A concern of mine from the beginning has been to use metaphors more effectively to provide intuitive understanding of the environment and its affordances. So far no one has come close except for a few games that have made good starts. But while the games work from inside out with strict barriers to external communication, I have been working basically from outside in. It is rather a different inside-out in that I think the experience begins when you turn on the machine and connect, jack-in, and then engage the larger worlds.
This also fits with my ambition to make the invisible world of the infrastructures of the home visible. I talked earlier about the meta data of all our devices and the opportunity to uses AR to help us understand, setup, maintain and alter these in-home devices that have inscrutable interfaces. That started with the VCRs in the 70s and it gets worse each year. The number of gestures and setting for just one device, the iPhone are mind boggling. Visual communication coupled with more advanced AI is the way to go.
So to start with the embarrasingly simple, let’s say there is no more GUI. Let’s say the primary interface is HMD or the 2.5D equivalent. What will we first see? We can’t completely throw out the desktop any more than would could our real-life desk or workspace. But with all the media we juggle, there must be some visual metaphor and a bookshelf is as good as anything. So imagine that every wall of the room is a bookshelf and each book is some unit of memory. Just as in a GUI the application with which to view or manipulate the object is bound to the properties of the object, we can simply go over and grab what we like and have it appear in a window before us. This is one way to deal with the media on the machine. But what about a NAS? How do we visualize the network?
A network is accessed via a network interface. That device can be made visible when needed but ordinarily we don’t care. So there might be some subtle indication that the object we want is not on the machine but nearby. Regardless the location of the object is a property of the object and the infrastructure knows how to access it. So what about the external network, the internet?
As we know the larger internet is mediated by an ISP and consumers interact with their ISP over some network provided by an organization,most often the ISP itself as the industry consolidates. So our punny little LAN has a device that mediates between it and the big-bad ISP. That device also provide management of our local LAN. That router must be on and connected.
We use the metaphors of gateway to discuss connections between networks or access to networks from computers. This suggests that visually any transition from one network to another will be a door or gate of some kind. Keeping it simple for the moment let’s assume that visually when we first don a HMD we see a room. That room has the objects we have immediate access to like the files and applications on the machine. Any other device on the LAN will have some form of visual representation to indicate its availability or lack of availability. Since we are talking about immersive technology, the wider internet must appear different. Let’s look at two scenarios, one passive media consumption and the other browsing behavior typical of 3D worlds.
The representation of a screen will either be a fixed window or a popup screen. If our interaction is simply passive consumption, we can “tune in” to whatever the content is with the URL which functions like an old fashioned channel selector. Movies, documents, etc can then be viewed from the comfort “of our home” without the need to navigate like we would in a 3D world.
To experience the wider world will require passage from our home. In my mind a doorway is how that would work. I see some small indicator light next to that doorway to indicate if the outside world is available. Since that wider network is a utility, it is expected to be there. But if not, we should have some indication that it is not available. If it is, we can pass through that doorway and see a different space.
My first impression of what we would first see is some local space that is dictated by what is “close” to us in the network. I propose that this will be the resources, if any, offered by our ISP. I believe it is important that we can see our cyber neighbors. We should have a neighborhood that can support interaction with this small grouping. An easy way to group is to use the IP address directly so we should have 256 people as neighbors.
What the ISP provides can vary depending upon the service. But I would hope that simple tools such as a club-house, message board, or other community building tools would be there. This can be the first level tech support and customer service. An of course there should be some form of presence such as avatars so we can see who is currently there. We may never have relationships with any of these people but that isn’t much worse than the typical suburban community.
From this neighborhood space, it must be possible to navigate to the wider internet. Now we can envision a series of portals using the IP address as the means and navigate the taxonomy. But there will need to be some other faster way. There are many good metaphors for conveyance. One I like is an evelavator. It is natural to summon one, select our destination and then emerge in the new space. This has both human and mechanical advantages.
Mechanically it is necessary to build out the environment we will walk into. This might be nearly instantaneous for high-band width and low latency destinations. But if it falls short of that it will take some time to download the needed objects and update the rendering engines to produce the proper perspective. The human aspect that is helpful is that the elevator cab shields us from whatever chaos is needed as this all happens for our benefit.
Most VR spaces I see are some combination of overly crowded spaces within a larger space of most empty vistas. People want to be around other people. Vast empty spaces are wall paper or art, not social spaces. There must be the liminal spaces of streets lined with built out spaces. depending upon what people want, this could be visually like a quaint european town with narrow winding ways. It could be broad boulevards like a section of Paris. There are near infinite ways we already have seen how the built environment can look. But the key design feature will be to limit the isovist[1] so as to keep the rendering under control.
The technical reality is that distance in cyberspace is a function of network connection. Two key parameters are bandwidth and latency. Also it is obvious that the distant space is on a different machine and our presence in that space depends upon the maintenance of the network connection. A visual problem to be worked out is how should others see our avatar if the connection is lost.
My pet concept of lost avatars is for every space to render an avatar with a fading that continues in time. As long as the connection is alive, the avatar will appear fully rendered. But once the heart beat (packet exchange) stops, the avatar should begin a slow fade to transparency.
Note how this differs from simply not responding. If I am in conversation with someone and they simply stop responding, they could be thinking or just stepped away. Socially they should excuse themselves but that won’t always happen. I should not have to wonder if they became disconnected and therefore may not join again. This gives me the signals I need to either walk away or just wait a moment for them to return.
To quickly withdraw from some distant VR I can simply do the equivalent of clicking my heels or hitting an evacuation button. I will simply blip out of existence and be returned back to my home.
This is the beginning of how I believe we will experience and inhabit the Metaverse.
References
[1] isovist was coined by Clifford Tandy and extended by Michael Benedikt. It refers to what can be seen by the subject from that vantage point.
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