Tech Muse Working Group {Transcript}

Sorry, go ahead Fabien.

I was going to say a lot of silly things but if it’s recorded, I’ll try to be a bit more cautious. I was also a bit worried when you started to remind of the conversation we had because I was like ‘Whoa, I hope I wasn’t too harsh or direct’ but I admit it’s, it’s not a fear of mine but it’s a recurrent challenge, let's say and I think it’s not specific to VR, it’s like, as soon as we have as a new medium, we repeat what we know and that’s perfectly fine and normal but I think it’s literally a waste of a medium if we constrain it to that and that also means when I see yet another [00:00:53.7] or interfaces we’re used to simply put it to VR or AR, I look at it but it’s really very shallow in the sense that we already have medium, so a bit for context, I was at the European Parliament just half an hour ago, here in Brussels, to give a technical presentation on the metaverse, because it’s been something I worked on for a few years, but it’s been very trendy, or famous, maybe infamously famous, due to a certain Mark for the last couple of weeks or month riding on the buzz wave. And it’s yeah, it’s something that I was giving already doing the presentation half an hour ago which is, I like books and I like paper books and I like E Ink; I have a couple of different E Ink devices like the Remarkable or this Open Source version, running on Linux. So, I don’t use VR for text for example, it’s a bit of a simplification but basically, I don’t use VR for everything or AR for everything, and I don’t think dismissing the past media is an interesting perspective. I think it is yet another media or medium and we can do things with it and find words, the sweet spot for our own use cases. So, that’s a little bit also one way to share my perspective, I am going to try to show my screen, can you see my screen now, yeah. So, I’ll start with this which is my motivation for VR. So, this is what brought me to VR in the first place. Initially it’s not that that’s the current outcome, let's say, but initially let's say let's start with this which is a page of my Wiki but in 3D. So, I’ve been maintaining my Wiki, my name Fabien Benetou.fr for about a bit less than 15 years. And I write about everything in it, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for anyone but me, if it is useful for anyone on any topic, then I’m very happy and I can talk to anybody who let's say visit one of the pages but it’s mostly like the equivalent of a notebook, a physical notebook for me. And actually, I started with a Moleskine notebook or whatever piece of paper I could put together, because, and that’s again very personal, but I get bored rather quickly and at some point, I was like, ‘I don’t need to have the same thoughts twice, if I don’t want to, because I have pen and paper because I have a bunch of tools around me to help me basically manage - maybe not knowledge but at least information. And then I started to write it down, so I can go back to the 1,000 plus pages I have in it on a lot of different things. But then when I put a VR headset in the first, for the first time, that was in 2014 I believe, I don’t remember exactly I put the headset on and I was in Tuscany. So there was a simple but famous demo from the Oculus DK1, where you’re in a very low resolution game like place in Tuscany and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool’, and then my second thought was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool and I could put all my notes in it’, so that’s when I started to be really excited by the medium because I thought, ‘Wow, my screen here in front of me is very nice’, it’s high resolution but it’s very thin and I feel like I want to grab my notes out of it and move them around and organise them and let's say organise on a tour and then bring you to the tour of my notes to get some feedback to [00:05:25.2] basically I want this feeling that I should have my notes around me if I feel like it, so that’s when I started to work in virtual reality. A quick note is also that the same kind of reflection or ideas also apply to augmented reality, so a quick note because I don’t know how familiar people are with different technologies, this is an augmented reality headset and the main thing you can see, I’ll just put it like this, that it’s transparent, so it mean if I put it on, I’ll see the real world whatever that is through the glasses and then I put on top again my notes, I’m sorry if I sound obsessive but to me they are precious because that’s how I see the world literally so when I have my notes at the right moment in front of me, the problem is, this is pretty cool and it’s a fancy €3,000 headset, it’s still very, very [00:06:28.5 stitch] in my opinion, we’re not ready yet to anybody and everybody in any context to use augmented reality. In the near future I bet it will be the case but not right now, so whereas this, VR headset which you call see-through, which is opaque, that works, I discuss with them a bit by email but apparently a lot of you maybe even most of you did try VR and for those who didn’t i really recommend that you do try it, you don’t need to buy the headset, so just for, when I did this is about €300 standalone headset, you don’t need to buy one because you can go to a VR arcade, if you have the chance to have on you buy, try it for one hour and you can hate it, that’s perfectly fine, you don’t need to like VR or AR but I think what is very, honestly I’m going to say dangerous, is if you think you know but you haven't tried because it is a very experiential medium, you need to be in it basically, you need to put the headset and again it can be literally just for five minutes and then you say, ‘Useless’, put it in the bin and move onto whatever you want to do with your day but I think no matter how smart of educated or imaginative you are, you need to give it a go, you need to try it and if you tried something 10 years ago, you don’t know anymore because the technology again, that €300 it fits in my backpack and I can move around, so if I put the headset I can physically go five metres to the left or the right, again even jump and I can lay on the floor and that’s going to work and it will completely transform the world around you and the other very neat things is you have those controllers and those controllers mean you can grab an object, initially I was talking about how I want to work with pages, so if I brought back some of the different prototypes I’ve built, initially I had just the 2D version, so this is graph perspective of my notes, I have another one on the side where I can [00:08:39.4] based on different context, let's say those are reading notes, those are programming tools and I apologise if it’s very self-centred but you need to project with whatever content you want to organise or play with or tinker with, being an art collection, being historical pieces, I believe the principles basically are the same and then once I have some 3D viewers, I show you earlier, then I could bring them with someone else, so that’s the first image here, I have my webcam too and I have somebody visiting my notes, or [00:09:18.6 opening] PDF and what’s really, really important then it’s really, it’s a different experience is to grab the note and then you can move it, I don’t know how many of you like post-it notes, but I think it’s very simple yet a very, very cool tool. And as people like to talk about tools to think, we don’t need necessarily fancy novel in hardware, I think the post-it note really can do a lot, and then the idea is that you can move your content, like post-it notes around in space and have that space to be [00:09:50.2], it doesn’t have disappear once you’ve gone. And you have unlimited space, you can extend it however deep, far and high you want and with completely different physics, you can add physics so that when you put the post-it note in front of the wall but [00:10:09.1] to fall or not, you can make it float, you can do whatever you want. One also clarification that I notice I missed, here for example you can see the island, let's say, in here I have a more abstract version, I don’t know if I should start it live but let's try, yeah, that works. Which is more of a – and I guess it’s still loading but abstract city scape like cyber [00:10:35.0] city scape where the notes, the size of the note is going to be proportional to the size of the building more or less, so a lot more is different stylised version. You can have literal metaphors or you can have metaphors literal models however you want to organise it but I think what’s very interesting and important, again I can move around here, I’m doing it through the computer just to show you but otherwise I would physically move around with a headset or with the controls. If we need to okay manipulating notes themselves is very interesting, it’s even honestly enjoyable, you can scale them up and down, the same for 3D objects. You have little cars symbolically, photographic camera etcetera, but what’s interesting is those notes or those artefacts if you want are in space. And I don’t know for you but I think a lot, I’m amazed when I go back and think of let's say a friend and a word [00:11:38.2] because even if I haven't seen that friend for five years and I’ve been to their house and I know how to get there. And from, let's say a theory of my perspective and how our brain works I find just this incredible and I think it’s our ability to remember not just space but how we walk a path through space is excellent and you can basically [00:12:05.2]. So, we can visit back a place a lot more easily when it’s more spatial and as you leave through symbols and not landscape but landmarks basically, adds that meaning to it and eventually helps to recall what happened. Some of you might be familiar with a memory palace technique, that’s not new, the one difference though with VR is that shared space, potentially shared actually, it doesn’t have to be is permanent so you can come back and it’s going to still be there whereas if you do a memory palace, if you don’t have some kind of support for it it’s relying entirely on your memory. So a lot of different versions of it and one version that could also be interesting is I did a tour to present different concepts of the technology behind it, I’m just going to skim through and not show you the whole presentation, I can put a link after but I – well I organised a 3D world, I’m not a graphist, so I’m completely unable to do something like this but there are 3D models on the web that you can buy or get for free and then you can organise the space, organise the space to then give a presentation, so I’m walking through that virtual space, in order to explain the concept in a different way and that makes recall or being able to memorise what happened a lot more efficient, a lot easier. Yes, so all this though is still very much work in progress, what was maybe not said during the introduction is I’m a developer but I’m kind of a strange kind of developer in the sense that I’m a prototypist, you would definitely not want me to play with a let's say a nuclear power plant next door because the code I write is honestly unreliable and aesthetically yeah, it’s different, let's put it this way but I still think it’s good in the sense that it does the job and the job usually is to test the concepts, it’s something that normally has never been done before, so I would do prototyping and then I explore those concept, I believe most of that about organising notes in VR when I did try it, they were sure attempts elsewhere but not a lot, so I think it’s relatively new. And a lot of them are dedicated to hubs, [00:14:46.5] hubs, I do that particularly because a couple of components or a couple of properties – number one, it’s on the web, so it means it does work right there on my desktop, I can give you a link and you can join right away, you can join a desktop, on your mobile phone, on your headset but you don’t have to if you don’t have a headset that’s going to work, of course you don’t get the whole immersion and the controllers but you can still experience, give some experience of it, so that’s one aspect being across the different platforms, deliverable on the web and it’s open source. So, it means if you don’t like it, if you have ideas on how to customise it, make it better or even just integrating with a back end system for participants to an exhibition or a show, you could also diverse that, so that’s something that I did is very important and to go back to the initial point of being at the early stage of a medium, where we tend to copy a behaviour we had in a previous medium that means you can think about it freely, it doesn’t mean it’s trivial, it’s actually pretty challenging to modify hubs, and to change how to manipulate, let's say obtain VR or otherwise but at least it doesn’t prevent you from being creative and challenging how you can showcase content, manipulate content, interact with content and then I will also share the link that I have a dozen or more prototype using sunglasses to look around in the virtual space, manipulating notes that I was saying with the Remarkable, so that’s a E Ink tool e-books or documents and then when I move around or when I drop, let's say, a PDF in this specific part of the island then it sends it automatically to the device, why do I like this specific prototype is again, to show that VR is not for everything, organising note, manipulating content, experiencing your space, [00:17:04.7] reading a 35 pages PDF where it’s mostly text in 12, has a small font, I would not do it, I mean you'd get a headache after five minutes, so playing to the strength of the medium. And one thing also that could be interesting and I’m going to stop after this, I’ll pause it, is collaborative design, a lot of people think, it’s a bit blurry but I’ll explain, there are people who think that VR as an isolating medium so I have friend there who looks like a panda because that was his choice then and you can be there with someone else, you can be there with one other person or yeah a lot of other participants, this person is in VR, I’m on my desktop and I show the code there at the bottom because the space become interactive and you can let's say take here a soccer ball, toss it in a disk and make some points, that’s to say that it’s not just about showing the space but you can define some ways to interact with the space and this is done live meaning the code I have here is going to impact his behaviour as he plays, so in the room, why do I mention it, is because again, we’re looking for new ways to explore and exploit the medium and basically we don’t know what we’re doing and if we don’t know what we’re doing, the faster we can get feedback from an actual user in the headset or again otherwise the more efficient because we need to fill a lot so we need to try and try as fast as possible to be able to explore the space of potential as much as possible, so I think doing collaborative exploration of the medium with or without headset is one of the most efficient way to narrow down what basically works for you or [00:18:59.4]. And I’ll stop there because I talk too much.

Thank you so much Fabien, that was really, really stimulation and exciting and I think just talking us through your process and I think you conveyed really clearly where the strengths of this might lie and the exciting potential. One thing I was just interested in maybe you could say a little bit more about was just at the end you know you showed us that you have a friend who’s in panda avatar and we were discussing this before you came on about the social element and how it can feel quite individualised to put a headset on and particularly in the space of the museum there's something fundamentally quite social about walking through a museum with other people but perhaps you’re pointing to potentials actually of virtual reality being a social space, I mean is it the same as socialising in, I don’t like this term but the meatspace, you know non-virtual reality or is distinctive, do you think?

So I think so just to step back a bit, I think reality exists but we don’t have access to it, so we have access to reality through a bunch of filters being our culture, being literally glasses but basically we think we see but if I look at the wall to my right I don’t objectively see the wall because otherwise if I were to look at every, I can’t see atoms but small pieces of the wall, I would stare at it, completely forgot about you all and then maybe forget about my dinner, so basically we focus on what is useful for the task at hand regardless of the medium, can be VR, can be meatspace as you say, it can be using Teams also, so I think focussing on what being useful for the task is the only thing that matters, the medium itself then is the way to convey that being again face to face or in the space, in VR, in AR but as long as you provide the affordance to the tools, the mechanism, the interface to support the task at hand I think we forget the medium like most of us here forget about Zoom I hope because we have, it is interesting we have a task to solve, we’re wondering let's say how to use the medium and then okay if it was Zoom, if it was face to face, if it was in VR, as long as it’s helpful then it is good, the one thing though that is pretty important is, I really don’t think it’s isolating, if you don’t do it alone, if you do it with somebody else in the headset, if you’re both, let's say all at first to join Helpspace or another platform with a headset then that will be the space of social interaction, that being said [00:22:19.1 the caveat] is, it looks a bit dorky, to be honest, having those big headsets on the face look a bit dorky and initially a lot of people come and I probably have been guilty of it, I can’t recall, I like to think of myself as a good person but I probably fell there at least once, which is you poke at people like physically, you’re like, oh they're in their headset, so basically you need a safe space in VR and outside of VR, if you bring somebody in a public space and they are afraid of being judged, poked at, even hurting someone else like it’s pretty bad but if you go on Reddit, there is a VR to ER [00:23:01.8] where you see people doing the dumbest stuff but one cannot judge if you haven't put the headset on because I did punch the wall quite a few times, it looks completely, it sounds silly let's say but once you put the headset and again you have a task at hand you forget about the headset, you start to do your thing and if you were to think maybe I don’t know, a kid is going to run in front of me while I do the experience and I might punch them, then I’m going to be like this literally the whole experience, so you need to have an actual physical self-space, where people don’t feel either judged or that they might hurt or somebody might judge them or whatever it is so that would be first and then after that having quality interaction, social interaction in the virtual space.

Thanks Fabien. Yeah, really, really interesting about the sort of that we forget about the medium, so that’s really interesting and does anyone else want to jump in for questions or comments for Fabien.

I’ve got a really simple one Fabien, I see you have your own headset there, is that the way of the future that people will carry these around because I’ll tell you why, we had a discussion about the headsets in public places and hygiene is obviously really hot issue and nobody wants to put on a headset where the previous person has had makeup or greasy hair, so do you see that’s the future, that we will each carry one of these around the way we do a smartphone?

I hope so, I hope so again because I have a view of it being, at the same time, let's say my personal intention is just the medium, nothing more and I have zero passion or love for that piece of plastic, it’s just a tool, that being said when I have a really quality experience, I do care a bit to go through it, so I really do hope we’re all going to have headsets but to use it the way we want. What I really don’t want is to be forced within usages or feeling unsafe or that there is some kind of abuse of monopoly or economic system that’s going to get us, forcing to get a headset basically, I can’t imagine that, I don’t want this to happen, now on a lot more pragmatic perspective this was 10 years ago, €100,000 more or less and you had to set up a room with a team of specialists that would put, not lasers but things like this in the corner, so VR already existed for quite a while but it’s the democratisation of the medium basically that is quite different and also the good thing tough is, it’s not just cheaper, it means more eyes and minds poking at the medium. So, it’s quite a big difference, I would imagine it’s going to be even cheaper, well maybe not honestly, it’s a bit special for me because that’s my job, like that’s my focus. So I have box, a literal box full of headsets, so I [00:26:35.2] to be very dispassionate about the headset themselves but I can imagine keeping on being cheaper and cheaper, I don’t know if you’re aware but you can pull out the part that’s going to be in contact with the face and it means you can have one headset with a hundred let's say of those face mask and they also face mask covers so that you can put them on top of and then you literally throw them away, you don’t even need to wash, so there are a couple of let's say, hygiene solutions, a little anecdote, when the pandemic started I was like well that’s not good, [00:27:18.9] polite and then I thought okay, well we’re stuck in this, that’s it but there is a medium that might help, so what I started to think is, I cannot buy a headset for all of Brussels where I’m based but what I can do is use for example a courier service, send a headset to someone, they send it back to me but that was, I just try it once with a friend who would just see how it will work out of the behaviour, seeing the prototype being mindset and then even that and even though it was a friend, it was already awkward so it’s a bit, it’s a tension of like okay now we’re in a pandemic, the hygiene already was challenging me, now it’s really, really a big deal and rightfully so, so it’s a bit of tension, hopefully I would, I’m an optimist, I think it is getting better, the whole idea of those disposable one, the one you can remove, there are also some UV boxes I’m not a medical doctor so I don’t want to give any advice on this specifically but I want to say there are quite a few solutions on this in term of providing what again, not as a doctor, seems to be a hygienically respectful experience. So, a little bit, a word of caution but if you don’t have questions then I’ll have questions, it’s a bit of a warning.

Is this like volunteer unless you’re voluntold kind of a situation yeah. I have one Fabien then and again it’s thinking about VR in an art museum context, so I’m just interested in this idea that so a Van Gough, I think was brought up earlier, it’s a hugely popular, Van Gough experiences and some of them are sort of just immersive experiences in physical factory and others are VR and some are a mix and this idea of going into an artwork and going inside an artwork and I was just quite interested in this idea that for me you know when I experienced recently, quite recently it was a VR experience of, it’s totally gone from head but it was a VR experience of an artwork and you sort of the elements of the artwork are all around you, I found that the, I found just totally because of the privileging of like immediacy and sort of affect, I found it impossible to think about the artwork and actually when I sort of stepped out and took the headset off and you know I was able to stand back and could see it was a reproduction actually, it was like I felt enveloped and I felt that the critical distance that I needed to really like think critically was not possible when the artwork was all around me and when I was inside it and that might not be true for some of those examples that you said but in how I experienced I felt that the you know and I just wondered if you'd any thoughts on that the sort of increasingly common now to see this in terms of immersive art experiences and I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that kind of the critical distance, like I mean you’ve got your notes in there, so presumably you’re having critical sort of you know experiences then but yeah I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that.

Well so it’s not exactly on that but I don’t know if you did watch documentaries in VR, not a piece of art but documentaries, well even outside of VR I guess I watched a couple of documentaries a week but not too much because I found them usually emotionally draining, all the world is maybe not as neat as I thought it was but I still can’t help because I want to understand, I want to have some, I need to see what’s happening, not just from a [00:32:03.8 little] window but from a broader perspective but I can’t do that every day and especially when it’s something that was really challenging that I was like, ‘Whoa, why I did not know about that’, and I’m not even sure why I had to, it was kind of tricky and I think a lot of VR experience especially in term of there was a, it’s not really a buzz word but I think it was at some point called an emotion machine or the empathy machine also. One of the experience I tried was before the pandemic, there is a [00:32:42.0 Centre de Recherche Inter-Disciplinaire] in Paris, the Research, Interdisciplinary Research Centre, that basically tries to not put boundaries between disciplines in research and they had an experience, two experiences in VR, one was where you put the headset on and you have a camera and then somebody else sits in front of you and they do the same and then you basically can look down and you’re as if you were in their shoes but like literally you’re in somebody’s shoes and it’s very and you repeat the movement, you synchronise it, there is the hand, you can raise your hand to the point that you can even touch you but [00:33:23.6] someone else body at the end. So, there are experiences like this that are really, I can’t do that every day, you need some time to digest basically. And another one I saw from that research centre was on dyslexia, it was for teachers, where you had to be in the shoes of a [00:33:48.2] pupil and it was really, [00:33:51.4] it stays with me that I never thought about it that basically their experience was this kid couldn’t read properly, was switching letters, they had some exercise about reading to the rest of the class and they become the clown of the class but not on purpose, they were really trying their best to read but when you put the headset on, they switched the letters as you tried to read them so even if you don’t have dyslexia you get dyslexia and then you’re like, [00:34:19.0] the teacher is mad at me or send me away and I really tried my best. And then what happens next to, after that scene is that you’re in person in the space with the person who designed your experience and they give you a book that you have to hold like this which symbolise, it’s synchronised with the video, [00:34:42.6] symbolise being in a [00:34:43.8 toilet] where you want just to have a break and then somebody comes knock at the door and you feel the knocking on the door and they come in it’s basically to get bullied because you are not good in class etcetera. And that same – I don’t want to believe that, again it stays with me, it’s not inclined to go away but I can’t do that daily. So, the other, [00:35:05.4] aspect of the media that are really, really demanding and if you have an abstract piece of art, you might have again some distant, if it’s a piece of work that is, that can be very, end up very personally that touch you too much. That can be the case and then there is also the more naïve let’s say aspect of the medium is new. I need to discover what it is and then I’m just blown away by being somewhere else. So, I think with this in term of design experiences the onboarding, I’m guilty of this too, just this morning there is a game that I’m setting up at the parliament called ‘[00:35:50.8 Keep talking] and nobody explodes’, it’s an asymmetric game where you have somebody wearing the headset that has to diffuse a bomb. And then other participants who can’t see what they see have the documents which is basically the manual to diffuse it, it’s a game, it’s very fun, I obviously I really warmly recommend it, it forces you to understand that you need to communicate and you have different perspectives and it’s a team thing, it’s not competitive, it’s collaborative, so in term of team building it really works but why was I guilty is because my colleague I give him the headset and I was, ‘Okay, you do this, you do that’, because we had a meeting like 10 minutes later, so I had to rush through and it’s really bad because you’re putting somebody else in your situation, forget let's say, this is even worse because he was supposed to diffuse a bomb, so he knew about it before and he like literally for him there in hell just like that but still it’s the – and especially when it’s an environment where I imagine for [00:36:54.1] you have like a queue of people because you don’t have like hundreds of headsets, so you basically need to make it fast, that would be my biggest warning there is you need to spend the time before and after for a ramp up and onboarding and explanation, what’s going to happen and make people feel comfortable because and that most of us are guilty of that, that maybe it could be ageism, sexism, a lot of basically [00:37:22.9] notions and [00:37:24.3] I don’t know it’s a 15 years old boy, he’s going to know, he plays video games, this kind of thing, boom, take the headset play with it, I was like no maybe they have no idea, maybe they don’t even have a mobile phone, maybe they don’t like video game, so it takes time like even if you just forget having one person, one experience the onboarding process is really something that everybody, it’s always underestimated basically.

Fabien, can I ask you a question, in terms of content versus aesthetics, with regards to VR, recently the Victoria and Albert Museum close to show an Alice in Wonderland, which as you can imagine gives its way to quite magical interpretations and HTC provided virtual reality sets, it was quite a big undertaking that they did but interestingly there was a lot of kickback, a lot of negative criticism because the aesthetics were brilliant as you would expect from a museum, they had an artist commissioned to create Alice’s world but a lot of the gaming community came and they were highly annoyed to say an understatement because they felt the content was ridiculous that there was no gaming, the caterpillar questions were the same questions every time you reactivated it, so there seemed to be this division between the museum gallery world going for a beautiful aesthetic but a large vast majority of people who are into gaming and videos felt that the content was useless and that it was kind of Emperor’s New Clothes slightly and I think that’s a really dangerous thing for museums and galleries because you’re alienating a whole raft of the audiences who you want to engage with but if they see it purely as a pictorial element but that’s important too because you know it can look really bad with clunky artwork, I just wonder your take on that, is it just a very difficult and expensive area for museums and galleries to get into?

The message is the medium so that’s a little bit the trick answer there is that yes, there is a tendency to gamify everything because you can and because honestly it is justified because if you can push back to the world you visit, you’re really going to feel there, if you put the headset and regardless, it is like showing pretty funny aesthetics just in term of immersion doesn’t matter, like you can look like an actual potato and the world around you can be symbolic with like I don’t know just triangles and if you have something to do, an important task or again a chat or something like this, you being to feel there, whereas you can have something photo realistic even actually a 360 video but then you have no impact on it and you’re behind a screen even though it’s immersive so I can, I hear when you give the example what this, [00:40:40.3] this has is, risky push for everything becoming a video game and maybe losing some of the contemplative aspect of using the piece of art as it is. So, in a way that’s justified or that’s pushed by the nature of the medium that – but that doesn’t have to be that everything has to be gamified. For example you can put the piece of art on a virtual [00:41:08.6 pedestal] and you can play around it or giving different visually perspective or a good tool or I don’t know a lamp to send the, to change the light for it, different way to experience it, not necessarily I don’t know, taking the piece of art and playing basketball with it, so I think there are good ways to gamify while being respectful of the perspective you want to give to the piece and there are things that are just badly using the medium to say, ‘Oh yeah we need to add interaction because it improves immersion but without what do you want to express [00:41:44.4]’. Does it make sense? Just a quick word before somebody ask a question but a lot of the productions are not that good sometimes, sometimes I go to a museum and then I’m not going to the VR piece and I know it’s [00:42:07.7 my job] and I really am passionate about it and curious but it is easy to do it wrong, it’s a little bit, it’s quite harder to do it right, it’s still worth it in my opinion, it doesn’t mean it has to be expensive but one has to ask the right question in the end like how do you, what do you want to express with that experience, it doesn’t have to be, I think there are fundamental again misconception that photorealism for example is the answer to everything and then you have a huge investment in time and then resource and then money to make something look like exactly how it should or maybe an avatar that look with all the right facial features and whatever nobody knows how to do this, it means you keep on spending money and resources to an unattainable goal which again in some case is completely pointless because for example maybe if you were to just be a potato that push on triangle, you would feel more there than if you were to try to look exactly like you are in real life, so I think that’s probably one of the biggest risks in term of having experiences that are extremely expensive and yet miss the point.

Fabien, have you done any research into how VR would work for people who are challenged, neuro-challenged, they might be autistic or you just have kind of learning disabilities or that kind of thing, how does it work for those type of people?

No, I haven't. The research centre though I mention in Paris, with the example of dyslexia, the [00:44:17.0 CRI] did some of that, there is actually I think overall taking considerations of accessibility really helps everyone, so in term of the assumptions of I don’t know do we need to walk around, do we not, do we – can we have a high contrast experience et cetera I mean overall accessible design doesn’t solve everything but it facilitates onboarding, it’s hard but overall I think it’s also especially I mean depending on the context but every kind of experience especially with – what happens, quick short story, a personal story, so I went to the San Jose First [00:45:14.2 W3C] which is basically an organisation to set standards for the World Wide Web and it was the first conference, workshop rather on VR on the web and somebody ask, ‘What about blind people?’ And I was like ‘That’s a silly question’, of course that’s not going to work, of course VR is like the big change that happen for the last five years or the screens and they move fast and all that. And then I actually listen to the [00:45:50.8] and it’s like that person was making a great point that yeah, you already, I don’t know isolated is the right word but you already have a rather specific way to perceive the world then you hear about it’s all the time everywhere this new super-interest medium and yet you don’t have access to it so how are you going to feel, it’s really, you’re excluded in some ways already and it’s going to get worse, I went like, ‘Wow, this is, I’m a bad person’, I should have those thoughts initially and it was really quite striking and then because my initial was reaction was like - yeah, plus even if there was there is no solution to it and then of course after listening to the talk I was like, ‘Hmm, actually maybe there is’, and a friend of mine, [00:46:41.6] worked for example on using, on translating let's say the [00:46:48.1] screen readers that you have on your 2D screen to VR so basically you’re going to turn their head, you don’t sit still of course but then where you would look at, there would be like a laser if you want that’s going to highlight with sound what’s happening in the space and then you could have maybe a description you can have some music or hints or whatever but basically translating to some of the medium that person could still experience so it’s not easy but there are definitely ways and also more importantly that there is ongoing research for this, both in term of accessibility and in term of also the impact, it’s something I didn’t touch on during the presentation but you have VR used as a tool or as a way to present content but you have VR elsewhere used in research in neurology, in psychological development, in much every field it’s being used as let's give a virtual experience to someone, let's measure basically because you can create that world with some how do you say, experimental challenges, instead of course one with reality but if you can identify and what you’re trying to measures, it’s quite a powerful tool. So, most likely you’re going to see research on how to become accessible to your audience and also how to better understand your audience through what has been learnt thanks to VR.

I’m curious if there's – because we all know sort of Facebook is designed to be addictive, is there a lot of concern about Mark Zuckerberg’s company moving into this space in general and yeah what you think about that.

Can we swear? I mean I don’t have a Facebook account, I don’t have a Google account, I don’t have Instagram, I like to think that I play with the state of the art of [00:49:06.3] technology that doesn’t mean I have to adhere to, the core of the issue to me is [00:49:06.3to avenge] against capitalism basically, the technology itself, that’s problematic for me because that’s a Meta Facebook headset. It’s a problem because it’s good and it’s cheap. And that’s, I would argue, one of the biggest problems is they subsidise the cost of those headsets, they can’t make money with that. But they have so much, so deep pockets that they can lose money for a couple of years, a couple of billions here and there, no big deal and then they own the market. So, I think that’s pretty bad, it’s still a potential, it’s something again just two hours ago now at the parliament we discussed in term of abuse of, monopoly abuse risk, it is just a tool, just yet another medium with yet another tool but it can be like other tools, abused and that specific company has a history of abusing its power and the tools and resources, so yeah, it’s pretty bad already. I have friends who received, I’m being cautious of what I can say or not but I personally advise some of the friends who could potentially have been hired by Facebook, like okay but beyond the technology and the access and everything you’re going to have, during a dinner party are you going to be proud of what you’re doing like what’s, it’s a tool in a context, that company has a specific business model and a specific scale so yeah I think it’s very worrisome that being said I don’t think it’s a good idea to throw the medium with that specific company, I even mention it, I think it was earlier this morning, I was chatting on basically disentangling the commercial success of the medium versus the interest, it can be a flop, it can be a success in term of sales, it doesn’t mean you have to throw it away, it doesn’t mean you have to accept it just because it’s [00:51:21.1 popular]. So, I think it’s, how you say, digital hygiene let's say or even also digital literacy, I think it’s a powerful tool but it has to be used yeah smartly, you need to be able to know like GDPR, where your data is going, how it’s going to be used, I mean it’s a company that tries to get all the data it can to sell it to other people, initially it’s – I need to be cautious because I could talk for hours on this specific point, so I’ll try not to, the one thing though that really was interesting for me or a clicking moment, let's say, is actually, you know a certain Daniel I believe, who talked about AI a little while ago.

Daniel Luther yes, he did our first session, yeah.

Yes and it’s thanks to him that I read the book on surveillance capitalism from Shoshana Zuboff and because initially that made no sense to me why would Mark Zuckerberg buy the Oculus company, that’s the only reason I had was like, ‘Oh he got too much money and he wants a new toy’, and I’m like that does make sense actually but it’s not very strategical like as he’s been running and develop your company quite well for a while now so a random move like this could be a bit strange until I read the book and basically summarised the interpretation for VR of the book was like, ‘yes it’s another source of data’, it’s not just more data, it’s another way to get other sensors in people home because once you know everything there is to know through your feed and the clicks you basically need not just more but different data, whatever it could be motion, it could be buddy, it could be next generation, it could be i-tracking, it could be a heart rate whatever, any in term of strategy what Meta doesn’t have is a platform. Google which is still a huge advertising company so it’s just as bad as Meta but what they do which I guess would make it worse is they own a platform, I don’t know, I’m not going ask how many of you have an android phone but android is Google, they own 70% I think of the mobile phone market, they have the play store for it, they have Chrome, the browser, they have basically because – and actually ironically enough their operating system of that headset by Meta is from Google, so that’s the challenge let's say of Meta, compared to they are both billion dollar advertising company that use technology, to a not technology company it’s a different thing, their business model is selling our data to the highest bidder for profit, including politics so anyway you know all that but they don’t have a platform, Meta doesn’t have a mobile phone so that’s the play there, it’s like, ‘Oh we need to own a platform to get yet another kind of data and we’re going to subsidise headsets in order to yeah, leave the competition behind so it is where we stand yet there are other headsets especially I have different ones including VR and AR, there are some open choice one, the one thing, the one I did with quite a bit now is from a French company called, Lynx and it’s more expensive because they don’t subsidise it, you need to actually pay for the stuff, it’s made in the EU, at least it’s designed, assembled and programmed in the EU so if let's say you have digital problems and more importantly because you don’t have to know and trust them in my opinion the one way you can know a company is the business model, if the business model is to sell stuff, then that’s how they make money, if the business model is to sell yourself through your usage, then it’s different, so here they sell stuff, so it means if they mess up by sharing your data without you agreeing to it, they go down instantly, so they don’t have an incentive basically for this in term of the risk for privacy because privacy I think is just like, I don’t want to show myself is going to shape who I am literally because I’m going to have some [00:55:53.3 chill] effect I don’t want to talk about that, I’m going to have advertisement targeted to me that I can’t discuss with others because you guys are not going to see the same advertisement as I do, so it’s pretty messed up but there are other headsets, there are other platform and that’s also why I personally I believe open source is quite interesting, I have of course how do you say a specific position because as a developer and a prototypist that they’ll ask me to build, so that’s definitely very interesting but it’s also like I can open it, I can check it, I can audit it and I can see – oh, it does only what it says it does not more and I think when I have, those are full of sensors, cameras and again you can expect a lot more in my house in my office, I want to know what’s going through and I want to be able to use it safely. I don’t think it’s good you know to compromise basically. Sorry for the rant.

Thank you for that Fabien you know I think that connects really strongly with our earlier conversations with Daniel and also with Gracie and I think it shows that actually these different technology areas are connected through central concerns around privacy, around surveillance and these kind of things but I really liked your term digital hygiene, I’m going to keep that I think you know to make sure we’re looking after ourselves. I think the last question from me Fabien, if I can be cheeky, since you’re here and you’re at the coalface, what’s your, putting looking at the future, what’s your kind of – do you think that in the future we’ll all be in a metaverse, do you think the future is AR, it feels like Derek I think earlier talked about we’re on the edge, the sense we’re on the edge but no one knows quite how it’s going to play out, one of the articles we shared was I think John [00:58:20.0] who, the guy who runs Niatic, so he’s kind of banking on AR you know AR is the future not VR obviously we’ve talked about Meta and they're banking on a certain vision of the metaverse, what in your own kind of personal opinion if you had to put your money somewhere, where this is going next, what would you say, VR, AR, the metaverse, a mix of all three, what would you say? Maybe it’s too big a question but.

I can try anyway. I mean my short, actually we can step back a bit before, before VR, I tinkered a bit with artificial intelligence so that was about 10 years ago or less. I want to say before it was as trendy as it is now because I really think it is very interesting and powerful and potentially useful. The same [00:59:36.0] that we mentioned before about surveillance capitalism, it was the all the same company doing a lot of AI [00:59:42.8 R&D] so there is that, also to be pragmatic that VR uses AI, computer vision to be able to like those cameras basically in order to position them [00:59:52.5] space without any tracking, they just look at the feature points to see, ‘Oh I’m moving forward or backward’, so that’s AI, what changed I think for me was. I don’t know if it’s the marketing gap basically, the promises, I mean that’s why I do prototyping. And I was thinking about it this morning, my mother sent me to do internships when I was maybe 12 or 13 just for a couple of days because I said, ‘I want to be an architect, oh I want to be like an editor in a printing press’ or whatever, she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure go for it’ and then I tried and I went like, ‘This is not as interesting as I thought it would be’, because there is the actual core of the task and in a lot of jobs I think you have 80% that is unrelated, it’s not like what you came here for and I found that like yeah it didn’t work out for me at least for those two jobs, let's say for the architect it was a lot of project management like oh you need to call people and you need to be faster on this and – I wanted just like designing a museum for example with some crazy unlimited budget [01:01:10.1] it’s cool but it’s not real life. So, I was about to confirm it right away and now I think that’s my perspective for everything when you hear about a rendition try it right away and don’t okay check one or two presentation if you want, read a PowerPoint or two, a book but then actually like go for it and even if it’s to give up right away, like okay that’s why I mention initially the VR arcade is because you need to give it a go and even it’s to say, that’s cool but I don’t care enough for it and maybe you check again in six month or even six years whatever but you give it actually a go because I think otherwise the marketing gap and how much there is some buzz around is pretty counterproductive so if I go back to your question about let's say AI versus VR versus AR, I measure that in term of marketing gaps or how far are we to the actual [01:02:08.1] and how long it’s going to take. So, I think AI is never going to go away, but I think of AI as state of the art software, it sounds a lot less sexy but I think it’s more pragmatic if you think about it of like what is the state of the art of I don’t know, the days of [01:02:25.5 computer] vision or text processing or speech to text, all that fits into AI, but it’s not like a magical thing anymore, it’s like okay there is research in that field and it’s being, you can use it this way and you can check it that way from that specific [01:02:42.4 lab]. So, it’s a lot less sexy but I think useful so AI is always going to be there, always going to be with us because software is yeah, really useful in every domain. So there, I’m always betting on that, but without grandiose perspective. AR in the long term but we’re not there yet, so I think it maybe a decade or so, I mean we’re getting there, there is a lot of progress including from meta, so I keep on tinkering with it but and honestly I don’t know if that’s a good, a lot of the AR vision to me are not appealing because it’s more noise and it’s very difficult to get exactly the right information, the first thing I did before we started this call was actually to turn off all my notifications so except if my house is on fire then I’m going to stay just with you all, I’m not going to have like more stuff everywhere around so I think if you can get control, if get like just a notification at the moment you want AR is going to be nice but I going to quickly mention another book actually a book that was quite central for me on this and on digital hygiene, it’s reclaiming conversation from Sherry Turkle and she’s, I forgot exactly but a sociologist, a professor at the [01:04:11.9] I believe and she studied teenagers, kids and adults in the mobile phone usage and basically what we tend to overlook is how often we have our mobile phone at the table, it looks very an [01:04:29.0] but in the end, her thesis is our conversation remain very shallow, we don’t talk about the meaning of life, because we might receive yet another notification about an email about price of gas, or like selling more stuff. Or I don’t know, anything like this, and that’s a pretty yeah, if we don’t have any deep conversation, I think we’re missing quite a lot the meaning of life or also just personal stuff, like how was your day things like this. So, if AR comes at the cost of [01:05:00.6] that prevent us from having deep conversations I don’t want it, not interesting for me. So, there is still but just let me show you something one second. That’s also the popular use of technology like let's say the Microsoft hollow lens and then I have the same way I have an [01:05:26.9] from Linux I have an AR headset, it looks -even dorkier than usual because it’s 3D printed, looks like this. It is quite a thing I did wear it outside, actually not exactly this model, I did get quite a few looks. But that thing is entirely open source and not just the software but the hardware stack, the 3D printed parts, I can – so my vision for this is commercial AR is going to be probably full of notifications that I don’t want to, what is some popular version of it but if the open source hardware movement does keep on happening then again it means we can increase control of our device, their behaviours and how they try to shape back our behaviours so I think there is a way but to me that’s further down the line and right now that’s this, VR is right now the thing because I mean it is not even complicated so this one but there are other ones like I mentioned, this is about €300 so I think it’s for what it is, relatively affordable, you’re not going to, very pretty sturdy and all and you feel you’re somewhere else, so do give it a go if you can try but then after this you’re in front of this then what, what do we visit, like I have an actual universe to build give an experience with all the constraints I showed a bit earlier but this in term of agency to me that’s number one, that’s the one thing you can build a lot with that’s affordable that can be used quite a bit and not like a vision that’s going to be there may be in five or 10 years or whenever, so in term of being able to build, to propose an experience, to create or even to just explore without taking too much personal or economical risk that’s the sweet spot for me at the moment. And just one last thing, sorry, it’s also the, why do I mention it because a lot of people say oh but AR is the future and is super trendy and what, yes okay maybe but first I think some time it’s good to just we initially I think Adam you ask about the social aspect and how it could be seen as isolating, I think some isolation is good, if you decide to like I have a great time chatting with you but at some point I need to actually think back about what happen some of the question, what I should I say, what’s wrong et cetera and then hopefully being able to sympathise maybe transform it to a prototype etcetera. So, I think some isolation we all need that but it has to be on our agenda or will or whatever we want to, not when we’re forced into isolation. So, it’s the same let's say as VR [01:08:38.9] notification if you can manage the isolation whenever you want to, that again is super powerful because again you put it in your backpack you go travel and then boom, you are, I mean literally travel after [01:08:54.7] and then you can bring I don’t know all your document with you, all your - organise it the way you want. So, I think organisation – no isolation on demand to work when you want to is extremely powerful. And finally the point I want to make is this, is a step towards [01:09:14.6] meaning that once what you learn in virtual reality, so how to create a 3D world, how to get assets, 3D models for example, how to manipulate them let's say with a controllers is going to be useful for AR, it’s not exactly the same and you’re going to have different constraints but there is a significant overlap, I’m not going to say oh it’s 60% similar or something like this but especially if you come from let's say 2D, if you come from text that’s going to be a big gap but once you’ve done that gap then that’s going to be comparatively trivial let's say, so I think that’s also if this is too far and expensive, this is just a step to get there to prepare for it, I believe it’s a pretty good strategy.

Thanks so much Fabien, that’s was so fascinating and really refreshing I think your perspective on these things and you know thanks for cutting through the buzz and you know the marketing blah, blah on these things, really, really fascinating and you know a couple of the group who have had to leave early have left comments in the chat saying, ‘What a brilliant discussion it was and how much they enjoyed it’, so we are coming up to 5.00 and I’m sure we all need to go in our separate directions but I just want to thank you so much a really fascinating hour or so absolutely, the floor is yours Fabien.

Sorry, I still have a question, you won't have time to answer it but I’ll still leave you with that because you see me [01:11:06.1] organising my notes and all and I’m not a curator I don’t have the expertise or the technical expertise the understanding but I’m convinced I could learn a lot from that. So, if you have ideas or suggestion, not matter how crazy you don’t have to know if it’s feasible or not, don’t worry about that but please do ask or share something whatever because yeah, yeah I want play a bit more with this and I don’t have this knowledge so if you whatever you have thought about it [01:11:44.5] I really appreciate it.

And so just to be clear, so you’re interested in how people, how curators organise notes or what should we…

It could be notes but it can be beyond that, it can even be artefacts, it can be whatever you manage because that’s actually one of the how do you say competitive advantage of VR AR is that it can be let's say documents but if you have a 3D model that obviously works really, really well so everything, anything.

Curatorial techniques and strategies for organising that definitely. We’ll maybe pick that up in the Discord server. Thanks so much, Fabien and thank you all again, I’ll see you all next month but you’ve given us a lot to think about, so thank you.

Thanks for having me.

ENDS