Social VR Leading Edge Behaviors
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LEADING-EDGE BEHAVIORS FROM THE NEW WORLD OF SOCIAL VR Institute for the Future January 2019 © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org ABOUT About the ... INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE Institute for the Future (IFTF) is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the world’s leading Institute for non-profit strategic futures organization. The core of our work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. We the Future provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. Our research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative — trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity. IFTF is based in Palo Alto, California. Future 50 FUTURE 50 This work is supported in part by IFTF’s Future 50 partnership—a circle of future-smart organizations that think strategically about near-term choices to reshape the long-term future. Future 50 draws on a half century of futures research from our labs focusing on society and technology, the economy and the environment, food and health. Its goal is to create the perspectives and expert viewpoints, the signals and the data, to make sense out of disruptive forces in the present. Grounded in a framework of Foresight- Insight-Action, the Future 50 partnership invests in critical research, boundary- stretching conversations, and strategic experiments that will shape the business, social, and civil landscapes of tomorrow. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..................................................... 4 SOCIAL VR: overview…................................................................... 10 LEADING-EDGE BEHAVIORS: at a glance.................................................................. 15 5 BIG STORIES....................................................... 16 LEADING-EDGE BEHAVIORS full set.......................................................................... 40 DESIGN FRAMEWORKS...................................................... 125 © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 3 INTRODUCTION: “It takes thirty years to become an overnight success” is a phrase we often apply to transformative technologies about the study and business models - like the smart phone or Uber. The insight: when something scales super fast, it’s the result of decades of innovations converging in just the right way, at just the right moment. VR and AR technologies have been decades in the making, with multiple cycles of emergence, astonishing promise, and disappointing results. We believe it is social applications - social VR - that will finally deliver "overnight success” for mixed reality applications, and a mind-and-body-altering world of embodied, fully dimensional digital experiences. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 4 INTRODUCTION: On a handful of platforms around the world, a small group of pioneers are hanging out in 3D environments in 3D about the study bodies. They are willing to endure technical challenges, limited content, and lack of standard practices and etiquette to be the first to inhabit and explore new shared virtual worlds. IFTF spent eight months exploring their environments, communities, and practices. Their experiments provide early signals that point to a future where we each have a personal digital body, and content can be experienced in full 3D space. This will have profound implications for how we socialize, learn, work, engage with content, and take care of ourselves. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 5 INTRODUCTION: This study contains 10 LEADING-EDGE BEHAVIORS: what is a emerging and innovative user practices likely to play out leading-edge more broadly over the next few years. Leading-edge Behaviors inspire and inform new behavior? products, experience and service ideas, and reveal emerging opportunities and implications. Leading-Edge Behaviors are created through a blend of expert interviews, observational and ethnographic research, and horizon scanning with people pushing the edges of new applications, devices, and platforms. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 6 INTRODUCTION: We looked across the implications of each individual what is a “big behavior to synthesize 5 BIG STORIES. These are the areas most likely to truly impact the future of media, story”? work, wellbeing, learning, retail, collaboration, entertainment and a host of other domains of human life in the future. These are the areas of opportunity and threat. These are the stories that point toward how the world might be different in 2030. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 7 SELECTED EXPERTS INTERVIEWED Jessica Outlaw Ethan Summers Laura Smith VR/AR Behavioral CEO and Founder CEO, Co-Founder Scientist Underground Engine Slanted Theory Jesse Damiani Marcia Edelman Chuck Shipman Emerging Technology Somatic Movement Digital Alchemist Journalist Therapist Cisco VRScout Embodied Culture Kent Bye Adam Arrigo D.J. Soto Producer CEO and Co-Founder VR Pastor and Voices of VR Podcast TheWaveVR Filmmaker VR Church Philipp Lenssen Graphics David Eagleman Creator Monkey Co-Founder and CEO Anyland + Manyland VR Creator NeoSensory © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 8 Lyn Jeffery Liza Bender Distinguished Fellow Research Affiliate at IFTF at IFTF Research Toshi Anders Hoo Quinault Childs Emerging Media Lab Research Manager Team Director at IFTF at IFTF Ben Hamamoto Susanne Forchheimer Research Director Research Manager at IFTF at IFTF © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 9 SOCIAL VR: overview FROM SOLO TO SOCIAL Most people, if they’ve tried VR at all, have had a solo experience. Social VR platforms connect VR systems to the internet, to share virtual experiences in real time with others in VR headsets, sometimes physically co- located but mostly in different geographic locations. Many social VR experiences are about building relationships through play, exploration, and “hanging out.” But leading-edge users are also working, learning, shopping, performing - even praying together. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 10 SOCIAL VR: overview “OTHER PEOPLE ARE THE ULTIMATE CONTENT” Think of VR as a form of immersive computing. Personal computers were adopted at a slow rate until the 1990’s, when we were able to use them to communicate via chat rooms and email. We moved from talking to our machines, to talking through our machines to each other. The next stage of VR and AR will require the same kind of shift. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 11 SOCIAL VR: overview DEFINITION • 3D computer-generated space • Supports visitors in VR headsets, may also support non-VR users • Users are represented by avatars; communication is between users sharing the same space • Users are free to move around • Platforms are open-ended • Content is completely or partially user-generated. - Ryan Schultz, Social VR blogger © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 12 SOCIAL VR: overview Full body VR factory training system. Source: Holosuit YouTuber HeyImBee in VRChat. Source: YouTube EMBODIED PRESENCE Being social in an online world is nothing new: gamers explore vast maps every day and Second Life still supports a community of 50,000+ people. What’s different about being social in a VR world is the deep sense of presence - just as seeing a video of a place is dramatically different than visiting it. As VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, puts it, “The visceral realness of human presence within an avatar is the most dramatic sensation I’ve felt in VR.” © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 13 SOCIAL VR: overview VR Headset sales 2017-2018 and projected 2019 sales. Source: Statista VRChat daily user statistics Source: Steam STATE OF PLAY Experimental VR tech has been around for decades, but consumer level VR headsets costing $200-2,000 were only launched in 2016. Over 14M headsets have been sold over the past 3 years, but adoption has currently slowed: too much technical complexity and too little content. Several dozen social VR platforms have launched, among the hundreds of VR applications available. The most popular include: High Fidelity, AltspaceVR, RecRoom, Oculus Venues and Facebook Spaces. VRChat is the most popular, with typical daily user counts in the 7-9,000 range - still very low. © 2018 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-2063 | www.iftf.org 14 Designing new bodies a new canvas for personal expression 10 Managing multiple embodiments going back and forth between realities LEADING-EDGE Re-negotiating personal space BEHAVIORS: a new etiquette for social interactions Unwittingly generating data bodyprints at a glance expanded surfaces for personal data capture Thinking with data in three dimensions turning 2D data into 3D data objects Expanding the dimensions of familiar content a new way to consume media Re-inventing audience experience better than being there in person Setting up marketplaces in social VR from communication to commerce Bridging siloed metaverses connecting worlds