First day of the final working week of the year and I somehow convince myself to go along to what could turn out to be a wild goose chase to nowhere. Truth is, I hadn’t even given it much thought and ended up getting a little swept up in the moment. The meeting on campus wrapped up, the two of us headed to Farringdon for an Elizabeth Line trek over to Hammersmith and then on to the Wild West of Chiswick. The more I take the Elizabeth Line, the more I impressed I find myself being at what public transport in Britain could be, rather how in most cases it actually is. Anyway, I digress.
The destination was the studio space on an industrial estate rented by a start-up called Existent. The company’s website describes their main product as ‘an end to end application framework for virtual reality integrated with Unreal Engine 5 (where you can s)tart projects with your hardware of choice working together seamlessly and virtual people, places and things all in one place’. This snatched description viewed on a phone screen didn’t really tell me very much about what to expect. Had I dug a little deeper, I would have found that they ‘envision a future where it’s easy to create and spend time in infinite alternate realities that are just as compelling as our current one (and) want to enable developers and creatives to build any world in which anyone can experience anything.’ Furthermore, ‘projects built on Existent will completely transform consumer expectation of spatial computing experiences’. So far, so promising, yet also so opaque.
The thing about experiences is that you can’t really comprehend what they’ll feel like or what impact they’ll have on you till you’ve been through them. The Online Etymology Dictionary describes the term ‘experience’ as having come from the late 14th Century and refers to ‘observation as the source of knowledge’ or ‘an event which has affected one’. When I hopped on the Elizabeth Line and wandered around a Chiswick industrial estate, I had no idea that an experience would be what awaited us, what I would be observing or whether I would be affected by it. Even if I had though, I doubt that digging much deeper beforehand would have given much of a sense of what awaited me.
So I and my companions arrived roughly in tandem and were let in to a large building with a few snaking corridors, to be greeted by Existent’s founder Andy Brunskill, a former theatre creative now turning his hand to virtual reality (VR). Although I’ve worked at the intersection between education and technology for around 15 years, VR is a medium that hadn’t really entered much into my thinking as being a useful tool for delivering educational experiences until quite recently. Much like podcasting, which developed and matured into a fully-blown 21st Century digital medium before I finally turned my attention to it, VR is increasingly occupying a lot of my thinking now that my university employer has made some significant moves into that space. More on that another time, but for now, back to Chiswick.
The main room we were led into was a large open studio space with the walls and floors marked out with an array of 2D patterns of varying size, colour contrast and shape, all crafted out of masking tape. The edges of the studio were littered with various bits of technological ephemera, like compter monitors, cables and 3D printers. Near the edge of the room was a rudimentary-looking garden bench. As the first two got tooled up for their experience and entered into the zone while seated at the garden bench, the remaining four of us chattered about our surroundings, peered at the moving graphics on the displays and watched as the other two gave us hints of what was to come.
There’s often a lot to think about in preparing for a VR experience, like how easily the headset fits on your head, how the controllers work (if you have any) or whether the experience is likely to make you sick or will unsettle you in some way. My journey partner and I approached the bench and got ourselves ready. This involved fitting some camera sensor devices to our wrists and ankles with velcro straps, putting our headsets on and standing upright facing each other with arms outstretched in a T-shape, all while Andy settled us in and performed whatever technical orientation was needed on his end.
VR is something that you can read about or that you can watch somebody else going through, but until you experience it for yourself, you don’t really know what it’s actually like. Once we were in Andy’s virtual construct, the slightly industrial studio space melted away and we faced each other as slender robots in some kind of magical environment. A chairlift arrived — the rudimentary-looking garden bench from earlier — and we both sat ourselves down on it. What happened next was genuinely rather breathtaking.
The chairlift took us two robots on a journey through the cloudscape that hovered above a terrain of peculiar floating rock mountaintop-type regions. As either of us pointed our actual limbs at the sights we could both see on our virtual trip, our robot bodies moved in parallel with our human bodies. Waterfalls cascaded over rocky outcrops, fabulous birds passed us in our airspace, and we waved back at the different humanoid-type creatures we could see waving at us from the ground. My mind knew that I was sat on a stationary bench in a warehouse room in Chiswick, yet my senses would have me believe that I was on a wonderful journey through a world that I’d never even imagined existed. The motorised device beneath the bench that delivered some haptic feedback for the journey made things all the more convincing.
As our short ride through the clouds drew to a close, the chairlift alighted on a terminus in some mountain glade, where we were beckoned to take a seat at a table by a barman that looked like half a human torso made of bits of rock and tree branches (yet very friendly). The barman served us up a couple of drinks and asked us to tell him about the ride we’d just been on. In real life, these were 3D printed rocks with cups and straws placed inside, and we’d even seen Andy refill the cups with water from the office tap. But to us two robots reflecting on the journey we’d just had, we were supping on the nectar of the gods after our cloudscape adventure.
Having created this experience and by playing the role of the barman, Andy must have heard so many variations of what his passengers have seen and been through, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all of them conveyed some sense of awe of what they’d been through. Afterwards, we spoke of the technicalities of building such an experience, of what his potential customer base would be for a product like this and whether he had much in the way of competition in this space. Mostly though, I was aware of still trying to get my breath back after the experience.
One of the drivers behind some of my work in educational technology has been about the removal of perceived barriers to interaction when facilitated via digital media. This is to enable teachers and learners to get closer to a state of flow in what they are doing, rather than focusing too much on the technology itself. Technology should ideally be an invisiable enabler, in my book, rather than a firm interlocuter in a human learning encounter. This is why I ended up writing a book chapter that tried to imagine what it would be like to turn academics into holograms as an alternative to more conventional video conferencing methods for bringing people together in time when they’re not in the same space.
There are certain technical barriers in VR that can take a user’s mind off what they’re seeing and focus instead on the difficulty of using the hand controllers, for example, or their knowledge that their spatial boundary in an actual physical environment is more limited than what their senses would tell them otherwise. If I were to try and put my finger on what Existent has created, I suppose I’d call it ‘embodied VR’. What made this different and much easier to get into the flow of the moment itself was the ability to use our actual physical bodies in natural ways, such as by pointing out a sight or gripping a seat, and seeing that reflected in our virtual bodies.
I think Existent just might be onto something. Now, how on earth can that be conveyed or utilised in higher education?
