Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

Interactive and augmented environments are far more exciting to me than the promises of VR. Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better?

The Dynamicland stuff is particularly fun due to the promise of accessibility. A mature version of this vision would be tremendously exciting for me as a high school teacher.

When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice. I want to be able to create personalized tools for interacting with media and ideas (extant and live creations) and managing interpersonal communications/interactions in my room. I can see immediate value in the ability to build branching lesson plans with trigger-able subroutines to provide more individually appropriate experiences to students. I feel strongly about non-linear learning opportunities, but they're logistically difficult. Likewise, to create modifiable one-to-one/one-to-some/one-to-many communications channels to smooth the experience of working with 30-35 people when I can only be in one place at a time (and to mollify the anxieties/anger/angst of being a teenager expected to publicly perform in a crowd).

There are any number of small tools I would like to build. I know what problems I want to fix to improve my efficacy, and I don't need polished consumer products to do that.

If "Hypercard for the World" allowed me to start hacking together useful tools for myself, I would shower them with love.

"Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better?"

Some people could really enjoy escaping their lived world. Imagine if the costs on VR came down enough so that a person living in a slum in Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro or Chicago could walk through the Taj Mahal, or Petra, or sit in a Harvard University lecture hall? What if they could just make the smell go away for an hour?

It would greatly improve the quality of their life even without solving the much tougher challenge of getting them out of poverty.

Considered expansively enough, virtual reality for all five senses could be a substitute for almost any consumption experience. People could eat protein paste and have it taste like filet mignon. They could walk between the same two rooms in their house but feel like they were in Versailles. VR could massively reduce the global demand for energy and materials.

In the long view, this is absolutely compelling. But then - post scarcity also lives in the long view.

I think I've seen this in a movie before, perhaps we could even harvest their body heat for energy and hope they don't come up with a prophecy for a "one" to set them free.

So the Oasis?

A person's interactions with the world are not "consumption experiences." This sort of VR future would turn humanity into ghosts -- haunting a virtual world, unable to truly inhabit it or exercise any degree of agency over it.

I'm eagerly awaiting social VR. Since playing multiplayer games allows people of now to have unparalleled social interaction and insight into other person, being able to freely explore virtual worlds together would greatly increase integrity in society, even if at very least teaching various social skills.

Yeah, there's no reason humans can't interact with the physical world through auxiliary VR worlds. We already do this with websites, VR will eventually be an interface to interact as a connected robotic device.

At the same time, the person in VR would be giving learnable information to the robot while they are controlling it (e.g. like a driver for a self-driving car). Eventually, you could wade the robot off of VR and it would be able to carry out the task. So, VR could also be a way to teach robots.

Bingo

When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice

It seems like this goes beyond VR, and is reflective of the design mindset in tech at large. Creating canned, linear, self-contained, one-size-fits-all flows instead of giving users tools that they can combine/contrast/etc into more powerful abstractions that fit their individual use cases.

Which is disappointing. I either swim in the canned flows or learn to really wrench on code. How many nights and weekends is it worth to be able to create my own tools? Is that even a realistic goal?

Such a barren middle ground.

Those linear, self-contained flows are what can be packaged, marketed and sold. Then the next flow can be scripted and the cycle repeats.

Seems like it's a pretty natural consequence of how a consumer based culture thinks and defines success.

> than the promises of VR. Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better?

I think that's an overly narrow characterisation of VR with unnecessarily pejorative connotations.

For example, perhaps VR will let people interact or collaborate with others in ways AR wouldn't be conducive to?

I'm not saying "VR is better than AR". Different media have different characteristics and uses.

What is the author referring to by "Hypercard in the world"? Does he mean an IoT version of Apple's old HyperCard system? I didn't quite understand the tech stack behind Laser Socks.

(Unfortunately) they don't explain much about it.

westoncb's comment downthread points to another resource digging into B. Victor's recent work.

From the article:

> The theme was to make hybrid physical/digital games using a prototype research system Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn had made called Hypercard in the World. This system was like an operating system for an entire room — it connected cameras, projectors, computers, databases, and laser pointers throughout the lab to let people write programs that would magically add projected graphics and interactivity to physical objects.

In the same way Smalltalk was about virtual objects computing and communicating with each other through a common environment, Hypercard in the World was about physical objects computing and communicating with each other. The next iteration of the system is even called Realtalk as a play on "Smalltalk" but for the physical world.

There were lots of other demos made in this system, but those will be published at some later point...maybe.

The potential for VR of course is that they're the ones who create the simulation.

Sure - and that's valid. I guess I have a futuro-nostalgic attachment to looking people in the eye when we work together.

Have you read ‘Snow Crash?’

I have. It's really fun. So is watching Westworld - morality of player actions aside.

On the AR side of things, Rainbows End is a well conceived vision. I'd appreciate suggestions for other AR visions in science fiction (or otherwise).

I’m not sure about suggestions but I was thinking about Juanita when you talked about wanting to look people in the eye. In snow crash she was obsessed with facial expressions and the need for just what you’re describing for real human experiences. Having said that though I also recommend anything by William Gibson in terms of VR/AR.

I think there's a broader picture here than our personal preferences about our ideal situations.

Consider software development teams. It's probably optimal for the team to be all co-located so they can communicate in person. But the internet today enables dispersed teams (that otherwise wouldn't be able to work together, e.g. for financial reasons) to pretty effectively collaborate on software.

The internet is providing additional options, that provides additional benefit. VR could provide collaborative benefits along these lines.

> I guess I have a futuro-nostalgic attachment to looking people in the eye when we work together.

This is tangential, but as a blind person [1], I wonder if you would be uncomfortable working together in person with someone who can't make eye contact and doesn't even know that you're looking at them. I don't mean to be confrontational; I'm just curious. Eye contact has always been an abstract concept for me, and somehow, I never thought about how it might actually be important in a working relationship until I read your comment. Have you, by chance, ever worked with a blind person?

[1]: Actually, low vision (I can read text up close, and my limited sight helps some with orientation and mobility), but I can't make eye contact, and don't really understand the significance of it.

I have worked with blind coworkers, and they're still making "eye contact", if I recall correctly (I work remote and it's been a while since I last met them). They tend to turn their head a certain way which shows you when they're listening to you.

All eye contact is is a signal that the person's attention is on you.

Thanks for asking. No - I am not uncomfortable talking or working with blind people.

My point about looking someone in the eye was a synecdoche for the more generally the value I feel in-person interaction has that could be lost if I and my students were using VR goggles.

My ability to "read" students is a big part of my professional practice.

Ah, I see (pun intended). Thanks for answering.

VR for connecting real world spaces across distances, so well to the point that our brains cannot distinguish the "V" part of it, to me has the most value.

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