Making Virtual Reality social is all about building the right environment

“Facebook is the social network of this reality, but we want to enable thousands of new realities where people can socialize,”

Herman Narula, founder and CEO of Improbable, might be smiling as he says it, but he is very serious indeed about his company’s ambitions to take over the social VR space. Fresh out of one of the strangest VR experiences I’ve had, that started to make sense. The demo had involved me donning a HTC Vive headset and entering the MetaWorld. In this cheery, cartoon-like environment I met Dedric Reid, Founder and CEO of Berkeley-based HelloVR, who are partnering with Improbable in building the first of these alternative social realities.

As Reid appeared before me in the shape of a beardy head floating above Mickey-mouse-like gloved hands, we took our places across from each other at a chess board. I took a moment to marvel at the realistic physics of the game, where it really felt like I was holding the pieces in my hand. But as fun as that was, the most interesting thing was how it felt like I was really sharing that space with Reid – who was talking to me from San Francisco at what was for him 6:00am – much more so than with the 3 people in London who were physically in same room as me. In fact, when they spoke, THAT felt like the intrusion of a weird, other-worldly presence. My reality was very much the virtual one.

“Creating a social VR experience poses new challenges like head tracking on a massive scale, and networked physics so people can realistically interact in a persistent shared space,”

explained Reid even as he expressively moved his virtual hands to emphasise the point. The next step in improving that would be to figure out efficient ways of incorporating face tracking, to give avatars more realistic and responsive expressions. There’s even scope for using your tone of voice to convey your mood in the virtual world (they do say you can hear a smile or a frown over the phone, so perhaps that could work.)

Creating social VR experiences poses new challenges like head tracking on a massive scale and networked physics
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But even at this basic level the experience is pretty powerful. If I turn my head, the sound of Reid’s voice fades, so that I automatically turn back from my inspection of the pitched tent behind me. We “walk” over to the campfire together, and as we get there the sparks float around his avatar, not through it, so that his face, which looks nothing at all like a real person, very much feels like one. The other strange thing is that, unlike with a phone conversation, I don’t find myself holding even a vague mental picture of what the person might actually looks like. The avatar gives my brain enough of a visual anchor, so I just focus on what they are saying. It opens up some really interesting possibilities for using avatars in meetings and interview situations to avoid bias based on physical appearance, for example.

The avatar gives my brain enough of a visual anchor, so I just focus on what they are saying
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This is not about fancy graphics, at least not yet. What HelloVR are showcasing is the power of simultaneous presence in persistent worlds. Persistence translates into worlds which remember your actions, and where those actions continue to shape the world even after you leave. On our virtual chess board, for example, the knights were facing the wrong way because Callum – who had set up the demo and was admittedly not big on chess – had placed them that way. That did as much to bring the environment to life as all the impressive physics around it. The world was further enhanced by realistic flocks of birds flying past at what felt like random intervals, all controlled by IBM Watson. These mechanics will scale up to cover nearly 10,000 square miles of this virtual world, all of which will be “always on” with something always happening whether or not users are there to see it.

What HelloVR are showcasing is the power of simultaneous presence in persistent worlds
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This massive scaling is enabled by Improbable’s distributed operating system SpatialOS, which can harness the power of hundreds or even thousands of cloud servers in a single interwoven fabric, enabling real-time high-fidelity simulations without loading screens or artificial gateways.

“The promise of VR is half about the devices and the immersion and half about the world and its meaning, but nobody is solving the problem of making that world come to life,” says Narula. “The Matrix is two pieces, and the other part of it is the actual Matrix.”

And that is the key to what makes Improbable so exciting. They are making the under-the-hood infrastructure that will enable not only individual VR experiences, but for us to build and share those experiences collaboratively, over time. So instead of building lots of mirror-image parallel universes that don’t talk to each other, you have massive persistent environments populated by creatures and objects over which you (and all the other players in that world) have direct influence. If you cut down a tree, it stays cut. If someone else kills an animal, you can stumble across the decomposing carcass, unless it’s been carried away by scavengers. In other words, instead of focusing just on making spaces, they’re building timespaces, where this sense of actions taking place persistently over time affords a real feeling of presence and permanence, and since this is the way we perceive our own reality, it follows that the latter feels that much more immersive.

This massive scaling is enabled by Improbable’s distributed operating system SpatialOS
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“This is fundamentally a new technology. We’re talking about thousands of people and millions of objects interacting dynamically in the same world,” explains Narula. “These are massive infrastructure issues that no one developer is able to solve. When you scale a game in that way, we’re enabling a type of parallel computation across thousands of cores that simply hasn’t been possible before. Yes we’ve made it more accessible so that developers can easily build content on the platform, but we’ve also moved the goalposts in what it is those developers can do.” This is perhaps why Improbable has attracted such interest, recently securing $20 million Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz and growing to over 100 employees.

The promise of VR is half about the devices and the immersion and half about the world and its meaning
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The fundamental test, Narula explains, is what he calls the “Gibson Threshold”, named after science fiction author William Gibson. The key to achieving this threshold is consistency rather than realism, by creaeting a world so persistent that it starts to matter (really matter) to you. “When we get to the point where we ask someone whether their imaginary house matters to them as much as their real one, and they start to hesitate, you know you’re nearing that threshold,” says Narula. And you only get there by building an environment where your actions have consequences, and where you feel that you have real influence over others and the world which you share. That sense of connectedness is – perhaps unsurprising – the holy grail to making VR experiences immersive, compelling and social.

Creating a sense of connectedness is the holy grail to making VR experiences immersive, compelling and social.
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So, is Improbable building Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One “Oasis”?

“Well, sure,” laughs Narula, but the key difference that in the book you only had one Oasis, and we’re going to build lots of them, each with its own look, feel and rules.” These worlds will all be build on the Improbable SpatialOS, so will still be able to share elements between them where it makes sense.

He’s right. Even at this early stage there are already several of those worlds being built. In addition to MetaWorld they are working with Entrada Interactive (Rebel Horizons), Soulbound Studios (Chronicles of Elyria) and Bossa Studios (Worlds Adrift). We got a sneak preview of that last one in the improbable office and it looked quite impressive.

The environment in Worlds Adrift is, I’m told, roughly the size of Israel. But unlike other massive worlds, in this one every single part of it is reachable, changeable, and open for exploration. There is something distinctly otherworldly about knowing that “out there” really does exist, says Narula, “there are no loading tricks or fake backdrops or locked doors: if you can see it, you can travel to it.”

He points to a cloud in the middle of the sky in the game, and tells me that any player can travel to it if they wish. Granted, they’ll still need to build a ship powerful enough to take them there, but luckily a developer on the workstation around the corner was doing precisely that as we spoke. On his screen the complex-looking engine pieces were coming smoothly together, and it looked like it might indeed fly.

Narula believes there will be an explosion in new VR projects on the platform, helped by the fact that they’re open sourcing it. “All of the code for Worlds Adrift has been made Open Source, the first MMO to have done that,” he says.

MetaWorld is currently on closed alpha, with a Pioneer Edition expected later in the year, which will let users who sign up for early access take part in outdoor simulations including camping, fishing, farming, archery, hot air balloon flights and even meditation retreats (watching the birds flock above was quite relaxing, so I can see that working). Next year they will make a suite of creative tools available for users to start building their own experiences, using a ‘MetaBlox’ toolkit. The idea is that they will be able to do this either alone or collaboratively, and build things over time as there will be no “world wipes” to free up server space. And although it worked very smoothly on the HTC Vive, MetaWorld will be platform agnostic and available on other devices such as Oculus and PlayStationVR as well as non-VR users on standard computers and mobile devices.

The Matrix is two pieces, and the other part of it is the actual Matrix
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It remains to be seen how this compares to other initiatives such as Project Sansar, currently being developed by Second Life creators Linden Lab, which is also set to start opening up its platform to early adopters later this year. There is huge momentum building around social VR and user-generated content, however, and it will be interesting to see who gets a head start in that arms race.

There is huge momentum building around social VR and user-generated content
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Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Making the Improbable Real appeared first on Tech Trends.

In this article for The Times Higher Education I visit the San Francisco Headquarters of Linden Lab and talk to the creators of Second Life about how Virtual Environments have already been a feature of education for years, and how the commercialisation of VR will bring it to the masses.

Picture this. You’re walking through a chemistry lab, watching as some students happily experiment with hazardous substances while others interact with 3D projections of the molecules as they react to each other. Over in the next room, a trainee nurse triages a stream of patients based on their various symptoms, while across the hall a group goes through a realistic emergency simulation for an oil drilling platform fire.

It might all sound futuristic, but these are real examples from what is now the granddaddy of the virtual world: Second Life
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SL launched in 2003, and 15 years is a very long time in the technology world. So long, in fact, that people are often surprised to find that it’s still around (or, indeed, that it turns a healthy profit for its developers, Linden Lab).

By the time today’s children grow up and enter university, this kind of Virtual enhanced environment could well be commonplace
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Linden Lab is back in the limelight after announcing plans to develop a fully fledged immersive virtual reality platform, code-named Sansar.

I met Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, and he told me that “if you boil down what human beings do, it’s basically creating spaces and sensory experiences, inviting people to share it, and interacting with them”.

One of those user creations was the chemistry lab described above, designed in Second Life by Texas A&M University as a learning aid for its students. In spite of the technical and graphic limitations of the platform, teachers using the facilities found that their students outperformed those learning solely in the real world.

“You can read about something, you can watch a video; but it’s only when you’re doing it that you truly absorb that knowledge,” Altberg says. “In that lab, I can take the molecules, move them around, sit on them; I can pour this liquid into that liquid and see what happens…Nobody reads the manual.The experience is more powerful than video lectures, he says, because it gives learners the ability to socialise with other people in real time. “If I’m at home watching a feed by myself I’m just consuming that content, but if I’m sharing the experience and feedback with others that becomes something entirely different, and much more powerful.”

His vision for Sansar is to make it accessible for anyone to create and share virtual experiences, something that at the moment is impossible for those without advanced technical skills.

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has conducted extensive experiments that show how effective virtual environments can be for optimising the learning experience. He believes that such technology will have a profound effect in education.

“We know, for example, that when a teacher looks at a student, that student has a better chance of actually learning. That makes sense in a one-to-one setting, but in a lecture hall with a hundred students, it is impossible for her to do that. However, when teaching a class in virtual reality, that teacher can employ augmented gaze powers, because the rendering computer in a virtual reality system sends information to all of the students’ systems individually, so the information can be tailored to each person,” he says.

In his experiments, participants never realised that the teacher’s gaze coming from their avatar was not “real”, and as a group, students under that gaze paid closer attention to the teacher’s avatar and retained more information.

By the time today’s children grow up and enter university, this kind of enhanced environment could well be commonplace. For universities just beginning to get their heads around the concept of video lectures and massive open online courses, it might seem like a daunting prospect to build entire virtual worlds and integrate them into their mainstream offering. But if Altberg has his way, universities will be able to not only provide those experiences, but to monetise them, too.

“Take the A&M chemistry lab, for example. They created this amazing, really effective environment and experience in Second Life, but only their students could use it,” he says. “In Sansar, they would be able to put that lab in the marketplace so that another department in another school anywhere in the world can buy it. That school would then have a duplicate of the lab for their own students, which they can customise as appropriate without having to build everything from scratch.”

Sansar launches later this year, so we’ll see how quickly this vision materialises, but Altberg is in no rush. Perhaps unusually in the tech arena, his company is really good at playing the long game. “Second Life’s 13th birthday was in June, so we’re building a platform with the assumption that it will be around for decades.”

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has conducted extensive experiments that show how effective virtual environments can be for optimising the learning experience
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Virtual learning really is coming to universities, via @secondlife creator: @alicebonasio https://t.co/sA8lMGgUZK pic.twitter.com/OGlUb37w4o

— TimesHigherEducation (@timeshighered) July 8, 2016

Read the full article on the Times Higher Education website

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Virtual Learning is Coming To Universities appeared first on Tech Trends.