I work in psychoanalysis, so it’s like...
...part of the setting. This is, of course, a very powerful demo. But I do think the scalable way of doing this is some blend between synthetic and the real, like in‑the‑flesh. Like this, I think, is very convincing.
The hand‑touching part.
The defense is, "Probably, people are going to find them anyway."
I think Daydream is already pretty much there.
Oh yeah, you have to be sitting there. But the most powerful experiences so far that I’ve seen involves very little mobility, as far as the Vive and Oculus experience goes.
[laughs] A lot of my experience is just sitting in a rotating chair. I think the rotating chair is part of the mobile VR experience.
It doesn’t work if you take that out.
Yeah, part of the swarm.
Yeah.
Why? We’re social animals. We’re part of the swarm.
Better than part of the herd.
I think there are symptoms, there are causes.
Yeah, sure.
A little bit. I study group therapy. I don’t actually analyze people on the couch, but I’ve been doing personality analysis for six years or more. But anyway, it’s a very long time. But I do facilitate groups, group therapy and group dynamics and things like that.
It’s the thing because anyone who works in social working or care worker or psychotherapy knows that it’s not really the therapist doing the healing. We’re just channelers, and a lot of experience doing that humbles us a little bit.
It’s not an individualist‑collectivist thing. It’s just knowing that personalities, identities, they’re artifacts of communication. If you take the social part out of it that there’s no identities. You can cling to memories and replay and try to confine yourself into identity but it doesn’t have to be like that. That’s the main perspective I’m coming from.
No.
Awesome.
They’re just false...I do think it’s like ends of the spectrum that you can fluctuate over the course of the day like from being very meditative to very social. I think it’s healthy to explain the phenomenon like this. But it’s not any fixed point in time where you can say, "This is me and the others are not, the others are just performance." No, it’s all us.
If you say, "Time box five minutes, 15 minutes, or something to help other people even though they’re complete strangers," then, you discover part of yourself that you didn’t already know.
Because I’ve been doing VR classes and everything for 16 years, so for me it’s always about what we ask of the technology, not the other way around.
It’s surfacing.
Yeah, surfacing different levels of reality.
To me it’s also a spectrum. There’s earphones. There’s earphones that have noise cancellation which is the audio kind of a VR and there’s earphones that have pass‑through. I have a pair of earphones that basically have, say, very good noise cancellation but it has a microphone that takes everything from the outside and places it to your ear...
...if you enable the pass‑through mode. That is actually a lot of where VR is going. I gave classes to students in Kaohsiung and Hangzhou and I teach them to use the Tron mode of Vive, which is this camera in the front of Vive. You can enable it and then you’re in a VR space but you see this blue outline of the world. It’s AR.
I told them to use SketchUp or whatever to draw their classrooms, which are very regular and to the point where if they put it and switch to Tron mode, you see it’s abled but you also see the surroundings.
This is also AR or mixed reality but coming from that isolation part of it.
What I’m saying is that complete isolation is other than looking at the Milky Way for meditative purposes...
...that’s probably the very good use of it, but it’s very limited and I think everybody will switch to the social side.
Probably within a year or two.
We have a product concept now. [laughs]
They just rolled out a phone that has both so...
... just need a cell phone.
I think it’s an Asus phone. ZenFone is a start. ZenFone AR.
A couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, this is Tango.
This is, actually, pretty well‑built. It’s not heavy. It’s not a giant Phablet. This is the usual three cams. The idea is that you can use Tango to do real‑time modeling and then put on Daydream to preview. It has weird amount of RAM.
It’s all software at this point. The HoloLens is ready and the software part is, at the moment, two virtual machines, so you can’t be in the same mode as Daydream as in Tango but it’s a software problem. I’m sure it could be solved, if they came together and joined and promote this.
To what?
I think it’s in a supergroup but it’s not really in the same department. Anyway, this is just the first. I’m pretty sure that there will be plenty of builds like this because it’s proven to work in a phone.
Yeah, probably.
In its very, very early days but not in expansion. I had those three different cameras [laughs] separately in the software stages.
I did the SDK but I don’t have the Daydream device yet.
All this is just so that people can make art.
This is literally what the cameras do.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with those AR devices.
AR glasses.
But this is really AR because after I’ve been wearing this for hours, I didn’t really feel that it’s there.
