On The Virtuosity of Simulocation
Simulation and location-based VR are two interrelated trends in immersive innovation that bear a little more attention and exploration. (Pardon the scientificky sensibility of the title, but there’s a method in it that I trust will become clear in the end…)
I’ve conflated simulation and out-of-home VR with the term “simulocation” not because simulator-style services need be limited to location-based experiences such as arcades, but to make a different point: the XR landscape will be powered by novel approaches that will often lie at the intersection between existing paradigms and in their cross-fertilization. Innovation has always worked through this kind of hybridization and mutation at the edge of the “adjacent possible” described by Stephen Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From.
For example, in the previous century, the national weekly magazine (Time, Newsweek) evolved out of local and regional newspapers to provide greater depth of coverage and analysis. It’s success gave rise to spinoff formats such as sports- and celebrity journalism (Sports Illustrated, People). That these may be endangered species of media innovation today only underlines how protean technology tectonics can be.
In the 1980s and 90s, cable television took those information models and spun them into new entitites: 24-hour news, sports and entertainment networks. Over the last 20 years, new competitive pressures and production economics has engendered new types of content programming such as reality television, and new consumption habits such as on demand, subscription and pay-per-view.
Across the last decade or so, online video and mobile devices have created entirely new categories, from the vast and various types of user-generated, how-to and tutorial content, to new kinds of engagement such as game-playing superstars on Twitch and eSports audiences filling arenas. Almost daily, we see how ubiquitous video capture has transformed the nature of journalism, law and social justice.
What does all this have to do with simulation and out-of-home XR? Of course, simulators and simulation systems have been around for decades. But what VR technology promises is to make this kind of interactive training both cheaper and more accessible, but also better and different. For example, a headset-based simulation service can track and measure the participant’s performance in new and more precise ways through gaze-tracking, heat mapping and instrumentation.
And VR simulation is also likely to blur and broaden from high-tech, high-value use cases like medicine, to larger consumer categories like improving one’s golf-, tennis- or basketball game.
Similarly, location-based VR and AR is serving as a living laboratory for new kinds of experiential entertainment and ways to monetize XR. While the cost of premium equipment is still out of reach for many consumers, VRcade, virtual theme park and event-based operators can expose people to the most sophisticated VR gear and games and whet wider appetite while the next wave of devices bend the cost/performance curve.
Indeed, the original video game arcades of the 1980s played a similar role in setting the stage for the era of game console dominance that followed.
Out-of-home and entertainment-oriented VR is expected to grow into a billion dollar business in the next few years. It will also function as a kind of booster rocket for broader consumer adaption and development of more powerful devices, accessories and infrastructure.
How Location-Based VR Enhances Consumers’ Everyday Routines: PSFK
But what the “simulocation” conceit really underscores is that XR innovation is most likely to evolve in directions that we probably haven’t yet even considered. Beyond the kind of simulation training that has previous existed. Or in the game and entertainment domain — in home and outside it — that we know today.
Even the humble format that we are conversing in right here, the blog, is an example of a mutant communication style that the Web gave birth to, along with so many other forms of posting, messaging and multimedia expression.
So the one easy prediction to make about the immersive (near) future is that it will spawn a wildly diverse and radical new range of services, experiences and opportunities. It will also inspire new content and business models, new art forms, and new categories of culture and commerce.
Physical meetings and collaboration are almost inevitably going to be augmented by both actual AR and VR capabilities. But so too will military, law enforcement, governmental and intelligence-gathering applications. Adult entertainment almost doesn’t bear mentioning.
So shouldn’t we also anticipate and encourage a widescreen view of the transformative possible via XR? Simulocation is just my shorthand for that kind of adjacently possible virtuousness.
Consider just one dimension: enlightenment and compassionate insight. Suppose the right VR experience could engender the kind of neurological breakthrough that is well-documented in meditation, mindfulness and contemplative practices. That same kind of intrapersonal transformation is also now being more seriously explored in medicine and research around psychedelics such as psylocibin in clinical settings, as detailed in Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind. And VR is also being explored for treatment of conditions such as PTSD, autism, depression and more.
Why couldn’t immersive technologies become a powerful vehicle and vector for humans to become more humane, more empathetic and more capable of contentment, joy and equanimity? As a buddhist practitioner, I don’t want to put a label on it such as spirituality, but others are welcome to define this kind of metaphysical virtuality however they like.
In fact, if XR is the next historic change wave on par with the rise of publishing, computerization, digitization of television, the Internet and mobile broadband, shouldn’t we from the outset plan, expect and work for it to bloom in a thousand flavors and colors?
This excerpt, from Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson, on the prospects for the first stored-program computer in 1947, sums that anticipation up beautifully:
“The projected device, or rather the species of devices of which it is to be the first representative, is so radically new that many of its uses will become clear only after it has been put into operation,” von Neumann assured him. “These uses which are not, or not easily, predictable now, are likely to be the most important ones.”