The promise of telepresence and social media has come up short in the human connection department. Communicating with loved ones in deep space will take much more than science & technology.  To avert the devastation of isolation suffered by loved ones exploring Mars, we need to find ways to increase the human connection and social engagement between people that are millions of kilometers apart. Just speeding up communications will not fully bridge the emotional divide. Even though asynchronous communication of Social Media has done wonders to connect the world, society has become more isolated than ever.  We need more than the just the genius of technology to form this interplanetary human connection. The current artistry of virtual worlds will require more than capturing the imagination or engaging the heart. We need to explore how one’s own perception of internal relationships can help transcend this chasm caused by sensory and social deprivation in deep space. It will take both art and science to figure out.

Imagination: I will see it, when I believe it!

We sometimes fail to see the power of our own imagination. In our research exploring the innovation process at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), we were interviewing how surgeon’s perceive new technology such as Mixed Reality. Nassir Navab, the Director of the Computer Aided Medical Procedure (CAMP) Lab asked surgeons, “how can technology help you see into the body better?” One surgeon responded, “I don’t need to see it, I need to believe it!”  That one insight has transformed the approach to medical imaging in all subsequent investigations. Instead of just improving the technology’s imagery, they needed to improve how the surgeon fully engaging their own imagination to create accurate mental models.  This is true for any high-performance and high-risk vocations from emergency response to inner city education. How can we transfer this power of imagination to transcend both time and space for human connection in deep space? How can we harness the imagination achieve deeper human connections?

The power of Imagination to Transcend Ourselves

• Have you ever been lost in a book?
• Have you been transported to another time and place watching a movie?
• Have you ever lost track of time while being immersed into a video game?

You are traveling the space-time continuum of story. The author is co-opting your imagination with the stimulus of media to bring you into a creative story-trance between storyteller and story-listener.  This lucid dream-like state is the willing state of the audience putting their highly impressionable imagination to work for the intent of the author.  The mere ink blots on a page, in the form of words, can transport you to a place you cannot reach on your own.  These comforting imaginary-worlds have emotion, but without the pain; The journey is all pre-determined, but is still surprising; Even though the story ends, there is still a lingering story-world that stays persistent in our memories. Our memories remember this as if we had the experience ourselves.

We give too much credit to the author if we think all the power is in the artistry or the medium. Earnest Hemingway realized this phenomenon when he describes the art of a novelist. The writer uses less words to draw in the more of the audience’ imagination to achieve the best work. He estimated that as the author, he only created 1/8th of the story experience; while the reader was effectively filling in 7/8th of the story experience with their own imagination.

People mistakenly label this phenomenon as “the suspension of disbelief.” It is actually the opposite. The author realizes that it takes our full belief system in their story-world in order to construct a convincing fantastical story experience. This is similar to how our subconscious fabricates our dreams. You are giving the artistic license to the author to craft false memories into your mind. As theme park designers, we go even farther as we co-opt the memories that the novel or cinema creates to extend the immersion of the experience. Theme parks engage all senses, in all direction, in all dimensions and with all realities (real, virtual and imagined). This phenomenon is what we call “Painting with the Audience Imagination“.  The audience is still doing most of the work, but not realizing that the magic of the media is to make it seem effortless. In addition, the work of the author and the technology needs to become invisible. We have only begun to leverage this power of the audience’s own imagination to transport them into a deeper human connection .  This is central to our research to help increase the human connection between people through telepresence and Virtual Reality (VR).

The Untapped Power of the Audience’s “Empathetic Imagination” 

In traditional forms of story, the magic of the “story-trance” between storyteller and story listener is similar to a hypnotic or dream state where the media drives the experience. Can we use this power in reverse to help with human participant drive a deeper connection with another person?

The next paradigm-shift for “experiential media” such as Virtual Reality (VR) will be engaging the full heart, head and body of the audience so their experience will drive the media versus the media driving the experience. The audience will be invited to more actively to participate with both the authorship and the agency of the story world. This will transform a “story-trance” into a “story-dance” where author, actors and audience create a form of square-dance of story-world creation. We are just beginning to formulate the artistic conventions, but unlike the birth of former media conventions, we are using both the art and the science of the imagination. This makes our work with partner, Jim Davies of the Science of the Imagination Lab, critical. In his book Riveted, “Why Jokes make us laugh…”

From Trance to Dance in Story Experiences

To reach the next major creative leap in the Language of VR, we will need to engage and exercise the audience’s “empathetic imagination” to equal levels of the author’s “expressive imagination.” On the audience side, the Experience Architecture will converge the physical, virtual and imagined realities into one world. The author on the other side will craft the InterPlay of  “serious play,” “gamification” and “story magic,” as a single medium. The Creative Technologist will procedurally weave them all with the artistry of Augmented Intelligence (the other AI), perceptual computing and Machine Learning. The culmination will be able to mediate between the expressive imagination of the author with the empathetic imagination of the audience to transform storytelling.

In this experiential media, the audience’s empathetic imagination will not be replacing the author or actor, it will merely be inviting the audience’s participation with the authorship and agency in order to intensify their human connection with story creation. This will completely change the way we create and experience social engagement with media that will make it as thrilling as it will be transformative.

Its curious how we have to consider traveling to other worlds to help figure out the power within ourselves.

Copyright © 2017 Christopher Stapleton, Simiosys

Simulated living quarters on Mars (left) compared to solitary confinement (right)

We don’t tell our entertainment clients that hire us to design adventures on Mars about our work exploring real-life on Mars.  The difference between fantasy and reality is so stark, it just may kill all of the enthusiasm of their project.  However for us, the challenge to help alleviate the devastating effects of isolation in deep space exploration will make this one of our most exciting projects. It is pioneering work that will not only help astronauts, but the millions of earthlings that also suffer from isolation in hospitals, on deployment, with disabilities, or that are incarcerated. Eventually, it will change the way we create the next generation of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) experience. It will push our creative development of the InterPlay of story, play and games to all new levels of importance to redefine education and entertainment as we know it now. Innovation is always stimulated by life’s challenges. Isolation is one of the great unsolved problems of deep space exploration that will have devastating effects on even the toughest explorer.

Life on Mars can be a sentence of isolation that has similar effects of being in solitary confinement, society’s most severe punishment before the death sentence. In the figure above, we compare NASA’s HI-SEAS (left) Simulated living quarters on MARS compared with Solidary Confinment (right). With the increase of years of sensory and social deprivation from isolation, our brave explorers face an increasing potential of depression and decline of performance.  Both the human and financial cost is irreplaceable. The most difficult challenge is with addressing the Asynchronous Communication challenge, which is the elimination of real-time communication. It will take 20 minutes for communication to get from Mars to earth, then another 20 minutes to return the message.  When our society can not even wait a few seconds of silent airtime on the radio, television or internet, think about the detachment that will set in between an astronaut and family members.  Earth life is filled with not only the abundance of activities with friends and family, but the endless wonder of our natural and manufactured life on earth. Waiting 40 minutes for a response from an relative is a real kill-joy for any sense of human connection.

Our pioneering work with NASA education and Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA) has brought us to exploring this issue of isolation in space.  The same challenge of engaging families with education, including those who have lost their ability to communicate due to Aphasia (the lost of language due to a stroke) seek similar solutions. The Space Florida organization has awarded Simiosys an economic innovation grant to help bring these innovations to the marketplace for the sake of deep space exploration. It will be advancing the work of NASA’s ANSIBLE project to develop tools that address isolation in both space and on earth.

With 10 years of experience of bringing Mixed Reality advancements to the marketplace with global entertainment and technology companies, Simiosys possess unique experience and interdisciplinary teams to take this technology to uncharted territory. Our teams include both Experience Architects with over 30 years experience with VR and the fresh young talents of the Virtual Native (those who have grown up with Virtual Worlds). Its not the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) that excites our team, but it is the testing of the full human potential within Virtual Worlds. Our use of emerging engagement strategies that leverage the InterPlay of story, play and games are able to push that human potential through experiential social learning and transdisciplinary collaboration.

As a human species, we are always seeking endless novelty in experience, but not without the  familiar intimacy of human connection and social engagement.  This will be the future measure of success in the $30 billion VR/AR industry. We don’t wish to keep our emerging research results a secret, but share them to help all of humanity to advance on earth and beyond.

Isolation and “Conversational Story Creation”

We are alone in our own thoughts.

We become a prisoner of our own mind when we can not communicate.

An expression of our ideas and dreams does not make us any less lonely.

We need to bond with one another to expose our loneliness and disrobe our vulnerability.

We need a space, time and exchange to feel safe, to connect and feel a sense of belonging.

Conversations allows us to shed our loneliness and feel safety in the presence of one another.

Stories allow us to feel emotion, without the pain in order to bond with one another.

Creation provides us the empowerment to form our own reality that we share with one another

Our imagination is where our memories, ideas and dreams congregate to form our consciousness.

Our conversation invites others in to explore this frontier between ourselves and the world.

Our participation within authorship, agency and the affection of a listener provides us courage.

Language reduces our communication into an explicit and socially acceptable narrative.

This efficiency has helped create civilizations and connect the world, but can leave us lonely.

Language can become a barrier with the loss of expression and empathy that diminishes our human connection.

A conversation is more than an exchange of ideas, its a deep human connection.

A story is more than the destination, its a journey that transforms.

Where we may be alone in our own thoughts, we are not alone in our imagination.

Our imagination frames our consciousness and relationships to help define ourselves.

Life participation is more than being present, its being meaningful to others.

Sharing, listening, collaborating and bringing affection is meaningful.

Conversational Story Creation takes us where we can not go on our own.

Thank you Janet, Jenn, Dana, Denise, Jim and Eric for the conversation that keeps on giving…

Copyright © 2017 Simiosys

As much as the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) Arcades excites us, should we not consider that these are two concepts have already died a dramatic death in the marketplace before? So it seems that these businesses and products have come and gone.  Now we are putting them together at IAAPA like we did with fine dining and theater and called it “dinner theater.”  Putting two things together, doesn’t necessarily make them better.  It can make them worse, but its not because either are bad. Its how they are crafted together that is important, We shouldn’t make all the same mistakes and be surprised at the results.

The arcades that survived were the ones that had a social elements mixed with food and merchandise such as Chuck E. Cheese’s or Dave and Buster’s. The arcades who thought it was about the technology created what some call a “coffin industry: One box, one player, one game.” It attracted a small lonely demographic that was not worth taking up prime real estate.

What makes VR popular now and not before is because of the enabling technologies of tracking, resolution, processing power, field of view, etc. at a lower price point. However, this makes for a good consumer product at home, but not necessarily a Location Based Entertainment (LBE) solution. In fact, it can be anti-social slapping a piece of plastic on one’s face and excluding everybody else out of the excitement. Even if you put up a monitor showing what they are seeing, your friends are still once removed from the player’s experience. That is not increasing social engagement and human connection, it is diluting them. Plus the hygiene problem with all the greasy fingers from the food and beverage just adds to the operational hassle.

The reason people leave the home for entertainment, no matter what century you live in, is because they all can enjoy being transported to an escape together. Otherwise, they can watch the entertainment at home. So a LBE with VR needs to consider the guest experience first and layer in the VR where it adds and not diminishes the social engagement and human connection that we all crave. There are so many more ways you can incorporate VR without an Head Mounted Display (HMD).  It is critical to the bottom line that the experience design needs to expand beyond the VR HMD. That is why you need an Experience Architect before buying or building any VR Arcade or LBE (even if you do solve the sim-sickness issue).

An Experience Architect creates memories, not buildings. They imagine the LBE from the point of view of the guest experience.  They design the social experience from how we engage with our hearts, hands and heads, not from the technology, flashing lights and theming. This is something that can’t be rendered in a sketch or watched on a Pre-Visualization video.  This has to be rigorously play-tested with prototypes that can bring together the real, the virtual and the imagined together for affective assessment. VR Prototyping is where VR is most dramatically being used to transform our industry. Prototypes are intended to amplify problems so we can fix them. The standard rendering and or pre-viz video tends to hide these problems to sell an idea, not to prove its value. Pretty sketches do not represent the true guest experience that will be making the long-term Return on the Investment (ROI) in the end.

With VR Prototypes we can create and test the ability to make memories that will bring guests back over and over again. This repeat business is what keeps the doors open to the venue to reach the bottom line of the long-term ROI. When developers are obsessed with just opening the doors on budget and in schedule at the cost of guest experience, the venue will experience a slow death as we have seen many times before. This was seen most dramatically with Wanda’s development of experiences that were suppose to out-Disney Disney.  However, we saw how those venues slowly became empty. As reported by the the Wall Street Journal, this drove their massive divestment of their toxic LBE assets this last year. As an industry, we must learn from our mistakes and not cover them up. We can’t be fooled by the shiny, sparkly things in the window surrounded by flashy lights and carnival music.

VR Arcades could be awesome, but they first need to meet the expectations they set in the imagination of an adoring audience passionate about great out-of-home entertainment. Whether you are the real estate developer, operator or IP owner, hire the Experience Architect first! They can either design you a great experience from the beginning or help create an “experiential make-over” to fix what is already done.

Mission LEAP:

Concept Art

Sketchup Model, Mockup Prototype

The ShowVRoom (formerly Phydgtial InterSpace) is our retail solution to bridge the “Bricks and Mortar” Retail experience to the “Click and Order” online purchasing. The Amuseo creative brand consultants translates your brand into a compelling user experience to simulate a working (or playing) environment to showcase your product in action.  Cars, vacations, real estate or fashion, the ShowVRoom puts your product into a lasting and immersive memory that customers can share with their friends.

Sample 1: Amuseo developing a Canon USA ShowVRoom of industry solutions for the design and manufacturing industry.

Using both physical and digital assets in a multi-user, Mixed Reality environment, Amuseo can bring your new brand experience into reality with the ShowVRoom kiosk. We work closely with your product development team from focus groups using virtual prototype to experiential marketing within busy consumer venues. Amuseo tasks its transdisciplinary consulting team made from leading experts from art, science, engineering, design and business. They analyze your future unmet needs and market trends. By simulating, capturing and analyzing with virtual technology, they can test your future consumer experience using your product prototypes within rigorous testing.

The ShowVRoom is customized configuration of interoperable immersive media technology that is skinned with the client’s unique visual brand and theming. Three novel systems work together. Immersive media technology simulate virtual worlds, perceptual computing sensors capture the behavior and machine learning analyzes the experience with minimal intrusion to the consumer’s immersion.

Sample 2: Amuseo developing a rehabilitation ShowVRoom for therapy solutions for the mental health industry.

commercial design testing our approach to teaching innovation skills within informal learning environments. We presented the prototype as an experiment in our Storefront innovation Playtank, hosted at Urban ReThink. Users interact with physical objects that have an impact on a digital environmental simulation. They are encouraged to learn through experimentation and to make creative leaps in order to arrive at unique, creative solutions. The model for interaction engagement is based on the InterPlay instructional strategy developed by Christopher Stapleton and Dr. Atsusi Hirumi.

Sample 3: Amuseo developing a Training ShowVRoom for emergency response solutions for the military industry.

ShowVRoom for Science and History Museums

The ShowVRoom video for the Phydgtial InterSpace device showcases the type of group-learning interaction using physical objects as interactive tools, and aspects of game and story media integrated into a physical victorian cabinet.

For more information about Amuseo Studios or the ShowVRoom contact:
Simiosys Real World Laboratories
Info@Simiosys.com
PO Box 616518
Orlando, FL 32861-6518

88246577-2 Click to download a ShowVRoom product flyer from Amuseo

Phydgital Interspace

The Phydgtial InterSpace is a prototype design testing our approach to teaching innovation skills within informal learning environments. We presented the prototype as an experiment in our Storefront innovation Playtank, hosted at Urban ReThink. Users interact with physical objects that have an impact on a digital environmental simulation. They are encouraged to learn through experimentation and to make creative leaps in order to arrive at unique, creative solutions. The model for interaction engagement is based on the InterPlay instructional strategy developed by Christopher Stapleton and Dr. Atsusi Hirumi.

Mission LEAP

Mission LEAP (Lunar Expedition for Astronaut Pioneers) is a unique approach to museum exhibit design that uses a combination of story, play, and game to engage the audience in a role-playing and cooperative problem solving environment. We prototyped the entire exhibit and invited kids from a local school to interact, as if they were visiting the final museum experience. From this experience, we were able to see how kids engaged together and in groups; we were able to explore the power of cooperative and competitive play, and to see what aspects of game play supported or detracted from the core learning objectives. Using live actors as docents and computer AI, we experimented with a museum experience that fluctuated between individual play and larger, more challenging group scenarios.

Teacher Talk 

Teacher Talk is a collaboration between Simiosys and the Haberman Educational Foundation. The goal of Teacher Talk is to help teachers (especially new teachers) identify the psychological goals that motivate challenging students, and to help them respond appropriately in order to build productive classroom relationships.