Since writing STYT, virtual reality has gone from a promising experiment to being the cusp of something huge.
I've already had some success in curating my thoughts by entering certain VR environments: in the same way you'd think about a problem differently in a park than to an office with flickering lights.
What excites you the most about the possibilities of this new medium?
@darklordandy
VR: This is a great question! But honestly, I'm not sure.
I have some intuitions. The obvious early stuff is going to be telepresence -- "being" somewhere in real-time. There are people already working on broadcasting live 3D imagery to VR from all sorts of fun crazy places: courtside at wimbledon, remote areas that are hard to access, drone views.
But in a way, I'm most interested in it as a new thinking tool. What types of ideas or information or communications can we wrestle with using VR? That probably includes anything that has a spatial dimension; not just the obvious things -- like architecture, fly-throughs, etc. -- but the less obvious, like data visualization. (Imagine a 3D dataviz you could walk around in!)
If you really wanted to know what's going to happen in that area, though, just look at the video games that people make. Video-game-makers are nearly always the ones that figure out the most useful and delightful way to employ a new interface. Joysticks in the arcades of the 80s taught people the concept of manipulating things on screen with a physical object (a *super* weird concept, back then). Solitaire on the Windows PC probably trained more people and how to use a mouse than any other thing. And it was video games on the iPhone that first explored the limits of what you could do with multitouch controls.
So basically, just watch whatever video-game people do!
@brentsum Heh, this is an awesome question.
If you mean "which is my favorite cognitive bias to complain about", it's probably what psychologists sometimes call a "frequency illusion". This often occurs when you really really like -- or really really hate -- something, so you start paying closer and closer attention to its occurrence in everyday life ... and you wind up wildly overestimating how common it is. Say one day you suddenly decide that hipsters wearing fedoras are really annoying; and *because* they're so annoying to you, your eye immediately lights -- and lingers -- upon every single person you see wearing one in public. Pretty soon it's like, arg, god: Why is everyone suddenly wearing fedoras? CURSE YOU, HIPSTERS.
Of course, it's simply not true that everyone is wearing fedoras. It's just that you're noticing every single one you see, and oversampling it.
The frequency illusion crops up a lot in people's complaints about how technology is supposedly changing or deforming everyday life. I pretty frequently hear people complain something like: "I walk into a cafe, and *every single young person* is looking at their phone! No-one is talking to anyone else any more." What's really happening is that a) a subset of people are, indeed, staring at their phones when they're putatively meeting/dining/drinking with a friend, but b) these incidents are actually a lot more rare than social apocalyptics claim (this data isn't precisely on point, but for comparison's sake, a study of the phone-gazing behavior of people in public parks suggests that the actual number of people looking at any given point in time ranges from ... 3% to 10%: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/1... nonetheless, c) the frequency illusion has made it *seem* to the observer that, dammit, *everyone* is on their phones, all the time.
Two years ago I started doing a little experiment. When I'm in a restaurant or cafe, at random moments I'll look up and do a quick visual scan of the room, counting how many people are there that are in a social mode -- i.e. with other people -- and of that population, what percentage are actually looking at their phones. It's nearly always a small minority, and frequently it's zero. (The trick is trying to pick as random a moment as possible to do the survey, because frequency illusions occur when you sample the world around you in a specifically nonrandom fashion: i.e. when you notice things only *because* they've annoyed you.)
It is my pleasure to welcome Clive Thompson for an AMA today at 12 noon - let's ask questions in advance...!
BIO: Clive is a science and technology journalist for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, and author of "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For the Better." In his spare time, he's a musician with the bands The Delorean Sisters and Cove.
Trailblazer
Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson
NotionMetrics
Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson
Backchannel