While sitting with my iPad typing the other morning, something about the experience struck me in a way that it never had before.
I've been typing since the early 90s, and can type around 120WPM without looking or thinking about it, and it hit me that in a very real sense, the iPad (and other computing devices) are already an extension of me. I've invested the time to integrate this hardware into my brain via the keyboard interface, and once typing is automatic, the friction between brain and machine is very low. I can transmit information from brain to computer and back relatively quickly.
The thing about immersive tech is that we're already immersed in tech. The next generation of VR/AR promises to immerse us even more, but I think it's interesting to consider the idea that we're already immersed and don't always realize it.
When you start to look at the space around you as an extension of you (and I think there are good reasons to look at it this way - your immediate surroundings are in effect a projection/construct formulated by your brain, and the actions you take within that space modulate your average conscious experience), and when you start to look at the computing devices around you as part of that extension of you, it starts to raise really interesting questions like:
If I could implant a chip in my brain, and if people could control my brain with that chip, I would probably never allow it. But when that chip is outside of my brain in a device I keep in my pocket, why am I more willing to allow other entities to feed me stimuli?
I tend to agree with the broader idea that we need to be less immersed in tech, if for no other reason to reduce this kind of external control mechanism we've all hooked ourselves in to. And I don't think immersion is limited to the obvious developments like that next generation VR/AR headset. Immersion is already extremely high.
Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click adswhich is very close to article’s paraphrase
I have a different take than the author. I don't have an issue at all with directed activities being deeply immersive - games most specifically. That is, I like the idea of putting on a headset for a half hour and playing a game, then doing something else.
What I think is much more destructive is when "immersion" just looks like "constant distraction", i.e. the idea that we'll wear these immersive devices all the time so we can be bombarded with "helpful" notifications and, oh look, in-context advertising! That is, when I want to relax I want to relax, and I don't think something holodeck-like is bad for that. But when I want to focus I want to focus, and strapping a headset onto my face for extended periods is not going to help that situation in any way.
I used to work for a small business accounting software company.
We used to talk about reducing the amount of time people use the product. Doing accounting is NOT what small business owners should be spending time on, and our goal was to reduce the amount of time spent.
As the company got bigger, we started selling adjacent software, and suddenly time spent in the 'ecosystem' became an important factor for increasing revenue per user and the rest is history.
Especially in the B2B space with sales reps, it's hard to sell people on things they don't have to do.
One compelling theory for why we have not encountered intelligent life is that any sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually stop exploring the universe and immerse themselves entirely in virtual reality, to the point that they harness the total output of their star for computation, and disappear.
Relativity means that the Star Trek vision of a galaxy spanning society is probably an incoherent fantasy. Why pursue expensive, dangerous, and disappointing adventures in the real world when you can conjure any conceivable reality with perfect verisimilitude?
Reminds me of:
> A very common practice in videogames is to make your game visually immersive—that is to say, to visually portray the game’s elements in such a way that makes the player, to some extent, feel like they’re “really there.” The most obvious way this is employed is via a firstperson point-of-view camera, as seen in titles like Counter-Strike or Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In these titles—especially in the highly fantasy-simulation-dependent Skyrim—part of the idea is to “immerse” the player in the world.
> The problem is, this isn’t where “immersion” really comes from. Ever notice how people get incredibly immersed in a great novel? What could be further away from the literal, realistic portrayal of reality that Skyrim brings than a set of glyphs in black and white printed on dead trees? And yet novels routinely engage people to the point where they are completely and utterly immersed.
> The myth is that immersion comes from visual/auditory messages, but the problem is the human mind wanders quickly. We’re curious and inquisitive and while a picture-perfect image might in fact immerse us for a moment, if there isn’t an engaging system there for us to keep us immersed, we’ll quickly snap out of it and remember that we’re just tinkering with some computer program.
> The thing that engages people in interactive systems is actually quality interaction—for games, this means interesting, difficult and meaningful decisions as frequently as possible.
Quote from Keith Burgun's "Clockwork Game Design"
Photorealism does not equal immersion. Immersion happens in the mind, not the eyes. The games I've been most immersed in were made in the 90s, when the graphics were not as good but the gameplay was better.
> There are new opportunities in things like e-Ink or transparent screens or IoT that can help people re-focus on the real world around them yet still reap the benefits of technology.
This assumption that only games with nice graphics are immersive enough to somehow be a problem is just wrong. Before I had gaming hardware I wasted the exact same amount of time by re-reading books and comics, and it was quite immersive. AAA graphics are not the problem.
> humanity has a variety of important engineering problems to solve, and nicer-looking graphics is quite low on that list.
That sounds an awful lot like the good old "why do we build space rockets when people are starving".
Same thing regarding the utilities -- we need home electricity switcheable with a key/knob, not browsing it for a minute in a smartphone (yes, with phone full of running apps, and network hickups, it may take a minute). And we need public transit usable without any smartphone, not to make people look for the buses on a smartphone map (try pushing a stroller with a kid on a cold winter day and search for buses in an app).
I agree with the sentiment that "the gaming industry has hijacked human play". The author justifies the development of his own game by the fact that "it looks like a CAD program", but I don't think that this makes the game any less immersive. Having seen a few of his dev-logs [0], I think that his goal of a 'systemic game' (if I remembered that phrase correctly) has the potential to be just as immersive.
Games with impressive graphics but no gameplay aren't known for being particularly big drains of human attention.
As another example, take the comments on the recent thread about the browser game generals.io [1]. One might say that 'it looks like a spreadsheet with conditional formatting', but it doesn't make it any less addictive, according to the commenters.
After reading the article, I was expecting his game to be something like Tetris or some 8-bit retro thing. It's not, though.
Full immersion is entertainment, consuming your full attention. Like a movie theater or a stage play. That's OK, but not full time. Light immersion is walking around with your nose in your phone for most of your waking hours. That may be worse.
i don't want to look at virtual worlds while this one keeps getting uglier, louder, and stupider. i don't care about computers anymore. i hate them and wish they never existed. unless they are all destroyed i will never have a moment of aloneness or privacy again. i resent every moment i ever spent playing a computer game. i hate these images of fake worlds meant to make us ignore the death of the world around us. we are going to reduce the earth to a single shining black rock running bitcoin and second life. whatever promise i perceived in technology has either been betrayed or never existed. the scale of the betrayal, the constant surveillance, the hateful and invasive advertising, just the pure spite, greed, and malice present in every aspect of every aspect of the logistical chain...
i want it all gone, or else i want us to use it to destroy absolutely everything. because what we have created is so hideous that only the capacity to destroy itself can justify its existence.
When I write poetry, song lyrics, or music, I am fully immersed.
The difference between video games and art is that I create the environment that I am immersed within.
Sure, like English or any other language, I’ve inherited the cultural context for my artistic endeavors, but that context is a basic requirement for any sort of immersive activity.
I don’t think making less immersive games is some how more important than more immersive ones. The more important problems aren’t gated by lack of talent but lack of money and or political will. Throwing talent at it (if you could) doesn’t magically add money or political will to solve them.
It is impossible to predict what effects technological developments will have.
Claiming that effort in one field is "wasted" or "misallocated" is the height of hubris.
I make satellites that are being used to scan the earth to determine the impacts of climate change, quantify coastal erosion, monitor foliage coverage and crop health, locate buried ancient ruins, predict the weather, and create high-resolution 3d maps of urban areas.
The production of these spacecraft is very low volume, and therefore very expensive.
Research into new lithography techniques for longer-lasting battery-powered consumer devices led to low-power electronics that allow the spacecraft I make to have greater processing power for a given energy budget.
Advancements in more powerful graphics chips for gaming have led to affordable (and yes, despite what you think they are affordable) GPUs used to process and rasterize the data the satellites I build gather.
Unreal Engine is used to build tools needed visualize the results.
The low-profile RF connectors that we use were invented for the specific purpose of shoving Bluetooth and Wi-Fi into thin consumer devices like laptops and tablets and they save us (noticeable and significant) weight.
I can't predict what will happen but I think I can predict what will not happen and given the size of the market I work in I assert that there is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that the resources needed to develop the technology I rely on every day would have been allocated in service of my market. It is too small.
Instead they were handed to me on a silver platter by the consumer electronics market. People playing smartphone games-- and militaries trying to destroy each other have directly led to what I do being possible.
>but I had to admit to myself at one point that, long-term, playing video games for any extended period makes me physically miserable and dumber.
I do not play video games, at least nothing newer than SNES games, but I know people who do and that sounds like a personal problem.
I disagree. There are lots of learning that can be done with VR that can't be done with traditional applications that haven't been invented yet.
I exclusively workout using the Meta 2 (I don't play any other games on it) and it works really well.
I feel like you only see articles like this written by game developers. Something about making video games for a living makes you question the value of what you’re creating.
This!
And the more immersive the technology is, the more the back-end should be open-sourced and put under the control of a free market of hosting companies and maintainers, that end-users and communities can pay.
Right now we have:
People
<=> Big Tech Server Farms
People
<=> Communities
<=> Hosting and Service Providers
<=> Developers
<=> Conferences, Certifications
Would you rather spend your years hooked up to Neuralink owned by Elon, or have a say in what you experience and mitigate the power dynamics?
Would you rather spend 9 hours a day in a metaverse owned by Zuck+Facebook (oh sorry, Meta), Elon+Twitter (oh sorry, X), Bezos+Amazon, Page+Google (oh sorry, Alphabet) or would you rather at least have your own Minecraft server? Or better yet, have an open platform that anyone can fork and build on, like Linux, Wordpress or Ethereum?
Technical overview: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
Layperson overview: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
"Less immersive so you don't get hooked and you can choose when to play and when to not play", that's exactly how I market my terminal UI Klondike Solitaire to my friends. You can't even play it on mobile, needs a keyboard! No fireworks when you win, nothing, well it's a work in progress.
Shameless plug:
> The gaming industry has hijacked human play. Instead of an evolutionary learning and relaxation tool, it’s so immersive now that people get sucked into spending hundreds of hours playing games that don’t teach them anything valuable about the real world, and don’t relax them at all. I’m a gamer, and I of course enjoy immersing myself in a good AAA video game, but I had to admit to myself at one point that, long-term, playing video games for any extended period makes me physically miserable and dumber.
I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having played a game for 200 hours. Before video games, we had toys like Lego, Lincoln Logs, board games, etc. that children (and even some adults) spent just as long playing.
Video game addiction seems like what he's worrying about, but addiction doesn't require immersion. People get addicted to Tetris, and it's not because Tetris provides an immersive experience.
It's funny to read this headline as a general statement. I work for Strivr (https://www.strivr.com/), and we make immersive training. And the same forces that make immersive games more enthralling make immersive trainings significantly more powerful as learning experiences.
So I don't know, there's definitely such a thing as immersive experiences that are harmful, but I think for educational purposes more immersive experiences are strictly better than less immersive ones. (Provided that you want to learn as fast as possible and you want to focus on learning.) Now, immersive experiences are also more expensive (especially to get right) than less immersive ones, so cost is a factor but I think we definitely want more immersive education.
Browsing the public library one day in the aughts, I came across Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan. Having been raised on the Disney version of Tarzan, I thought, "Ho! I should read this here original of the classic children's story!" So I checked it out, and I was shocked and surprised to encounter the most racist novel I have ever read. There is a reason almost no one reads the original Tarzan. It is not subtle about being Jim Crow, pro-colonialism pulp porn. I'm pretty sure Disney would prefer everybody forget that Burroughs existed, and that their animated and live action mega hits sprung out of the focus group imagining of a childhood bear necessities Jungle dream. So yeah, Burroughs is a rough reference to lead with.
as others have already suggested, i think the contrast of immersion vs no immersion is not really the issue (only as much as immersion helps people get addicted to games). the focus on entertainment and making a profit vs doing something to advance society is.
immersive games are fine. games aren't failing to teach anything or help you relax because they are immersive. they are not teaching anything because they don't have a good story that would teach something, and they don't let you relax because specific game elements are putting you under stress.
to give two examples: i play elite dangerous. i can travel through space with a VR headset and i trade items between various space stations. very immersive and quite relaxing, until pirates come along and want to steal my cargo. that's stressful. and i wish i could turn that off.
likewise i may play some puzzle game, that is not immersive at all, and that could be relaxing if the gamedesigner hadn't added a timer that forces me to complete the puzzle in a certain time. that's stressful.
so i don't think immersion has any impact here, other than immersive games are just more attractive. both are a waste of time however if they are not educational or relaxing.
but now this issue of entertainment vs advancing society is a problem of the whole entertainment industry. very little content produced is entertaining as well as teaching something.
and so for me the question is not about how immersive the games are but how educational. i believe it is quite possible to create fully immersive but educational games.
looking back at elite dangerous again, for example, the universe in that game is modeled after our actual galaxy. where possible, stars are named by their actual astronomical names, and their looks are designed after what we know about them and i can take a star system in the game and look up its name on eg wikipedia and learn real facts about it. compare that to eve online where the universe is completely fictional. in elite dangerous i can fly around and get a sense of the relative distances of say alpha centauri vs the north pole star or of the position of our solar system vs the rest of the galaxy. (assuming that it is all accurate)
immersive and educational and relaxing (as long as i can avoid pirates)
My opinion is that the last 40 to 50 years, have been all about entertainment, as a tool of control.
Are cars better, planes, houses....? Only marginally. I don't even want sensors to tell me my car has this or that issue, lol.
But we have phones, the internet, TV programming on demand, YT, tiktok, games, VR, flat screens, etc etc. it's all about content and the delivery of that content.
Basically all development has been in entertainment while every other industry has pretty much stood still, or devolved (eg food quality).
By the end, it reads more like a virtuous justfication why his game graphics are so basic.
I also do not buy the core argument. The game industry tends to ask for more and pay less exactly because people romanticize it. That is not to say the most talented engineers do not end up hired to produce bullshit, just that it probably is not games.
Lastly, the desire for faster and more realistic graphics is what commoditized massively parallel computer architectures. Keep chasing those FPS, the future of humanity depends on it!
I haven't played a video game that was better or more immersive than Tarzan. I hypothesize that artists, like Burroughs, could have more success than they are having today.
<rant>
There's always someone complaining about good things being too good and people lose on the rest because of it. What about letting people have some personal responsibility?
Instead of complaining about games being too immersive, doom scrolling being too addictive etc, how about reminding people to make conscious decisions on how they spend their time and attention?
We're living in the era of external responsibility, every problem one has is caused by someone else.
</rant>
My current job is in robotic space exploration, on a renderer in which to immerse a robot in a virtual world. This is just play in-silico, relying heavily on immersive technology developed for video games. In evolutionary terms, play's function is to learn in preparation for real events, which appears to work out on the technological frontier too.
It's not an XOR. Tech and social ideas and humanity in general advances because people dabble with it in the low risk entertainment space.
There is a balance between immersive and ambient. A large number of people are working on the latter in terms of smart home devices, advanced driver assistance systems and fitbit-like quantified self devices, to name a couple of sectors.
Maybe a challenge for ambient technology is that its nature is non-engaging. If it were engaging, it would be immersive and not ambient.
The feedback loop building a simulation will always be OOM faster and cheaper than building the real thing. The barrier-to-entry for entering the loop becomes personal aptitude, not capital, and yet the EV is enormous. That is why our "best minds" are working in software, not hardware, not computer games.
Really? Windows Phone Ad (2010): "It's time for a phone to save us from our phones." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-X0p-79SjY
After reading the book the Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, technology looks to both immersive and not immersive (but ambient).
People can choose their tool of choice but most people will not voluntarily do that because of convenience.
Bait and switch. Headline is about technology, but the article is about "entertainment".
It is a position of privilege to take that technology should be considered primarily as a consumer product.
I couldn’t disagree more. Been playing Gran Turismo 7 in PSVR2 with a steering wheel and pedals, the last few days. Why aren’t more games this immersive?
Getting sucked into a dream-world/story/abstraction is a feature, not a bug.
It's an attention-conservation strategy. Looking at an abstraction takes less precious attention than looking at reality. And abstractions are so malleable, so useful.
You can do it with a page of text. You can do it with no technological augmentation at all, just thinking.
It's so easy and useful that it's become a habit. The border between dream and reality is so blurred now that we've forgotten that there's a difference.
Maybe this is what the Buddhists call "Samsara".
The Remarkable 2 has changed my life.
Simple e-ink reader and note taker. No apps. No distraction. Amazing battery life. Easy to write on.
Switch off. Do more.
If the humane.ai pin had been released by Apple, it would've been the next best thing. The VR headset is just lazy.
What if I tell you everything around us is actually technology, we just dont understand it enough so we call it natural?
Zuck is spending his time farming in Hawaii to raise his own beef. Even he doesn't want to live in the Metaverse.
I rather missed the point where he explains why immersive games are bad. There's some hand-wavey bit about "[they] don’t teach them anything valuable about the real world, and don’t relax them at all" but that appears to be it. The first bit is beside the point and the second hugely debatable.
Similar criticisms could equally be levelled at engaging with any creative output - reading, listening to music etc. And I love being out in nature but it's not teaching me much.
His other point seems to be "talented engineers could be doing something more important" which is slightly more valid but then everyone who isn't saving starving babies could probably be doing something more important.
We have it, it's all the apps that are bad, frustrating, and they don't get used.
it is hilarious how the opening sentences written by this person refer to "Edgar Rice Borroughs", while pasted quotes and images refer to "Edgar Rice Burroughs".
The latter spelling is the correct one.
Why is working on art good, but working on entertainment a waste of time?
it is easy to agree with this. however, the problem is most people just don't care and/or are lazy to do something more meaningful. and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
I wonder if the author realizes that there are eight billion humans. They can't all work on the same thing. And the majority of people who are not engineers and who just work regular mindless jobs need entertainment.
Also we've had entertainment since the dawn of time. People don't just go home and stare at the wall for sixteen hours before going back to work. Almost none are going home from work to solve humanity's Real Problems(tm). Entertainment holds significant value to everyone plus or minus a few percent.
But really the author has a critique of capitalism and doesn't want to admit it. The complaint is that art is a product you're expected to pay for and consume, and individual artists almost can't even exist without spending all their time advertising. Imagine how much art would be produced if artists weren't forced to choose between making art and paying rent.
All in all, the author is yelling at clouds because other people have values he disagrees with and refuses to understand
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Let's wind this back to the days when people thought reading books was an indulgent waste of time.
The best artists are writing trivial drivel for women to read.
The best minds are finding new ways to sell books.
It's a stupid heuristical argument.
"I hope you’ll agree that humanity has a variety of important engineering problems to solve, and nicer-looking graphics is quite low on that list."
I used to sneer at the social value of entertainment. Then covid lockdowns hit. I spent a lot of time playing Factorio. When professional sports resumed playing (in empty stadiums, with fake crowd noise on the broadcasts) I was happy to sit on the couch after work and watch baseball.
Without that entertainment, there is no way I would have been able to trudge to my computer and work from home day after day, when the only thing I could leave my house for was an occasional walk and a frightful trip to the grocery store.
So even if the brain surgeon is not using those "nicer-looking graphics" to improve brain surgery (which could very well happen), the brain surgeon might just be looking at "nicer-looking graphics" to unwind after a day of brain surgery, which gets her ready for another day of brain surgery. Entertainment has value.