Metaverse. Here was an experienced combat veteran with a very narrowed view of the world supporting someone very different from himself. No, the story must be about grievance and the power struggle, not the solution rendering in real time.
An Example of Techn0shaman’s Virtual Worlds
The story was likely filed and then forgotten just as quickly, more hum in the propaganda machine. Years later I invited Techn0 to Florida to work on an AR art project. There I saw Techn0 create a 3D object that can only be viewed on that day and in that location by layering various 3D objects at various distances like a telescope. You can see a 360 video and render of it here. For this old dog, it’s sometimes hard to understand the appearance of my friend, and although I learned a lot by experiencing Techn0’s VR webspaces, there is much I don’t get. I still have a lot of preconceived notions to tangle with, but I know Techn0 is a virtual artist, an interesting human, and worth collaborating with in the future, as we contemplate the ways to animate and set to music neurofeedback information. No MacBook required.