12
Third Spaces
FUSING THE REAL AND THE VIRTUAL

You walk up to a whiteboard and begin drawing a diagram to share ideas with colleagues. They hear everything you say and see everything you draw, but they are not there, at least not really. Rather, you see them only virtually, represented as avatars through the clear whiteboard. At their individual locations, they, in turn, see you—strike that; they see your avatar through the whiteboard, and you see whatever they draw or write on it as you collaborate together. You gauge each other’s reactions not only by what your colleagues say but by seeing where their avatars look, their facial expressions, and their gestures, which all mirror their own bodies.

So that’s Mirrored Virtuality, yes, just like telepresence? Well, sure, in both you see the others virtually in real time via digital technology, but with telepresence you see the actual person’s picture, not an avatar. And you can’t draw on the digital image; here, your real-world activities affect the virtual collaborative space via Augmented Virtuality—but for your colleagues this appears as Augmented Reality, because for them your virtual actions affect their real-world space!

In the end, it doesn’t matter what realm it resides in, or what you call it. It’s just a great shared experience, enhancing the work of you and your colleagues. It’s also not yet an offering, but rather a project at the Georgia Institute of Technology called ClearWorlds, which uses such “virtual whiteboards … as a bridge between the physical and virtual world.”¹

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of South Australia work to develop “through-walls collaboration, in which users in an intelligent meeting room can work in real time with field operatives to view and manipulate data.”² Here again what is real for one person is virtual for another, and vice versa, as now you can collaborate with colleagues out anywhere in the physical world, not cooped up in a souped-up conference room. Going a little farther afield, computer scientists at Stanford University’s Media X center seek to scale up a virtual world to planetary size, where “physical sensors in the real world seed their virtual reflections, users can visually browse a sea of information, and virtual avatars convey physical social cues to bring distance interaction to the level of actual presence.”³

Not to be outdone, the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Joseph Paradiso, created ShadowLab, a Second Life-version of the Media Lab’s third floor housing the group. Not only does the ShadowLab change based on real-time sensors in the real world, shadowing (i.e., mirroring) it, but things happen in the Media Lab based on what avatars do in the virtual world! The Responsive Environments Group seeks to create a “persistent virtual presence,” with “people continuously straddling the boundary between real and virtual” so that “they’re never truly offline,” allowing avatars in the ShadowLab to “know something about what the user is doing in the real world.” “In principle, a touch from an authorized avatar in virtual space can reach out to the corresponding dormant user in the real world …, perhaps asking for live interaction or to bring the user more fully into the virtual sphere.”⁴

Fusing the Real and the Virtual

Again, don’t bother trying to figure out which realm (singular) this is in, as it crosses the boundaries of a number of realms (plural). Paradiso calls them “cross-reality environments,”⁵ for they effectively fuse Reality and Virtuality into a third space, neither completely one nor the other, but crossing or transversing the environment’s events (actually and autonomously), places (really and virtually), and substances (materially and digitally).⁶ The Metaverse Roadmap group developed an early and useful model for how Reality and Virtually fuse together, determining that the term Metaverse had grown beyond Neal Stephenson’s original fictional conception of complete Virtuality “to include aspects of the physical world objects, actors, interfaces, and networks that construct and interact with virtual environments.” The Metaverse, according to the group, represents the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space: “It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.”⁷

Such virtually enhanced and physically persistent—and we could just as easily say physically enhanced and virtually persistent—third spaces have made their way out of the lab. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra, for example, launched in late 2008, involved real musicians submitting virtual auditions over YouTube to be virtually judged by real symphony experts, with the finalists voted on by the entire virtual YouTube community. The winners, all amateurs, came together for a live concert on April 15, 2009, at Carnegie Hall, led by famed conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, and YouTube featured a virtual mashup of videos of their individual real auditions playing the specially commissioned “Internet Symphony No. 1 ‘Eroica,’” by composer Tan Dun.⁸

If you prefer the theatre over the symphony, you could head from Manhattan to Brooklyn for the Game Play Festival, which, according to the New York Times’ videogame reviewer, Seth Schiesel, “is the most ambitious effort I know of to fuse the techniques and live presentation of theater with the themes, structures and technology of interactive electronic entertainment, also known as video games.”⁹ The July 2010 festival featured such shows as “Theatre of the Arcade,” which in Reality provided an alternate Virtuality in which classic games such as Pac-Man, Super Mario, and Asteroids were reimagined, and “Grand Theft Ovid,” where the audience watched live students tell timeless stories acted out by their avatars, projected on a screen, in such games as Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, and the Legend of Zelda.

Turnabout is fair play; in another article Schiesel notes how “as games become more real, the experience of them is bringing them closer to art.”¹⁰ He’s thinking here in particular of those games like Power Gig and Rock Band 3 that go beyond Guitar Hero and the original Rock Band to incorporate real musical instruments, as well as the Kinect system that incorporates the full body. “Throughout,” he concludes, “from the personal to the physical, the line between the real and the virtual is beginning to fade.”¹¹

Students in a number of North Carolina high schools involved with Project K-nect (no relation), thought up by Shawn Gross of Digital Millennial Consulting of Arlington, Virginia, and funded by San Diego-based Qualcomm, were given smartphones to enhance their classroom learning of math.¹² They could access additional instruction and information asynchronously in off-hours, ask teachers and classmates questions at any time from school or home and then await the answers to come at some later time, and use their phones’ video cameras to film their group projects or explanations of how to solve particular types of problems—seventy-five videos in one week, in fact, on solving linear equations. Meanwhile, Katie Salen at Parsons The New School for Design founded Quest to Learn, a new school in New York City that brings custom video games into the live classroom, formally labeled a “hybrid physical-digital space” but which Salen more informally calls a “possibility space”; she and the teachers manage the space, and the classes, like a yearlong video game itself.¹³

Different elements of any one experience can also encompass multiple realms, creating experiences that transverse the Multiverse (for both guests and employees). Visiting Walt Disney World in Orlando, for example, clearly makes for one of the happiest experiences in Reality, but recall how the company makes use of Alternate Reality with its Kim Possible experience at Epcot. It embraces Warped Reality, with Main Street USA harkening back to a bygone era, and also in how it manages queues to change guests’ perception of time. In today’s “cultural shift toward impatience” even that’s not enough, as Disney increasingly turns to technology to warp its waiting time reality “to get you to the fun faster.”¹⁴ It now operates a wait-time command center below Cinderella’s Castle to monitor wait times throughout Walt Disney World (Mirrored Virtuality). When necessary, the center calls for additional ride capacity and/or a mini-parade to route guests to underutilized areas of the park (both in the theme park’s base Reality). Disney added videogames to the waiting areas of particularly long-lined rides (Virtuality), while its smartphone app Mobile Magic lets guests see where characters are out in the park (Augmented Reality). Finally, the company is experimenting with wristbands that identify guests connected to in-character technology, so that the cast members playing characters will know whom they’ve already met and where, guest names, and so forth (Augmented Reality for the cast members to enhance Reality for the guests).

You create a third space whenever you transverse even one boundary between two realms within any given experience. Recall how Layar could not only enhance your current surroundings through its Augmented Reality technology but also, with some apps, could give you a “time slider” that lets you see those surroundings into the past or future, shifting over into the No-Time realm of Alternate Reality as part of one experience. Other apps turn the phone into a gun to shoot down virtual objects, sliding over into Augmented Virtuality. Or consider SensAble Technologies of Woburn, Massachusetts, which provides 3D design and modeling tools clearly within the borders of Physical Virtuality, but its FreeForm and ClayTools applications enable users to use a haptic device it developed, called PHANTOM, that provides force feedback operating on 3D models. It lets you, for example, model with virtual clay just as if it were real clay. The addition of haptics causes the experience to reside simultaneously in Physical and Augmented Virtualities.

Further, properly understood, even those experiences residing within one solitary realm—outside of the anchors themselves—create a third space that is neither fully of Reality nor entirely of Virtuality. Each of the other Realms of the Real—Augmented Reality, Alternate Reality, and Warped Reality—has at least one un-real (i.e., virtual) variable, whether it be digital substances, autonomous events, or both. Likewise, each of the other Realms of the Virtual—Augmented Virtuality, Physical Virtuality, and Mirrored Virtuality—has at least one un-virtual (i.e., real) variable, whether it be material substances, actual events, or both.

Defining Third Spaces

A third space, therefore, is any experience not purely Reality or Virtuality. Third spaces include those experiences within any one of the six other realms of the Multiverse as well as those transversal experiences that cross any boundary between realms, thereby encompassing not just three but four, five, or all six variables.¹⁵

Realize, too, that most experiences—if not nearly all of them outside those you can clearly place within the pure anchors—resist clear classification into any one, single, solitary realm defined by three hard and fast variables. Recall our discussion in the previous chapter (Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction”), on how even something as simple as a purely physical Hallmark card embraced not just three but five of the six variables. While the traditional card experience fits easily into Reality—with the material card being read in a particular place in the flow of actual time as it commemorates, celebrates, anticipates, or simply accompanies some event—it also often activates an autonomous time and virtual place, transporting the receiver to a different time and place in the remembered past or expectant future. So while its center of gravity within the Multiverse, if you will, lies in its core material substance, it reaches out to encompass all variables except the opposite one on the Substance dimension. Then, when Hallmark adds digital substances to the experience through its nominally Augmented Virtuality (but, remember, mislabeled Augmented Reality) cards, the center of gravity shifts over to digital substances as now all six realms factor into the experience (as Figure 11.8 in Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction,” shows).

So think of the realms as having soft boundaries that blur at the edges, more often than not blending aspects of multiple realms fused into one unified experience. The three core variables of any particular realm provide the center of gravity or essence of the experience, whereas any one, two, or three of the noncore variables extend, enhance, enlarge, embellish, boost, or intensify the experience, increasing the value created within each individual customer.

That certainly is the case with all of Alternate Reality, also discussed in Chapter 11. As revealed in its plot on the Experience Design Canvas, experiences within this realm encompass not just the essential variables of autonomous events, real places, and digital substances but the more peripheral—yet still crucial—variables of actual events, virtual places, and material substances. The same holds true for most experiences centered in the other realms. All variables remain at play to one degree or another. By realizing this, you can more explicitly and intentionally take advantage of these variables to provide a fuller, more robust experience—an overtly transversal experience—with greater engagement and value.

Now, we intentionally waited until this point to reveal all this in order to ease your understanding and use of the Multiverse model. It’s a complicated enough beast without right off the bat being forced to think about multiple realms at a time. Thinking solely in terms of single realms bestows, we believe, great value in discovering the cosmos incogniti lying beyond the digital frontier. We do want you to start your ideation process by Reaching through the Realms, realm by realm, and only then go on to Varying the Variables, where you can more explicitly design transversal experiences by thinking of each variable first independently of the others, and then in fuller and more robust combinations.

When, as a result, you create third spaces that fuse the real and the virtual, you necessarily draw from Reality and from Virtuality, both of which lie at the core of what it means to be human.

It’s Really All Real

According to some social scientists, there is no such thing as objective truth, that in fact reality is socially constructed.¹⁶ On the other hand, we (along with most readers, surely) recognize the reality of Reality. No matter where an experience resides in or across the Multiverse, it still requires a real, live, living, breathing person to do the experiencing. Escape into your mind’s eye with a good book, and still you lay on a couch in your family room, breathing the air. Explore the beauty of a virtual world or simply surf the web to your heart’s content, and still you sit in front of a screen, controlling the action with your hands on a keyboard, mouse, or other device. Play a Kinect game or model virtual clay, and still your physical hands and arms move, shaping the on-screen activity. Visit a living history museum for the day or participate, whenever you can afford a few minutes or hours, in an ARG, and still you move inexorably along with the universe’s arrow of time, growing older moment by moment as your work piles up at the office or home.

There’s no escaping the reality: it’s really all real.

So design for the real place in which your customers reside, no matter how virtual the place you wish to take them. Every experience is a transversal experience in this regard, always incorporating the real place also being experienced by the real person, in the actual time available to him and with the material substances before him.

Further recognize that Reality is the source of all experience, whether through the direct engagement of the senses in Reality itself or by triggering emotions evoked by those senses via virtual means. And as we have emphasized multiple times, Reality still provides the richest of sensorial experiences. For example, we may be able to bring the elements of the rainforest to our offerings—say, through a tropical plant conservatory, a Web-surfing excursion seeking information about tropical forests, or even a virtual jungle tour—but we can never replicate the experience of being there: squishing the mud, feeling the springy humus, stubbing your toes on roots, smelling the verdant flora, hearing the birds’ calls and the monkeys’ hollers, and feeling the stifling hot humid air as rays of sunlight pierce the canopy high above.¹⁷

Reality also supplies the referent for all representations; even the most fantastical require some relationship to people’s experience for them to comprehend.¹⁸ The principles closing each of the chapters on the other realms all refer directly to the relationship between each realm and Reality, as summarized here:

∞ Warped Reality takes a Reality experience and plays with its sense of time without straying from material substances or real places.

∞ Augmented Reality uses Reality as the background—or better yet, as the foreground—for the experience.

∞ Alternate Reality uses Reality as a playground, superimposing the virtual onto the real to create an alternate view.

∞ Physical Virtuality takes things the other way by instantiating in Reality what you imagine in Virtuality.

∞ Augmented Virtuality takes a Virtuality experience and incorporates elements of material Reality to engage your mind and (real) body.

∞ Mirrored Virtuality reflects Reality, creating a simulation of the real world tied into actual time, moment by moment.

∞ Virtuality, even with its utter immateriality unencumbered by the real world, still hearkens back to Reality to give our imagination touchpoints to grasp.

So although we may define Virtuality as the polar opposite of Reality in order to present a handy conceptual framework that provides us with insights to stimulate our ideation, we never truly leave Reality behind. It’s really all real.

It’s Virtually All Virtual

According to some cosmological scientists, underlying the physical matter of the Universe—below the levels of molecules, atoms, and even subatomic particles such as quarks, muons, and bosons that collectively make up all of Reality—lies one more level, the fundamental level. And it is comprised of bits, of zeros and ones.¹⁹ While we find that view fascinating, if unproven (and probably unprovable), you need not believe it, or even comprehend it, to understand how Virtuality underlies all our experiences of Reality.²⁰ So yes, no matter where an experience resides in or across the Multiverse, it still requires a real, live, living, breathing person to do the experiencing. But where does that experience truly happen? The experience does not reside in either material or digital substances; they merely create the props. The experience does not occur in either real or virtual places; they merely fashion the stage. The experience does not transpire in either actual or autonomous events; they merely shape the drama. The experience happens inside each person. As we noted earlier in Chapter 6, “Virtuality,” the actual experience is your internal reaction to the external stimuli staged in front of you, whether those stimuli are generated via Reality, Virtuality, or a third space anywhere in between. All experiences truly exist only in the mind.

There’s no escaping the verity: it’s virtually all virtual.

So design for the mind no matter what you want to do with the body. Every experience is a Virtuality experience in this regard as well, always happening in the mind, the autonomous and immaterial virtual place inside of the real person.

Further realize that Virtuality serves as the font of extraordinary experience, for all experiences must engage the mind no matter whether the stimuli come through the direct engagement of the senses in Reality or indirectly in Virtuality. As much as experiences reside in Reality, the generation of new value today comes primarily from Virtuality. It can take you places Reality alone would never let you go. Its ability to create what mankind wishes is unprecedented, extraordinary, and limitless.

Virtuality also furnishes the inspiration for all imaginings; even the most grounded of new experiences require thoughtful innovativeness to engage people today.²¹ The principles closing the chapters on the other realms all refer, even if indirectly, to the relationship between each realm and Virtuality, as summarized here:

∞ Mirrored Virtuality creates a Virtuality experience tied into actual time, moment by moment reflecting Reality.

∞ Augmented Virtuality engages your real body via material substances to enhance a Virtuality experience.

∞ Physical Virtuality takes what you imagine in Virtuality and instantiates it in Reality.

∞ Alternate Reality takes an otherwise Virtuality experience and superimposes it on the real world, using the latter as a playground for the former.

∞ Augmented Reality takes a real-world experience and enhances it with elements of Virtuality, extending them not only visually but also along audio, tactile, and kinesthetic dimensions.

∞ Warped Reality takes Virtuality’s autonomous events into an otherwise real-world experience, opening the door to playing with time without straying from material substances or real places.

∞ Reality, the epitome of the physical world, harkens back to the Virtuality of the imagination that creates and defines its experiences.

So although we may define Reality as the polar opposite of Virtuality in order to present a handy conceptual framework that provides us with insights to stimulate our ideation, we never truly leave Virtuality behind.²² It’s virtually all virtual.

From Ideation to Design

Now you have it all—everything we know about the Multiverse (and probably then some). We trust this fuller understanding of Multiversal experiences serves as an enriching catalyst for refining and putting meat on the bones of your new value creation ideas. The more thoroughly you comprehend and explicitly consider all the factors at play, the more clearly you will see how to innovate new offerings that fulfill the promise inherent within digital technology.

Your knowledge of each of the eight realms (with the plethora of examples given throughout the book) should help you generate initial ideas for consideration. Your knowledge of the six variables should further broaden the scope of ideas, and knowing how each of them can always be brought to bear in any offering should deepen those ideas. Your knowledge of how every experience needs to be depicted in terms of Events, Places, and Substances, the three dimensions of the single Multiverse, should help you more clearly define exactly how each idea turns into an offering. And now your fuller understanding of the true nature of the Multiverse—how it portrays third spaces that are really all real and virtually all virtual—should help you see how each offering would truly affect each customer.