Virtual Reality? You Will.
“At the end of their lives, all men think their youth was Arcadia.”
–Goethe
As I write this, my grandmother is ninety-six years old. She has sundowner’s dementia, and is rapidly approaching the end of her life. I don’t get to talk with her very often, but it recently occurred to me that I may not have many more opportunities.
So I asked her, the last time we chatted: “What was it like to be a flapper?”
She lit up with almost girlish enthusiasm and went on at some length about her youth during the Roaring Twenties. She hallucinates every day and can barely remember the names of anyone around her, but she could recall with perfect clarity those wonderful and fond memories from more than eighty years ago.
I think she was surprised someone cared.
Because I did. I was genuinely curious. It’s one thing to read about the Great Depression in a textbook; it’s quite another to listen to someone who lived through it. And let me tell you: there just is no comparison. My grandmother was born only twelve years after mankind first took to the skies in the Wright Flyer. From then until now, the amount of history she has lived through — the sheer number of advancements we’ve made as a species — is staggering.
Take a look at this video. This was recorded by Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. Some of what he shows looks as fanciful as Home. Some of it, though, is eerily accurate.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOaZspeSBZU
(Keep in mind, by the way, that GPS and geosynchronous communication satellites owe their existence to Clarke.)
The reason why this has been rattling around in my head is because of just how much can change in only a decade now. Contrast someone born in 1980 versus someone born in 1990; to the latter individual, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, the Falkland Islands, the first bombing of Libya, Margaret Thatcher, and countless other major events are simply something to be read about as a curiosity. To the former individual, however, they were very real events that were lived through. To live under the very real possibility of global thermonuclear war is a terror which I hope is never repeated.
Likewise, technology advanced considerably in that decade. HomeStation has said this before and will say it again: if you were born in 1980 or earlier, you were born into an analog world. If you were born in 1990 or closer to present day, you were born into a digital world. And there’s a walloping big difference between the two cultures, because the internet truly did rewrite the rulebook — both for better and for worse.
Which brings me to the topic of this article. In 1993, just as I’d gotten my hands on the internet for the first time via America OnLine, a series of ads came out from AT&T as part of the “You Will” future technologies campaign. It was an exciting time; I was a teenager in Silicon Valley, just as Silicon Valley was exploding and rapidly becoming the center of the modern world. The future possibilities for technology seemed limitless — yet, at the same time, so much of it still seemed like far-fetched science-fiction.
Looking back on those ads now, however, it’s plainly evident that they were eerily prescient.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MnQ8EkwXJ0
Let me guess: at least a few times during that video, you exclaimed, “Oh my god, that’s actually happened!”
Now, to those of you who were born in 1990, most of what you saw in that video had already come to pass by the time you were old enough to actually care. But to those of us who were born only a decade earlier, the general belief was that, yeah, we might get this sort of technology within our lifetimes, but it would be several decades down the road. No one expected it so soon.
That’s Moore’s Law for ya.
It’s exciting and a bit sobering at the same time. Mathematically, I’m less than a decade away from being middle-aged. My god, I’ve turned into a thirtysomething yuppie. I used to watch thirtysomething on TV. The sense of wonder — of being young and at the center of the modern world during the rise of the digital age — is nothing more than a flickering ember now.
If I close my eyes, I can vividly recall being a small child and typing out wild, Tolkien-esque imaginings on my Apple IIe. There was this wonderful sense that time was on my side — that there was time to get everything done that I wanted to.
I feel like I nodded off for a moment, woke up, and was suddenly a quarter of a century older. What the hell happened? Where did it all go?
Maybe this is one of the reasons why I enjoy Home so much. It’s a new frontier. It’s bleeding-edge stuff. Virtual reality, to me, has such an exciting future that I just love being a small part of it. It really is the future of gaming — and, down the road, a big part of the future of social interaction. Imagine living in Ponca City, Oklahoma and being able to stand on the banks of the Rhine?
Sounds like absolute science-fiction, right? Holographic technology would have to progress to that point and then scale down to a point where it could be purchased for home recreational usage. But if the last fifteen years have taught us anything, it’s that things move much, much faster than any of us could have ever anticipated. And with quantum computers slowly moving forward, the growth could be exponential.
Sure, Home is a long way from a fully immersive virtual experience. But it’s a great start. Back when I was playing on an Atari 2600, the idea of buying a game console and going inside a virtual world wherein I could interact with people across the world would have been ludicrous. And yet here we are.
I’ll leave you with two last videos. The first is a look at the future from 1967:
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpq5ZmANp0k&NR=1
And the second is a look at what the near future might just bring us. It’s called A Day Made of Glass, and it’s truly astonishing.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv1FD0SLwWc&feature=fvst
This last video should have even the kids a little awestruck. But that’s why I’ve included the older videos for reference: because humans have an amazing ability to turn science-fiction into science fact.
I have this horrible feeling that by the time I’m an old man — and we’ve moved out of the digital age and well into the quantum age — I’ll be leaving this world just as some phenomenal advances have made it a more interesting place to live. Scramjet commuter planes. Virtual reality. “Smart” houses. The list goes on at some length.
Home, in time, will look as quaint as one of my old Apple IIe games. It’s the way of things. Yet Home, for all of its whizbangery and technological amazement, offers something much more important: the ability to make a friend.
I think about this amazing group of people I get to work with. People whom I’ve never met in real life. I get to come home from the beach, walk into virtual reality and hold a magazine production meeting in virtual reality with my friends.
My god, I’m living in the future.
And it’s Home which is making me feel young again.
July 22nd, 2011 by NorseGamer | 13 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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Uh huh, very interesting.
Age is a state of mind and physical condition.
Someday remote controls will be understandable by everyone and wow wow zowie people will be able to program their TVs and VCRs <— OOPS! I'm showing my age. Be quiet.
I'm reminded by the article that the ultimate computer, the human brain, has glitches also.
Excellent read.
Wow! I have to say those videos amazed me, the last one in particular. I think back on everything that happened in my own life time, I was born in 1952, before the space race, before computers, before video games, before fax machines, cell phones, and virtual reality. So much has occurred in my short life so far I can’t imagine what the future will hold for us all, I can only hope I am around to witness some of it.
BTW Norse great article!
Age is definitely a mindset. I’ve just come home from having breakfast with my parents, and my mother made a comment about the large number of “old folks” dining at the establishment we went to. It took until we were leaving for her to realize that she is in fact one of those “old folks,” as they were all about her age.
Here’s another observation about those of us who grew up in the analog world and those who grew up in the digital one -- the sense of wonder from the former, and the, “oh yeah, that -- that’s always been there” indifference of the latter.
Let me explain.
My eldest nephew is almost exactly ten years younger than Norse; he was born in May of 1990.
As this article documents, he grew up in a world where the current and growing technology always existed. He didn’t go to school and learn about the Cold War as it existed in real time -- he learned about it in history class. When I lived in Florida about ten years ago, he would instant message me over the computer about his school day in the evenings. This was more normal to him than picking up the phone and calling.
To me, this was a wondrous, amazing new way of keeping in touch with family thousands of miles away. To him, it was everyday life. It always existed. It wasn’t as amazing to him as I thought it was.
Now as a young man of 21, he has no real interest in technology, not because he doesn’t like it, but because he’s never known what it’s like to not have it in his life. It’s just not that big of a deal to him.
The same holds true with the “kids” (I use the “” as this can also include twentysomethings) you find in Home. To them, interacting in a virtual world is as normal as waking up in the morning. It’s not extraordinary or amazing -- and their behavior reflects that. They don’t look upon Home with the same childlike wonder as someone my age or Norse’s age (or even Granny’s age!). This is simply the world they have come to know and expect.
I know they won’t listen when I say that there will come a time in the future when they behold some great advancement with the same wonder as I do the advancements now. But it will happen. It will always happen, and the cycle will continue.
So true Terra, so true.
It is amazing how often SciFi becomes just Sci. The mid 60’s TV show Star trek had Communicators and Tricorders and now we have smart phones than do most of what they did. I remember hearing that during the first NASA space missions, mission control in Houston had less combined computing power than a 10 year old laptop does now. That amazes me, just think if they lost connection back then. Brings on a whole new meaning to poofing. And look how technology spoiled we have become, I know I have yelled at my microwave because 2 minutes is why to long to wait for popcorn. And these interwebs we all come to love, one small step for Al Gore, maybe the biggest leap for mankind to date. And its not over! I can’t even speculate on whats to come because it seems that if we dream it, it can be done. Holodeck Home… it already is to an extent.
People may become complacent with technology but technology will never become complacent with its shelf. There will always be the drive for “the better mouse trap.” But a watchful eye should also maintain non technological things and fail safes. Push for the 3 rules of robotics. A remote kill switch for Hal…there’s an app for that.
I still make my popcorn the old-school style -- Jiffy Pop on the stovetop FTW!
What makes our staff meetings particularly interesting to me is that we span 11 times zones! We are actually on opposite sides of the earth. When I was a child, a long distance call to another city, 200 miles away, meant calling the long distance operator, giving her the name and phone number of the person we wanted to call, and then waiting while the operator placed the call for us. And overseas long distance call meant waiting, sometimes, for hours, until that ‘trunk’ call could be made by the operator. Sending a written message meant paper and pen, envelope, stamp, and, if you want it to go by air rather than by ship, you paid extra for ‘air mail’. I am so thrilled to have lived long enough to see all these incredible advances in technology. I hope I live long enough to have my own holodeck to play in! Beam me up, Scotty.
HSM itself is proof that Clarke was correct. Norse and Terra are in Hawaii. Cubes is in England. If we had someone from Hong Kong or Japan on the staff we’d span the globe. Hmmm…
Honestly, the third video is (mostly) application of technology that exists today. I was pretty surprised that in 1967 they imagined of some of the things that we enjoy today. Like… flat monitors. I was also surprised to find that those “you will” commercials are coming up on 20 years old. Didn’t realize they were that long ago. Thanks for the nostalgia Norse. Great article. You talk about quarter century blinking by… it’s only going to go by faster.
The ONE part of the future that will effect all this is the extension of human life. You talk about not being around for the future and the wonders it holds. That may not be an issue for future generations. This may sound fantastic but death will conquered. People will die when they want to. Not when their body gives out. This may not happen in this generation or the next but it will happen someday and people will no longer be limited by time, only by ambition.
OH, and the phonebooth in the “you will” commercials made me chuckle. Phone booths. How last century.
That last video failed to impress me. Does anyone remember Earth: Final Conflict? My memory is a bit fuzzy, but in one of the opening sequences I seem to remember computers which holographically projected wide screen “monitors” which were touch sensitive. At the time I could barely recognize what I was seeing, because it was so different from my accepted conception of what a PC was.
The last video truly blew me away. We could actually see that stuff perhaps in the next five years from now because technology is just becoming more and more rapid. The IPAD definately showed the way in terms of touch screen technology, and movies such as ‘Minority report’ gave us a glimpse into manipulating images just through hand movement alone. In the screenplay I wrote ‘117’ (which tells the story of a young Clone Soldier who learns he has a choice) As the story is set in the near future I described the family Home of the title character’s Psychologist. Frameless, touchscreen monitors, that feature glasses free 3D images. Voice controlled, Wifi Enabled cars. Lighting & room Tempreture controlled by Hand gesture. It’s all possible and it’s all doable. Home has genuinely hit on something in terms of social interaction and make believe and i think it could take that step further somehow.
Btw Norse, go raid yur DVD collection because i remember a scene in which Kyle Resse describes the futureworld to sarah Conner as they hide out in the car. ‘One possible future’ he begins ‘In which machines are hooked into everything’ Back then in 1984 you wouldn’t think much about that line, but now when I watch it, the hairs on my neck stand on end..He was describing the ‘Internet’.