Future Presence

Peter Rubin

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062566720
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Recherche et compétences en technologie et en ingénierie

A Wired senior editor and virtual reality expert presents a captivating, candid glimpse into the future "realities" of this emerging technology: how we will use it to form previously impossible relationships, explore new frontiers of intimacy, and how it will forever change human connection.

Heralded as the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, virtual reality is poised to transform our very notions of life and humanity. Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same.

Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry's go-to authority on the subject, calls it an "intimacy engine." While once we needed another person to feel the sensations of closeness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, and titillation, VR will give us the ability to induce these sensations by ourselves for the first time in human history. This metamorphosis, Rubin argues, is going to have a powerful impact on relationships that will ripple throughout our society and our individual lives.

A journey into this uncertain future and a glimpse at the cultural implications and promises of a new reality, Future Presence explores a host of complex questions about what makes us human, what connects us, and what is real. Offering a glimpse into the mind-blowing things happening in universities, labs, and tech companies around the world, Rubin leads readers on an entertaining tour of the weirdest, wildest corners of this fascinating new universe. Describing this book as "half travelogue and half crystal ball", Rubin will:

• Introduce readers to the creators and consumers of VR technology
• Show readers what an experience is like inside the current VR devices
• Explain how this technology will upend everything we know about human connection in the future

At once the incredible, inevitable story of virtual reality's rise and a look towards the future of our fantasies, Future Presence is a deeply personal examination of what connects us, and an analysis of what relationships, empathy, and sex could look like—sooner than we think.

1

Presence

What It Is, Where to Find It, How to Stay There

NOW THAT WE HAVE introductions out of the way, and judging by the fact that you’re reading a book about VR, I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re a fantastically curious and sophisticated person. Maybe you subscribe to the New York Times—the print edition!—and one Sunday a Google Cardboard showed up packed in with your paper. Maybe you bought a Samsung smartphone and they threw a Gear VR headset in with your purchase, and you took a look at some of the 360-degree videos and games that were bundled along with it. Maybe your son or aunt or friend or someone sitting next to you on a plane insisted that you try their headset. Maybe you were already a die-hard gamer and you’d already priced out and built your own monster of a desktop PC so that you could use it with the HTC Vive you’d preordered. The point is, regardless of when it was, or what exactly you did with it, the idea of virtual reality is at least familiar to you.

But also regardless of when it was or what exactly you did with it the first time you experienced VR, it likely wasn’t the first time you’d heard of it. We as a society had already had a fling or two with the concept. So while the rest of this book is going to get into where we’re going, let’s take a second and look back at how we got here.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF REALITY (THE VIRTUAL KIND)

When Ivan Sutherland was a student at MIT in the early 1960s, he created a computer design program, Sketchpad, that allowed people to use a special pen to draw on a computer screen. That might not seem special in the age of iPads, but in 1963 it was beyond mind-blowing; before Sketchpad, computer graphics simply didn’t exist. In fact, the only way to interact with a computer back then was to feed it punch cards like the world’s most insatiable parking-garage payment station—so being able to create shapes on a computer screen simply by drawing them was tantamount to magic.

But Sketchpad wasn’t Sutherland’s greatest trick. A few years later, as a professor in Utah, he invented a device called the Sword of Damocles. Scratch that—“device” makes it sound like something you can hold in your hand. This was a complicated and unwieldy set of goggles, suspended from the ceiling like their namesake. In order to use it, you needed to step up to the goggles and allow your head to be tethered to them. (So far, so medieval.) When you looked into the binoculars, you saw two rudimentary computer screens displaying a transparent cube. If you moved your head, the goggles moved along with you—thanks to that handy tether—and the images on the screens changed so that your perspective appeared to change as well. Fifty years ago, the Sword of Damocles became what we now think of as the very first VR headset. It didn’t exactly do much at first, beyond let you see a cube hovering in space, but Sutherland and a colleague wound up commercializing the technology for use in flight simulators.

It would still be many years before the phrase “virtual reality” would enter the lexicon, however. (At least to describe this type of technology; a French playwright named Antonin Artaud first described theater as “virtual reality” in a 1933 essay.) During the 1970s, Air Force researchers who had been working on flight simulators started to develop flight helmets that could project useful information onto the pilot’s field of vision. That project evolved into a program the Air Force called Super Cockpit: a system of helmet, flight suit, and gloves that in the 1980s promised to allow pilots to see—and interact with—3-D simulations of their flight instrumentation and the surrounding landscape, displayed on screens inside the helmet.

The Air Force’s “Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator” in 1982.

Permission from Thomas A. Furness III

Meanwhile, scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Northern California, a mere two miles from what is now Google’s headquarters, looked past our own atmosphere and focused on space. In the summer of 1988, the fruits of that focus appeared on the cover of the space agency’s Tech Briefs magazine. Above a headline that touted “NASA’s Virtual Workstation” was a man wearing a giant white helmet that made him look like a cross between an imperial stormtrooper and a member of Daft Punk. Inside, the accompanying story outlined the promise of the contraption, which NASA called VIVED (Virtual Visual Environment Display), and proposed a future that’s by now familiar to anyone who’s tried VR: “Imagine having the power to instantly change your environment; to be transported at will to the surface of the moon or a distant star, and yet never physically leave the comfort of your living room. Though it sounds like science fiction, environment-hopping is not only possible but may one day be as commonplace as a drive in the family car.” Yet despite the headset explicitly using the word “virtual,” the article and the NASA engineer quoted within it referred to the effect only as “artificial reality.”

Ground Control to Major Tom: NASA’s VIVED system.

NASA

In fact, the term we’ve come to accept was emerging at the same time, a short car ride away. In a small cottage in Palo Alto, tiny VPL Research was developing a pair of goggles, very similar to what NASA was working on, called the EyePhone. (Yes, really.) VPL’s cofounder, Jaron Lanier, began calling the technology “virtual reality”—over the protests of his colleagues, who in the Winnebago-mad 1980s thought people would get “VR” confused with “RV.” Along with the EyePhone, VPL made a “Data Glove” to control what users saw in the headset, as well as a full-body getup called the Data Suit, which let users see their own limbs in the artificial environment. (The Data Suit was also bright blue and skintight, which really pulled the whole Daft Punk thing together.) All that fantasy came at a price, though: the three items, along with the computers necessary to run them, cost more than $350,000.

VPL’s EyePhones and Data Gloves in action.

Associated Press

VPL would ultimately file for bankruptcy in the 1990s, after the company that funded it foreclosed on loans. But by then both the term and the idea of virtual reality—specifically, a head-worn display that thrust users into an immersive artificial world—had made their way into popular culture. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash imagined a world in which people used VR goggles to access a series of interconnected worlds called the Metaverse. That same year, through the magic of Hollywood, a Stephen King short story called “The Lawnmower Man” became an amazingly terrible (but not terribly amazing) thriller that updated Flowers for Algernon’s simpleton-to-genius plot with a healthy dose of VR. (It also bore almost no resemblance to the original story; in fact, King successfully sued to have his name taken off the movie.)

As the ’90s continued, so did the VR touchstones, each one campier than its predecessors. In the cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves used a VR headset and gloves to hack into a Beijing hotel. Nintendo tried to capitalize on the trend with the Virtual Boy, a 3-D video game system so janky and headache-inducing it was discontinued six months after release. And may we never forget the action movie Demolition Man, in which a freshly-thawed-after-decades-of-cryogenic-storage Sylvester Stallone offends a woman in 2032 by suggesting that they have sex not in VR. (Specifically, he calls it “the wild mamba” and “hunka-chunka.” In rapid succession. Four stars.) There were others as well: terrible movie The Thirteenth Floor; terrible TV miniseries Wild Palms; terrible teen superhero show VR Troopers; even a very special (but still terrible) episode of Murder, She Wrote in which Angela Lansbury dons a headset to investigate a murder at a VR company. And then . . . it all dried up. VR disappeared, becoming in many people’s memory a relic of the 1990s—along with Crystal Pepsi, Beanie Babies, and the Spice Girls.

So what happened? Two things. The first is that all of these visions of VR, however compelling, were just that: visions. We’d seen the photos of researchers wearing their futuristic face computers, and then we’d seen the science fiction movies, and we’d concluded not only that the future was inevitable, but that it was here ahead of schedule, ready to usher us all into its shimmering dreamscapes. Yet, VR in its early forms was awkward and unfamiliar, and when we finally got to experience it from the inside rather than from the outside, what we found was spectacularly underwhelming. VR systems were hugely expensive, were unwieldy and uncomfortable to wear, and were often literally sickening. (We’ll get into why that is soon enough.)

But the other thing that happened was that a different future arrived—one that was cheaper, more accessible, and cut the legs out from under VR. The year that Snow Crash came out, 1992, was the same year the first photo was posted to the internet. By the time the Virtual Boy came out in 1995, an online bookstore calling itself Amazon had opened its online doors, and Microsoft had released the first version of its web browser. Out of nowhere, it seemed, we’d become connected to everything—to information and to each other. Who cared about a weird-looking set of goggles when you could buy things through your computer? Even though VR research continued in military and university labs, civilians moved on. It would be almost another twenty years before the promise of VR returned to the public consciousness.

THE RETURN OF VR

In 2012, I was an editor at WIRED, overseeing arts and entertainment coverage. Part of that work meant annual trips to events like Comic-Con International in San Diego and South by Southwest in Austin—and also to E3, a video game trade show held in Los Angeles every June. My last night at E3 that year, after days of sitting through press conferences and play sessions of upcoming games, I started hearing rumors from colleagues about a mysterious virtual reality demonstration that had been granted to a few lucky people. Once I got back to my hotel I found some pictures of the device, which was being called an Oculus Rift. The thing was clearly a work in progress: silver duct tape stretched across the front of the headset, cables sprouted from three different places, and the whole thing stayed on your head courtesy of a strap ripped from a pair of Oakley ski goggles. But what people had written about their experiences with the Oculus Rift, playing an updated version of the classic video game Doom, made it sound like someone had actually cracked the code of virtual reality.

Okay, let’s fast-forward a year. (This is a book. We can do things like that.) It’s now 2013, and I’m back at E3. Since the previous year’s trade show, the Oculus Rift has become a hugely successful Kickstarter project, raising more than $2 million from people who wanted their own version of the headset, sans duct tape. I didn’t chip in, so I still hadn’t tried the Rift, but when a colleague mentioned that he’d scheduled a behind-closed-doors appointment with Oculus, I let him know in no uncertain terms that I’d be tagging along.

This wasn’t mere journalistic curiosity. I’d loved Lawnmower Man when it came out; hell, I’d shelled out broke-teenager money to see it in the theater. (And I’d shelled out broke-twenty-something money to do the same with the abominable Thirteenth Floor.) I’d devoured Snow Crash in college, and since arriving at WIRED I had similarly feasted on Ernest Cline’s sci-fi novel Ready Player One, a treasure-hunt adventure that takes place in VR and leaves no ’80s pop-culture reference unturned. I may have missed seeing the Oculus Rift the year before, but there was no way I was letting that happen twice.

I still remember that June afternoon in 2013 like it was yesterday. I remember the shirt that I was wearing—a plaid short-sleeved number that my wife still calls “the Marc Maron.” I remember walking up the stairs to the upper floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, to a tiny nondescript meeting room where I met Brendan Iribe, then CEO of Oculus. And when Iribe told us that he’d brought something special to the show, I remember the molded-plastic case that he reached into to fish out the company’s first high-definition prototype.

He helped me situate the headset properly, to find that “sweet spot” that would make the 3-D effect as pronounced and comfortable as possible. Inside the headset, everything was dark—then Iribe pressed a button on his computer, and I found myself sitting inside a video game. Like, inside the game.

I don’t mean inside the game like it was a first-person perspective. I mean that I was in a stone cavern, sitting across from a towering horned creature. If I turned my head to the left and right, I could see the walls that surrounded us. Snow drifted through the air between us; when I looked down, I could see rivulets of lava running along the ground. “Turn around,” Iribe said; because I wasn’t holding a game controller, I twisted my whole body around. That, as they say, was the aha moment. Because when I turned around in that tiny meeting room, I also turned around inside the cavern, and for the first time I saw how it stretched away behind me. My real-world self—the one sitting in that meeting room—started to grin.

Things moved quickly after that. The following year, Facebook bought Oculus for more than $2 billion. (Fun fact: the sale was announced less than an hour after I had turned in the draft of a cover story I’d written for WIRED about Oculus. Cut to me, hunched over my laptop in despair, frantically booking a flight to Southern California for another round of reporting to rework the story.) Other companies jumped into VR, and by the end of 2016 people could get their hands on no fewer than five different solid VR systems—with many more in the works. None of that, though, really explains what VR is: what the effect is, how it works, and what exactly you need to do it. So let’s take a moment to get into that. Bear with me; I promise you don’t need to know anything about “judder,” “frame rate,” or even “computers.”

THE NUTS AND BOLTS [SIMPLE VERSION]

First, a basic definition. Virtual reality is (1) an artificial environment that’s (2) immersive enough (3) to convince you that you’re actually inside it. Those numbers aren’t there to freak you out, they’re just there so we can discuss the ideas one at a time.

1. Really, “artificial environment” could mean just about anything. A photograph is an artificial environment. A video game is an artificial environment. A Pixar movie is an artificial environment. (In some ways, a Pixar movie is a video g...