Designing for Virtual Environments - Digital Explorers' Diary #48

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #48!

A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Executive summary:

• How to think about designing experiences for Virtual Environments,
• Meta’s latest AI Model, Llama2 is open source and free to use commercially,
• ChatGPT and productivity,
• Maybelline’s plugin in Microsoft Teams for Virtual Makeup in meetings,
• And The Simulation, a scary venture to create sentient AI…

Designing Experiences for Virtual Environments

Interactive experiences that use Virtual, Mixed, or Augmented Reality are completely different from actual reality in many ways. The interaction with Virtual Environments, physics, time, and so many other elements are either more constrained or infinitely more flexible than in our tangible world. The boundaries are practically limitless, offering an arena where the imagination can come to life.

In the development and design of such projects, it's necessary to adopt a whole new perspective and completely rethink the concept and adapt it to the new technology so it’s enjoyable for the users while still having meaning for your brand or product. Let’s see some examples:

To begin with something very basic: for many years now, 360° videos have been available, and the cost of recording and releasing such movies is very low now. And yeah, the initial wow effect of being able to see in every direction and choose where we are looking is great… But if the content is a very simple video, the hype quickly fades away. To be attractive, your 360° movie needs to fully benefit from all the directions, a dynamic experience that the user can watch many times and discover new elements each time. Expand the scenario left, right, top, down… A great example of this is the 2017 short movie «Your Spiritual Temple Sucks»; you can see an extract here.

Let’s push the complexity and look at Virtual Reality. To all the retailers out there, a word of advice: don't simply recreate your physical store in a VR environment! It may be quite visually appealing in reality, but it might not necessarily translate into VR. Take the example of Alibaba in China, which build a full replica of a store. Contrary to the hype of expectations, it didn’t have the expected success. The store was very large, making it time-consuming to walk around. Add to it the absence of other customers; it’s a creepy and lonely experience… Instead, change everything. The laws of physics and architecture don’t apply in VR, teleportation is possible, and multiplayer, social experiences are the most successful ones.

Now, where VR and AR intersect, Mixed Reality makes things even more complex. There is the user’s real world and, on top of it, the virtual objects. As the Apple Vision Pro keynote has shown, even putting a simple computer interface into space is a complex task. The best games in MR won’t be the ones where the game board is put on your table, and that’s it. No, it will be the ones who anchor elements all around your room that take the benefit of all the available space and blend real-world physics with the virtual one. Exciting times ahead!

This Week's News:

1. Very important news in the Artificial Intelligence world: Meta has released Llama2, their latest Large Language Model, as open source and free to use commercially! It’s a major change: the model can be used offline and for free – for now, the leading LLMs were available only through subscriptions and cloud APIs.
   So, imagine what comes next: any developer can now fine-tune Llama2 and host it on their servers or locally. This is, as usual, both great and worrying. Indeed, a cloud API like OpenAI can control and adjust as they go, affecting all users, but not Llama2; once it’s out, we don’t know what people will do with it. Meta has written a responsible usage guide, but that puts a lot of faith in potential bad actors… Fun fact: as of right now, the link to the guide is broken on the Llama2 home page…
2. As Hollywood’s actors and writers strike, a company called The Simulation has made the buzz by releasing South Park episodes entirely generated by AI (Example here).
   Of course, welcomed with a lot of pushback, the real purpose of The Simulation is unfortunately mistaken: their end goal is not to generate TV Shows.
   I’ll let you head to their website to look at the dystopian introduction video; I’ll summarize it for you. They want to create a series of Virtual Worlds inhabited by AI-driven Virtual Humans. With the hope they’ll become sentient, your role will be to guide them in their newly acquired consciousness. These AI could be anyone. You, your family, a deceased relative…
   Do I really need to explain how this is a bad idea? Science fiction has already explored all of it.
   Here’s my proposal: how about creating many Virtual Words to explore, learn and act on how we could drive the future of humanity to better values, less poverty, and less suffering?
   Let’s hope so…
3. Maybelline & Microsoft collaborated on a beauty app within Microsoft Teams.
   Similar to the Snapchat/Instagram/TikTok filters, but integrated directly into the meeting window, thanks to Modiface, one of the best AR Makeup SDKs that L’Oréal acquired.
   Opinions are divided about it. On the one hand, that’s a clever use of AR Makeup that can help people feel more comfortable and empowered during meetings, and even a time-saving feature as it avoids putting on real makeup.
   On the other hand, how can it affect the user’s sense of identity, body image, and relation to reality? For a deep dive, see this video by Liv Boeree - Beauty Wars.
4. A quick take on ChatGPT and productivity on writing tasks, thanks to this research published on July 13, 2023:
   An overall increase in speed (40%) and quality (18%).
   And, more interesting, using ChatGPT decreased the inequalities between the workers. Indeed, participants with weaker skills benefited the most.
   And this was before GPT4! This is a very good insight that AI assistants can help employees with, as I mentioned here, Augmented Intelligence.

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:

1. As announced last week, Roblox is coming to Meta Quest. The main insight from our conversation is a major question about adoption from the community. Most of Roblox’s 50+ million daily users are playing from mobile. In Virtual Reality, the means of interaction are really different, and that might hinder the playability that is Roblox’s trademark.
   In the end, the big question is: will this bring more users to Meta Quest, or will this bring Meta Quest owners to Roblox, increasing the very low average usage time of this headset?
2. We then discuss the buzz around the video below, where a user tries to mimic Apple Vision Pro’s front screen by using an iPhone. As with many buzzes, we think there’s not much behind it. Remember: the reality of the companies, industries, and society is very different from what you see on Linkedin.
3. We then move to a nice showcase of Google’s latest innovation for Gaming: Google Earth Tiles. In short, any place available through Google Street can be instanced in a game. In this demo, you can be a superhero flying above Earth. This is an amazing tool for open-word games, of course, but also in many industries: architecture, construction, events… The applications are countless!

Watch the podcast below, and tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!

Did this newsletter spark some ideas? There are a lot of ways we can work together:

• A quick-fire, 30-minute brainstorm with me - book it here!
• We can ideate, prototype, and build your experiences - contact us here!