“What the hell did you just do to me?!” If I hadn’t actually spoken the words aloud, they were certainly running through my head (among other things), but let me set this up for you.
I’m an experience junkie. I’m especially interested in borderline crazy stuff that tests my limits: everything from extreme immersive horror experiences to Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to raising kids. Even when I try something new though, the experience usually begins with the anticipation of what it might be and ends with a reconciliation of what it actually was. So it’s very rare for me to be totally and utterly blindsided. Hold onto that thought for a sec.
I also produce interactive experiences. “Interactive” means something different to each person you ask, but I loosely define it as the integration of technology in an environment to extend, enhance, or personalize narrative possibilities. That “anything goes” vibe you’re picking up on is intentional.
One of the most exciting and challenging phases of the production process is brainstorming with a group of creative people in a relatively untethered fashion. In some of these sessions, where anything is valid and the ideas are crackling with vision and potential, someone may ask me, “Is that doable?” Thankfully, I usually don’t need to have a ready answer in that type of session. At some point the execution of realistic solutions within the pesky limits of time, money, technology, etc., can be a creative art in itself.
When I noodle on some of the more challenging scenarios though, it often seems that the same technology limits keep popping up. I’ll sometimes daydream into a thought experiment of what would need to happen in order for those limits to begin to dissolve, and a couple high-level conclusions tend to recur:
1. We’re going to have to come up with some pretty creepy technology.
2. Our bodies will merge somewhat with technology.
This type of thinking quickly ventures away from the domain of viable experiences and into the realm of science fiction. In other words, it seems unlikely that we’ll get a practical glimpse of this kind of stuff anytime soon.
Or so I thought.
I get a lot of inspiration at events where I can connect with driven people who are doing interesting work and plummeting through their own personal rabbit holes of passion, often with fascinating results.
Yup, a wig made of earbuds
When I attended SXSW Interactive this year, I was naturally drawn to the Interactive Expo. It was a refreshingly eclectic mashup of startups, universities, larger organizations, and individuals with only the coquettishly vague notion of “interactive” (there’s that word again) to connect them. I was most intrigued by a section that was dedicated to booths representing entire countries with exhibits that ranged from “we like tech and no, we’re not hungover” to specific demos.
In the Korea section, C-Lab, Samsung’s in-house incubator, was demo’ing a number of prototypes, and I saw a couple Gear VR kits being passed around so I dove in for a closer look. The guy at the booth had a headset in his hand that looked like a flimsy plastic rig for headphones, but without the headphones. It had a couple of small, approximately 1″ square foam blocks attached to either side and he placed it around the back of my head so that the blocks rested just under my ears. In other words, I was expecting Virtual Reality, but with nothing over my eyes or ears, I was pretty much just getting Reality. I didn’t come to SXSW for Reality.
He stood in front of me holding a mobile phone, and to the best of my recollection he waved his hand over and across the screen and back, like a fumbling magician doing a trick that everybody knows isn’t going to work. And then he asked,”Did you feel that?”
And some part of me responded:
“What the hell did you just do to me?”
Because when he waved his hand across the phone, I MOVED! Or at least I felt like I did. It’s really hard to explain. My feet never left the ground, my body did not physically move in space, but I MOVED. I may have swayed, my line of sight may have shifted from side to side. The whole thing lasted about three seconds and was indescribably uncanny.
Once I had gotten over my shock of what happened, I asked him to do it again. And it happened again.
The device is called Entrim 4D, and it generates a small current that stimulates the vestibular system in a way that mimics the body’s response to actual motion. The purpose of this is to mitigate potential motion sickness caused by VR. Next, I did an actual VR demo of a racing experience, this time with a Gear VR rigged up with Entrim. With each turn of the virtual car, Entrim simulated the corresponding motion in my body, which was somewhat less off-putting since it was supported by the VR visuals.
I don’t really have a big problem with motion sickness in VR, so it’s hard for me to say whether it’s an effective solution. In fact, experiencing Entrim without VR, even for a few seconds, made me feel more icky than anything I’ve experienced in VR.
Remember that bit about seeking out experiences that test my limits? I appreciate the role that technology can play in blurring those lines, and while I might aspire to be Oz in my day job, I’m always first in line to be Dorothy. Fool me once, shame on. . . oh nevermind, just keep fooling me.
A good show takes you on a journey down a path. Technology may play a part in paving the path or shining a light to guide the way. Regardless of the machinery behind the scenes though, creators ultimately provide an imperfect space that can only be completed by the imagination of their guests. There is an unspoken agreement that asserts the integrity of each party and the mutual trust between them.
My experience with Entrim made me feel that the agreement itself had been disrespected. Instead of being fooled, I felt like I had been hacked. That’s not to say that I felt violated, but it nevertheless felt like a line had been crossed with potentially unsettling implications. I recognize that it may seem like a disconnect to think that being hurtled through space at unnatural speeds on a roller coaster or having screens plastered to my face to force me into seeing an alternate reality somehow seems legit, whereas Entrim does not.
The distinction lies in how much agency the guest retains in owning their version of the experience. Consider: every experience ultimately asks you a question about how it makes you feel. A rollercoaster asks you how it physically feels to pull multiple Gs through an inversion. A movie, play, or dark ride asks you how it feels to experience that version of that story. A simulator or virtual reality experience asks you how it feels to replace your expectations of the real world. In each of these experiences, guests agree to be taken to the precipice of a creator’s vision and to choose to gaze or soar or remain indifferent as they see fit. In the best of those moments, we will each translate the art of the experience into something that is felt in a fundamentally personal way.
By contrast, a technology like Entrim is an override that forces you to feel in a specific way. It removes the question of how it makes you feel, because it no longer needs to ask. While Entrim itself seems relatively harmless, it feels like an early waypoint on a slippery slope that may lead to some version of my sci-fi daydreams of creepy, cyborg technology.
Like it or not, we’re on this train and it’s not slowing down. As experience designers, it will be increasingly important to make and protect a space for our guests to bring their own feelings to the worlds we create for them. Otherwise, we may find that we create for nobody.
The Memelab 
Closer and closer…until it’s inside…