Our Xtended Futures: The Reality of Reality

The future promises a world serviced by robots and AI personal assistants, self-driving cars and headsets offering virtual and augmented experiences as far as the eye can see. But who’s telling the story and does this narrative even begin to consider the greatest and most important hurdle in the quest for technological advancement – human beings?

No.

Actually, that’s probably not the level of detail you were looking for. I’ll provide a few examples.

I don’t wear glasses – except for reading (I’m wearing them right now) but I would prefer not to because when in face-to-face conversation, or simply enjoying the environment around me, I make a point of breaking down as many barriers as possible between reality and the virtual or augmented world.

This may seem at odds with the barriers I’ve pushed and the research I’ve carried out in both VR and AR (and ultimately XR) for the past 6 years but I never simply talk about technology for the sake of it. I always think about the consequence of its existence – not just the facts, but how and, most importantly, why it will feature in our lives.

Every second counts so we should make that precious time feel as comfortable as possible. To achieve this, the story behind why we need something or would wish to use it is every bit as essential as reliability, sustainability and security.

At their recent OC6 developer conference, FaceBook confirmed it was planning to build AR glasses and map the world. Even if the glasses are delivered in the sleekest designer frames, I still don’t wear glasses AND I have no wish to share my every move with FaceBook – including my every view!

Virtual Reality is another amazing creative platform with immense potential. Neither VR nor AR are new technologies. They have both been with us for decades in one form or another, but the platforms and devices are making the greatest impact in this current era of digital realities.

Of course, content is king and the quality and experience must be extraordinary in order to entice an audience back again and again or encourage others to make the effort to do so.

And therein lies another problem. We live in a society that is time-poor and effort-deficient. To convince consumers to adopt emerging technologies and then have brands (or Mark Zuckerberg) give the reasons we’ll use them in the future and how they believe they will fit into everyone’s lives takes a huge leap of faith and a great deal of inconvenience and discomfort.

I spent 48 hours in VR a couple of years ago and the combination of virtual and physical experiences was incredible for research, inspiration and visual reference. It was however extremely uncomfortable and I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to undertake this.

Of course, immersion for that length of time isn’t reflective of regular device usage and we intentionally took things to extremes. Dial this back and consider a real human in a real environment (shopping mall, expo, arcade, training room, school, etc) and you’ll still find a level of discomfort unacceptable to many – and an end result that isn’t great for your physical appearance.

And I refer to VR Hair. This is a very real thing – a direct result of a very virtual experience.

VR Hair is something I’ve spoken about to clients and audiences since 2016 and it still isn’t recognised as a potential roadblock to consumers. It’s not an issue for enterprise and training because that’s a closed environment. It is a very different matter for consumers.

I tested an incredible experience with Renault two years ago where I drove, then was driven by their autonomous SYMBIOZ electric concept car. When I transferred control to the car, I was handed an Oculus Rift headset featuring software developed by Ubisoft. The VR content displayed an identical vehicle interior, followed by scenes outside the windows that transformed from the existing road network to a future smart city, a dramatic eclipse, then the car dropped away as my viewpoint rose and I continued my journey in the sky – every bit the flying car of the future!

Holoride now offers a similar experience as part of its collaboration with various auto manufacturers – from Audi to Porsche to Ford. This combination of tech, platform and content illustrates the potential for in-car entertainment in our self-driven future to great effect.

However, at this point everyone emerges from the car with VR Hair. A genuine issue for anyone heading to a meeting, journeying to a night out, travelling to a shopping destination. Or anything that involves meeting other human beings upon exiting the vehicle.

When focusing purely on the technology already available to us or planned for production, the assumed development route is similar for both VR and AR:

• Increasingly powerful headsets

• Cutting the cord and delivering wireless free-roaming (6DoF) experiences

• Familiar, user-friendly platforms

• More impressive passive and interactive content

The story being told about our technological future includes greater duration and deeper immersion for VR experiences (as per Ready Player One) and the Augmented future paints a picture of a global audience wearing designer glasses, consuming vast quantities of information and targeted advertising material.

And then the reality of reality kicks in. If at any stage VR Hair is an issue (ie, you have hair and plan for anyone else to see it) or if you don’t wear glasses and have no wish to do so in the new Augmented era, then the predetermined technological roadmap falls over.

If you currently run any kind of experiential activity involving VR headsets – be that in-store or in-car – it is essential you offer an area for your participants to rearrange themselves and be pampered before sending them back into the ‘real’ world with the lasting memory of your brand. It should be about the content, not the inconvenience.

VR headsets will become lighter and thinner, but they’ll still need a big enough screen to offer wide field of vision – and until further notice, they’ll ruin your hair. AR glasses will become slimmer, lighter and (hopefully) cooler, but they’ll still be glasses until they evolve into contact lenses – and I’m not sticking them I’m my eyes either.

I would however implant the tech directly inside my head and beam the full visually immersive experience to my optic and auditory nerves. I spoke about ‘internalising’ tech at Futurefest in 2016 and it’s this bizarre time jump that delivers the progress everyone is talking about, without the physical or psychological barriers of VR and AR headsets.

Elon Musk’s recent startup, Neuralink is now hoping to develop the technology to make this happen – but it’s a huge step for most people to make when trusting technology inside the human body. This is akin to human evolution and not a comfortable conversation, but one that should be happening. Now.

In the same keynote, I also predicted Trump’s election win and Elon Musk as the future US President. There’s time for Elon’s campaign to kick off, but he still has work to do inventing the future and I intend to be there, telling the right story about the incredible potential for various realities, whist avoiding AR glasses and VR Hair along the way.

2020 Vision

The Reality Industry has spent the past six years talking about ‘next year’. Every year. We’ve been proposing potential and identifying opportunities for an audience keen to invest, dedicate time, effort and resources, without offering much in return. So, is 2020 the big year for consumer VR and AR?

I’m a man of few words. You may disagree if you’ve read some of my blog posts or seen any of my longer event keynotes – but I believe in actions, they speak far louder than words.

The thing about immersive experiences is that to really appreciate them, you need to be immersed. Sounds simple but it’s not when we share so much digitally. Using video to tell stories about the benefits of VR therapy or AR for industrial solutions is a powerful tool in a marketers armoury – and they’re far more effective than simply creating the technology and hoping your audience will view it or adopt it.

Until now, the Reality (XR) Industry has been hobbled by the hardware – from low-end phone-based headsets to expensive desktop PCs with their wired units. This, in a wireless world where we’re all trying to escape from desktop tethers whilst demanding higher and higher resolution and ergonomic comfort. These expectations aren’t unreasonable because we’re used to technology advancing at a breakneck pace.

Thankfully, Oculus launches its Quest VR headset next week for £399, a 6 DoF (Degrees of Freedom) device with hand controllers, unencumbered by phones, PCs or wires and empowering the user to move freely within the real world to navigate the virtual, unlike the cheaper Oculus GO that has you rooted to the spot.

You’ll be told there are better headsets on the market, even by Oculus. Some are cheaper, others with faster processors and higher resolution but none stand a better chance of changing hearts and minds and reaching the largest audience than the GO – if the story is told in the right way: A  tale of magic and wonder and learning and discovery wrapped up in out-of-this-world experiences. Not Virtual Facebook. I’ve spent more time in VR than most and Facebook is the last thing I want to experience in any reality.

So what about consumer Augmented Reality? I’m not going to list all the headsets/glasses but Hololens and Magic Leap look stupid and are way beyond consumer pricing, Vuzix Blade looks cool but is still $1,000 and ODG and Meta are no more. Those price points are still too high for anyone other than early adopters, so use your phone (because it has always been AR-ready) for social cosplay, apps for way finding and beyond, then throw in a Lenovo Jedi Challenges Lightsaber, because it’s an awesome demonstration of consumer AR capability with haptic feedback and multiplayer mode.

Alternatively, you could combine VR and AR as I did in my XR Immersion Suit on the world’s fastest city zip wire in London for a Vice documentary or during my Digital Freedom Festival keynote ‘Blurred Line Between Man and Machine’

Both utilise VR headsets for maximum Field of Vision (FoV) using their built-in cameras to offer an augmented view of the real world around us. These actions do indeed speak louder than words as the research delivers the message that we’re not there yet – the world needs stunning (and life-changing) content to add value, depth and relevance if we’re going to engage and retain a consumer audience for both VR and AR. You can’t hope to tick some of the boxes and still be successful – you need them all. Effective video storytelling not only raises awareness of XR content, it tells your audience where it is, why it exists and how it is relevant to them.

However, stunning VR or AR content alone simply isn’t enough if it doesn’t encourage an audience to return to it or go out into the real world and act upon it. Don’t be afraid to ask the question “why?” at ANY stage – or your audience will instead.

Is 2020 finally the ‘year of XR’ for consumers?

Yes.

Why?

#CES2016: The Year of VR. Again

In 2015, CES headlines were all about ‘The Year of Virtual Reality’ with many of the big (and small) names turning up to the annual Vegas tech pilgrimage touting consumer-ready VR headsets. Only Samsung delivered on the promise, so what happened to the rest?

Oculus held a press conference just before G3 to reveal their final Rift, Sony changed the name of their Morpheus headset to Playstation VR (or PSVR) and HTC postponed their 2015 Vive launch because they’d made a ‘major’ breakthrough. Good on HTC for holding on for a better product, because it’s well worth the wait, the Vive Pre is stunning. The Void broke ground on their first VR theme park in Utah and it’s mightily impressive, but won’t open until later this year.

I’ll also have my hands and eyes on the latest Sulon Cortex this week – but more on that when I’m allowed to tell you…

So here we are again with the usual question being asked “what’s big at CES?” Thanks to the Rift pre-order floodgates opening today, Oculus has ensured It’s VR. Again.

CES has also brought us a raft of 360º cameras (although not all ‘proper’ stereoscopic VR) including the Vuse, the Allie, Nikon’s new KeyMission 360 and Samsung’s Project Beyond. Again.

If we ever have a conversation about Virtual Reality, you’ll soon discover my views cover the extremes and there’s no fence-sitting. I love and will enthuse about the platform’s incredible potential yet have a rather negative view of some of the industry leaders, because some aren’t leading in the right direction and many aren’t pushing hard enough.

Having produced 360º videos for years doesn’t make you a marketing expert. Building great games doesn’t mean you’ll produce stunning VR experiences. The new frontier of VR studio production requires a diverse skill set and a unique understanding of how your audience will view and react to your content, not just how they’ll discover it.

If you stumble upon anyone carving themselves out a career as a VR movie mogul and they’re telling you THE future of film is VR, they’re doing more harm than good. It’s A future and a damn exciting one but claiming all films will one day be viewed in a VR headset with full 360º immersion is naive at best, chronically damaging at worst.

Think of all the movie classics that just don’t need enhancement. They’ve been brilliantly acted, superbly scripted and skilfully edited and that requirement should never go away because the film industry is a wonderful machine. Full VR would not only be cost-prohibitive but damaging to the backbone of the industry – focused storytelling.

No, I haven’t gone all retro on you, I’m not rebelling against the new Virtual world. We need to add value to really make the good stuff great. If everything is VR then it becomes white noise and loses its impact, much the same as the misplaced marketing prerogative of turning every website into an app – that just gives fuel to those that still think the app is dead.

VR is at its most powerful when pushing boundaries, offering the chance to experience the unexperienceable (that’s a word, right?)

Take the storming of Omaha beach in Saving Private Ryan, the Jakku Millennium Falcon chase from The Force Awakens or the thick of the boxing action in Southpaw, Raging Bull or Rocky 27. VR will live or die on its financial relevance to studios. It’s unrealistic to shoot an entire blockbuster but a D-Day beach scene or a single round of boxing become invaluable marketing tools for a cinematic release and an essential added extra for the digital home download. Add episodic storytelling then suddenly you’ve tapped into the micro-payment and subscription models contemporary audiences are comfortable with.

In the same way that we went through a phase with visionary publishers claiming all future books would be interactive, we’re already facing the same issue with VR. Yes, some books obviously benefit from the bells and whistles (Brandwidth’s Doctor Who Encyclopaedia and The Doors apps or our Maleficent and Saving Mr Banks iBooks are perfect examples) but for many, the reading experience needs to be just that – words and images, digested in much the same way they always were, for the same cost. But certain properties deserve more. I received an email last week via the CES Press Portal claiming the ‘real’ sex industry will always be better than ‘holographic 3D porn and teledildonics’. That may well be true, but the VR porn industry will still be huge!

To say VR is the headline act at CES is a little misleading, there’s AR too. Augmented Reality has the potential to hit an even larger demographic than the Virtual variety, simply because the audience doesn’t need to shut itself off from the outside world. The main reason I’m more excited about VR is we’ve had AR on our phones and tablets for years – even desktop PCs and laptops equipped with a camera have been able to display augmented content.

New headsets such as Microsoft’s Hololens have reignited the augmented conversation (and investment frenzy) and Google’s second attempt at Glass appears to be just around the corner, even though this isn’t actually AR but an info overlay within a single screen. Impressive tech nonetheless, but not what we’re talking about here.

If you’re losing patience waiting for the new hardware to turn up and you want to see AR 2.0 in action, grab an ODG headset – it works and has had years of development time and budget. If it’s good enough for NASA and the US ‘three letter agencies’, then it’s certainly robust enough for consumers.

2015 may not have delivered VR and AR as promised, but the potential for 2016 has never looked more real.

Festive Reality

Happy Christmas, Happy Holiday or just enjoy your break from reality. However you refer to this seasonal respite, there's actually an even better way to escape from it all – in Virtual Reality.

OK, I'm not suggesting you ignore your 'real' friends and family but If you've just invested in Samsung's Gear VR, the best VR headset on the market (for now), then you should probably grab a couple of new titles to justify the purchase.

The free apps are best experienced by trial and error but you should start with Jurassic World: Apatosaurus, Battle for Avengers Tower and James's Legacy - The Prologue.

Gear VR works with Samsung's Galaxy Note and S6 phones and as they're on the Android platform, paid-for titles tend to be unfamiliar territory. Take my advice – as you've just spent $99 on a new headset, spend some more on these two...

Land's End $7.99

This audio-visual masterpiece is a 3D strategy game from UsTwo, the team behind the hit app Monument Valley. I don't even like puzzle games but I refused to return to reality until I'd completed all five levels. The finale won't disappoint – it's spectacular!

EVE: Gunjack $9.99

I tested EVE: Valkyrie earlier this year on the consumer edition of Oculus Rift. It is scheduled to ship with this hardware in 2016 and the audience will love it. I won't go into detail as you basically pilot a spacecraft around er, space, shoot lots of stuff and marvel at the world as it floats by your cockpit.

It's an adrenaline-fuelled ride and visually stunning but couldn't be further removed from the look of Land's End. You're in a movie – and an impressive one at that! In EVE: Gunjack you're in control of a gun turret rather than the whole ship, but it never feels like the poor relation. It's still a mightily impressive VR experience.

It's worth noting that Samsung's gamepad enhances the gameplay so is a good investment for this and many other titles.

There's an increasing number of titles appearing for the Gear VR, some good, others not so. Enjoy the best of the bunch in the standalone VR headset market until the full-blown Oculus Rift, HTC's Vive and Sony's Playstation VR arrive in 2016.

If you don't own a Samsung phone, there's still a healthy selection of Google Cardboard headsets available. I'd recommend looking at a couple of robust options that still hold iOS and Android handsets – Mattel's View-Master reboot and the Zeiss VROne.

I'll feature a more in-depth report on the VR market when I write from CES next month. Have a very Happy Virtual Christmas!