notes
All website references were valid as of January 3, 2011, unless otherwise indicated.
Foreword
1. Sean Leahy, “Stadium vs. Home: Can the NFL make being there match what’s on TV?” USA Today, September 1, 2010.
2. Stan Davis, in the Foreword to B. Joseph Pine II, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), x–xi.
3. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Updated Edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 76.
4. Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), masterfully chronicles the triumph of the mathematical algorithm over “old media.” Its subtitle points to the belief system in place at not only Google (and Amazon) but most of the digital innovators of our age. Note that even the old guard that was slow to respond to the digital revolution (can you say, newspapers?) missed the shift precisely because their own behavior demonstrated a view of the digital as completely alien to their businesses.
5. Daniel Lyons, “The Customer Is Always Right,” Newsweek, December 21, 2009. Bezos’ complete answer to the first question: “I do. I don’t know how long it will take. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world. That’s not going to go away; that’s going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It’s probably the most successful technology ever. It’s hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what’s remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.”
6. For an introduction to the role physical libraries have in promoting an appreciation for human knowledge, see David Brooks, “The Medium Is the Medium,” New York Times, July 8, 2010. For a peek at a future without physical books, watch an episode or two of MTV’s Cribs, which takes viewers on tours of the houses of well-known athletes, musicians, and other “celebrity” role models; there’s nary a book to be found in these narcissist containers.
7. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred a Knopf, 2010), 27.
8. Dalton Conley, Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 7.
9. David F. Nobel, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 206–207.
10. I am indebted to Bill Brokaw for this valediction. See www.brokaw.com.
Introduction
1. For a more complete description of this fundamental shift in the fabric of all developed economies, see B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), now in an updated edition, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), to which all future citations will refer.
2. True commodities, being fungible, cannot be innovated, although of course new commodities may be discovered and old ones refined or processed in new ways.
3. We have had many people tell us about the iPhone unboxing experience, and have seen it for ourselves, but in the writing here we read the normally irascible Lucy Kellaway’s poetic ode to the App Store guidelines in her “Business Life” column in the Financial Times: “I have found the words to describe Apple’s glory.” Lucy Kellaway, September 20, 2010.
4. Alan Kay, “Computer Software,” Scientific American, vol. 251, no. 3, September 1984, 52–59, cited in Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,1993), 32.
5. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 103.
6. Laurel, Computers as Theatre, 32–33.
7. “F-8 Digital Fly-By-Wire Aircraft,” NASA Dryden Fact Sheet, www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-024-DFRC.html.
8. An illustration from W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 72–73.
9. The impediments to reaching literally everyone in the world are primarily political (retarding wealth creation in undeveloped countries) and cultural (with many groups of people resisting new digital technology, not necessarily without cause, even—such as the Amish—in the United States). Even many poor people today have digital phones; witness the rise of mobile phone usage in both India and Africa.
10. Andrew S. Grove, “Intel Keynote Transcript, Comdex Fall ‘96,” Intel, November 18, 1996, available at www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/ag111896.htm.
1. Cosmos Incogniti
1. Stan Davis, Future Perfect (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 5.
2. Ibid., 7.
3. Ibid., 92. Another path-breaking notion from this book, in the chapter “Mass Customizing” (138–190), inspired B. Joseph Pine II, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
4. In ibid., 102, Davis provides the equation.
VALUE OF A DELIVERABLE = INFORMATION / MASS,
citing Paul Hawken’s statement in The Next Economy (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 11: “The single most important trend to understand is the changing ratio between mass and information in goods and services.” See also Diane Coyle, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998).
5. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 11–20 in particular.
6. Anne Friedberg relates screens to the three dimensions of the Multiverse on the first page of The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 1 (italics removed): “The screen is a component piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways: a ‘virtual window’ that changes the materiality of built space, adding new apertures that dramatically alter our conception of space and (even more radically) of time.”
7. In cosmology, this term refers to the unproved (and unprovable) hypothesis that our known universe is one of many, each with its own set of distinct physical laws. Related more directly to using digital technology to create customer value, a company based in Mountain View, California, called Multiverse says its mission is to build a platform for companies to create particular virtual worlds, and eventually to have them interact with each other; see www.multiverse.net and www.mv-places.com.
8. We discuss this relationship between the real and the virtual at length in Chapter 12, “Third Spaces.”
9. Jane McGonigal, “Alternate Reality Gaming: ‘Life Imitates ARG,’” PowerPoint presentation created for the MacArthur Foundation Board of Directors, November 2004, available at Jane McGonigal, www.avantgame.com/writings.htm#PRESENTATION%20MEDIA.
10. In the end analysis, it doesn’t matter whether you call such experiences Reality or Warped Reality, and people will differ on their perceptions of particular experiences (even the same experience at different times). What matters is using the labels and the realms to innovate new offerings.
11. David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox … How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.
12. We discuss creating experiences that take advantage of both variables on either side of a dimension, and provide a model for thinking about it—the Experience Design Canvas—in Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction.”
2. Reality
1. We are not commenting here on authenticity as the new consumer sensibility, which the lead author did elsewhere—in James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2007), with particular focus on technology and economic offerings in Chapter 5, 81–94. Rather, our point here is simply that technology does not lessen the Reality-based nature of real life.
2. W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 28.
3. Ibid., 70 and 145.
3. Augmented Reality
1. “In the Driver’s Seat,” Time, www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1939342_1939430_1939727,00.html. Note that FanVision has since been reduced to a 6’ × 4’ palmprint with an even larger screen size than before.
2. Laurie Mallis, “Birth of the DIAD,” Upside: The UPS Blog, December 7, 2009, blog.ups.com/2009/12/07/birth-of-the-diad/.
3. Christine Perey, “Shopping with AR,” O’Reilly Radar, radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/shopping-with-ar.html. Although an interactive catalog that we can choose to browse or not browse whenever we want sounds intriguing, we do hope the world does not turn into a cluttered landscape of virtual billboards, instigating a battle among advertisers for the “virtual estate” that potentially lies in front of us, always.
4. David Pogue, “The Pogies: Best Ideas of the Year,” New York Times, December 30, 2010.
5. Sam Altman, “The Life Graph: You Are Your Location,” Wall Street Journal, March 11,2010, voices.allthingsd.com/20100311/the-life-graph-you-are-your-location/.
6. Gary Hayes, former director of Australia’s Laboratory for Advanced Media Production and founder of MUVEDesign in Sydney, Australia, provides a model for “16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models” on his blog, Personalizemedia, September 14, 2009, www.personalizemedia.com/16-top-augmented-reality-business-models.
7. “About Medtronic Surgical Navigation Systems,” Medtronic, www.medtronic.com/for-healthcare-professionals/products-therapies/spinal-orthopedics/surgical-navigation-imaging/surgical-navigation-systems/index.htm.
8. See T. C. Browne and Mike Donfrancesco, “Using Motion Control to Guide Augmented Reality Manufacturing Systems,” Motion Control Technology, nasatech.com/motion/features/feat_1007.html.
9. Chris Baker, “Found: Artifacts from the Future,” Wired, 16.01, January 2008, 168.
10. Kristina Grifantini, “GM Develops Augmented Reality Windshield,” Technology Review Blog, March 17, 2010, www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24936/?nlid=2828&a=f.
11. Columnist David Pogue, in “Apps We Wish We Had,” New York Times, July 15, 2010, asked his Twitter followers what, you might have guessed, apps they wished they had, and “one hugely popular category was ‘Shazam for other things,’” like movies and TV.
12. “RJDJ,” iTunes Preview, itunes.apple.com/us/app/rjdj/id290626964?mt=8.
13. See Takayuki Hoshi, Masafumi Takahashiy, Kei Nakatsumaz, and Hiroyuki Shinoda, “Touchable Holography,” www.alab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~siggraph/09/TouchableHolography/SIGGRAPH09TouchableHolography.pdf.
14. Kristina Grifantini, “Augmented-Reality Floor Tiling,” Technology Review Blogs, April 28, 2010, www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25114/?a=f.
15. Morgan Stanfield, “Hugh Herr: Beyond the Merely Human,” The O&P Edge, March 2010, www.oandp.com/articles/2010–03_08.asp.
16. Herr works hard on how his prosthetics look, not just how they function, for he fully believes that people will want to “augment their appearance, not just their performance”; quoted in Paul Hochman, “Bionic Legs, i-Limbs, and Other Super Human Prostheses You’ll Envy,” Fast Company, February 2010, 87.
17. This replaces an elbow ligament, such as on the throwing arm of Tommy John, the first professional athlete to undergo the operation successfully, with a tendon from elsewhere in the body.
18. See, for example, William Saletan, “The Beam in Your Eye: If steroids are cheating, why isn’t LASIK?” Slate, April 18, 2005, www.slate.com/id/2116858/.
19. In Stanfield, “Hugh Herr: Beyond the Merely Human,” Herr contends: “If the Paralympic committees do not ban advancements in technology, 100 years from now the jumping heights and running times and whatnot for the Paralympics will all be superior to that of the Olympics. It will make the Paralympics the preferred spectator sport—it will just be more exciting.”
20. See “Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense,” TED, www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html, and “About,” sixthsense, www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/.
21. See, for example, ibid., plus Norman Chan, “TED 2009: The Sixth Sense Is Actually a Minority Report-like Internet Interface,” MaximumPC, www.maximumpc.com/article/news/ted_2009_the_sixth_sense_actually_a_minorityreport_internet_interface.
22. “John Underkoffler points to the future of UI,” TED, www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html.
23. Keith Kelsen, Unleashing the Power of Digital Signage: Content Strategies for the 5th Screen (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2010), 219.
24. And not all of these technologies, whether software or hardware, necessarily work well enough to be useful, as is often the case with new technologies in their first release or two. As Mark Schatzker noted in a review of travel apps for Condé Nast Traveler, January 2011, 44, after actually using a number of them on a trip to Rome, “The problem is that we are in the early, heady days of travel apps and AR. It’s three seconds after the big bang, metaphorically speaking, and the universe is still jumbled and chaotic.”
25. If movies were the first screen, TV the second, personal computers the third, mobile phones and PDAs the fourth, and digital signage the fifth—see Kelsen, Unleashing the Power of Digital Signage—then consider the retina as the zeroth screen.
26. Few have also followed in the footsteps of Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto who helped found the Wearable Computers group at the MIT Media Lab, who has worn a computer that mediates his vision since the early 1980s. See Steve Mann with Hal Niedzviecki, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001). Mann believes his “Mediated Reality” differs from Augmented Reality, as least as it was thought of at the time, but it readily fits within the parameters of this realm.
27. Quoted in Liz Karagianis, “Climbing Higher,” SPECTRVM, Fall 2010, 5.
4. Alternate Reality
1. Jane McGonigal, “The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming,” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007), 251–2. The name I Love Bees derived from the point of first contact: a jar of honey a few prominent people received in the mail containing letters that spelled the title phrase, which sent people to the supposed beekeeping site www.ilovebees.com, at which something was obviously not right (an effect that still remains active long after the game was completed, at least as of our last access).
2. See “Alternate Reality Games,” Sean Stewart, www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/. A great resource on ARGs can be found in Adam Martin, Brooke Thompson, and Tom Chatfield, editors, “2006 Alternate Reality Games White Paper,” The IGDA Alternate Reality Games SIG, archives.igda.org/arg/resources/IGDA-AlternateReality Games-Whitepaper-2006.pdf.
3. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in Noah Wardrop-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, editors, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 128.
4. See McGonigal, “The Puppet Master Problem,” and “A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play,” Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) “Level Up” Conference Proceedings, November 2003, www.avantgame.com/MCGONIGAL%20A%20Real%20Little%20Game%20DiGRA%202003.pdf.
5. “Games Now Playing,” ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network, www.argn.com/now_playing/.
6. Note that such elements add a degree of material substance, or Matter, to the experience. As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Cosmos Incogniti,” experiences often bleed into other realms, adding elements of other variables than the defining ones for that realm. This will be fully explored in Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction,” with Alternate Reality as a particular example, as experiences within it seem to permeate boundaries more readily than those of most other realms.
7. “Beyond the Fourth Wall,” Sean Stewart, www.seanstewart.org.
8. “Disney’s Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure,” Walt Disney World Resort, disneyworld.disney.go.com/parks/epcot/attractions/kim-possible/.
9. Markus Montola, “Games and Pervasive Games,” 12, in Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary Between Life and Play (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009).
10. Ibid., 12 (capitalization deleted), 14, and 13, respectively. Note that he and his fellow editors treat ARGs as a subset of pervasive games, not the other way around as we do. This view arises from thinking of pervasive gaming arising more from the live action role-playing games (LARPs) of Warped Reality, discussed in Chapter 5, “Warped Reality,” than from the computer games of Virtuality as discussed in this chapter. ARG designer Sean Stewart wrote the foreword, and on xiii he incorporates both approaches by defining pervasive games as “entertainments that leap off the board, console or screen and into your real life.”
11. SCVNGR, www.scvngr.com.
12. Quoted in David Segal, “Just Manic Enough: Seeking the Perfect Entrepreneur,” New York Times, September 19, 2010.
13. “LocoMatrix—GPS gaming for everyone,” LocoMatrix, www.locomatrix.com.
14. Ibid. See also the “active urban games” of Encounter, which asks if you are “ready to jump into the world of real adventures?” at en.cx.
15. “Welcome to Geocaching,” Geocaching—The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site, www.geocaching.com.
16. “Team Building Events,” geoteaming, geoteaming.com.
17. “What’s a GoCar?” GoCar Tours, www.gocartours.com/pages/what-is-a-gocar.html.
18. “DigiWall—Takes fun to new heights!” DigiWall, www.digiwall.se/experience/.
19. Tom Chatfield, Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), 52. He goes on to add, “This is true of all art and media to some extent.”
20. Gary Hayes, “Future of Location Based Augmented Reality Story Games,” Personalizemedia, October 25, 2010, www.personalizemedia.com/future-of-location-based-augmented-reality-story-games.
21. “timescope (2005),” ART+COM, www.artcom.net/index.php?option=com_acprojects&page=6&id=38&Itemid=115&details=0&lang=en.
22. Peter Wayner, “When All the World’s a Staged Game,” New York Times, November 11, 2009.
23. “Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World,” TED, www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html.
24. See World Without Oil at www.worldwithoutoil.com.
25. “Superstruct FAQ,” Institute for the Future, www.iftf.org/node/2096.
26. Jane McGonigal, “Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality,” Harvard Business Review, February 2008, 29. Note that despite the reference here (and others elsewhere) to ARGs as a genre of “entertainment,” they are not true entertainment experiences marked by passive-absorption, but more escapist experiences in which the individual is actively immersed. The best of them, for most players, surely hit the “sweet spot” between the four aspects of experiences discussed briefly in Chapter 13, “From Design to Deployment,” and in detail in B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, updated edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), Chapter 2, 41–64.
27. McGonigal, ibid. See her full-length treatment of this topic, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: The Penguin Press HC, 2011).
28. This point is further made by David Edery and Ethan Mollick, Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2009), 127: “ARGs possess qualities that make them uniquely powerful for increasing the ability of employees and companies to deal with unusual events. First, ARGs are interwoven with reality—players interact with the ARG using the same tools that they use every day…. ARGs also unfold over long periods, allowing players to experience a scenario from the first day through final resolution. Committing a little time each day to an ongoing ARG allows employees to effectively train while they work. And, most important, a good ARG is both fun and deeply immersive, creating a believable world in which individuals want to solve problems and resolve mysteries. A good ARG can lead entire teams to voluntarily train themselves and push their co-workers to improve.”
29. Construction equipment also provides a great (and play-full) consumer experience at Dig This in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, “the first ever heavy equipment play arena in the United States”; see Dig This, www.digthis.info/#Home.
30. For a discussion of how many organizations of learning use ARGs, see “ARGs in institutions: museums, libraries, schools, and beyond,” Jeff Watson, remotedevice. net/blog/args-in-institutions.
5. Warped Reality
1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 66.
2. Ibid., 67.
3. “List of historical reenactment groups,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_reenactment_groups.
4. For a great discussion of LARPs and other such imaginary realms, including some virtual, see Ethan Gilsdorf, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2009).
5. Unfortunately for this golfer (Joe), the course’s website at www.oakhurstlinks.com indicates it is no longer open to the public since 2007. We still love it as an example.
6. Peter Laundy, “That’s it! Rocketing new business ideas into implementation,” Doblin, unpublished essay.
7. See “Historical Preenactment Society,” Facebook, www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18669064520.
8. “What Is Vintage Base Ball,” Vintage Base Ball Association, www.vbba.org/Main/What%20Is%20Vintage%20Base%20Ball.htm.
9. Doris Kearns Goodwin, cited in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., editor, The Quotable Baseball Fanatic (New York: The Lyons Press, 2000), 137.
10. Christopher Caldwell, “Games prey on your mind,” Financial Times, March 12, 2010. The quotes are from problem gamblers cited by Natasha Dow Schüll in “Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 597, 2005, 65–81.
11. Sally Harrison-Pepper, Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York’s Washington Square Park (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 71.
12. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, quoted in Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello, Performance in Postmodern Culture (Madison: Coda Press, 1977), 33.
13. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, The Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 2–3.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. Aaron M. Sackett, Leif D. Nelson, Tom Meyvis, Benjamin A. Converse, and Anna L. Sackett, “You’re Having Fun When Time Flies: The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression,” Psychological Science, November 30, 2009, pss.sagepub. com/content/early/2009/11/25/0956797609354832.full.pdf+html.
16. “Time flew by … I must have been enjoying myself,” BPS Research Digest, January 27, 2010, bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/01/time-flew-by-i-must-have-been-enjoying.html.
17. In the story of Somewhere in Time (1980), based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), playwright Richard Collier (played by the late Christopher Reeve) goes back in time to meet, and then falls in love with, the beautiful actress Elise McKenna (played by the beautiful actress Jane Seymour). The time travel is accomplished more or less by sheer force of will within surroundings that completely recreate the past timeframe. The climax of the movie occurs when Richard pulls out of his pocket a single, solitary penny from the present day, which destroys the illusion and brings him back to the present day. Experience designers should similarly look after every single, solitary detail in staging their experiences lest belief be destroyed.
6. Virtuality
1. “Colossal Cave Adventure,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure. This reproduces the exact spacing (within lines, such as the extra space after “BUILDING,” and across lines, such as the extra line after the computer game’s response). The only user input here are the three commands, “.RUN ADV11,” “YES,” and “GO IN.”
2. The level of agency in the Colossal Cave Adventure is still pretty primitive, limited as it is to simple choices that branch off in different directions. In “Response,” in Noah Wardrop-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, editors, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 314, Brenda Laurel says of interactive fiction in general, “There is something deeply unsatisfying about the lack of significance in one’s actions as a player; that is, the player knows that he/she is merely selecting one of many preordained ‘pathways’ and its therefore exercising no more agency than a rat running a maze. To the discerning player, branching architectures lack vitality in the same way as hypertexts.”
3. It seems to us that not all Virtuality-based experiences are interactive; movies and books, for example, and at least some virtual art are esthetic or entertainment experiences, and hence passive in nature, which also lessens their agency.
4. Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and NewMedia Like Real People and Places (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.
5. Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2000), Book VII, 177–202.
6. Henry Jenkins makes this point in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person, 118–130, as does Nicole Lazzaro, in “Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story,” XEODesign, www.xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf, 4, who notes that immersion is often created with less than full fidelity, as “ambiguity, incompleteness, and detail combine to create a living world.”
7. Visual representation is a two-edged sword, of course. Sometimes, as with reading, we are better left to our own imagination than to have images made explicit, which can impair or stunt that imagination. On the other hand, sometimes images can fulfill our imagination, letting it bloom and take flight.
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, from The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; originally published in 1817), 314.
9. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 110.
10. Astute readers will note the high degree of similarity between this discussion and the section “Create Belief” in James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2007), 108–110, from which it is borrowed and edited. This shows the tight connection between Virtuality and what we call there Fake-real offerings, offerings that create a fake reality—a Virtuality—by creating belief.
11. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in “Tree and Leaf” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 73 and 60, respectively. Note that Tolkien calls such story-makers “sub-creators” because they create in the image (and imagination) of the Lord of Creation, creating worlds secondary to the world of Reality.
12. Although many businesses have given up on Second Life in particular, as a consumer experience it continues to chug along nicely, thank you. According to Erik Sass, “Second Life Chugs Along,” The Social Graf, July 29, 2010, available at www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=132912&nid=117095, active users “increased from about 25,000 in 2005 to roughly 700,000 in 2009–2010” but more importantly they are spending even more time and money on the site.
13. For understanding the nature of virtual worlds in general, and Second Life in particular, and why so very many people spend so very many hours there, we highly recommend Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
14. Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7. For more on time and attention as the currency of experiences, see Gilmore and Pine, Authenticity, 172–177, and David W. Norton and B. Joseph Pine II, “Unique experiences: disruptive innovations offer customers more ‘time well spent,’” Strategy & Leadership, vol. 37, no. 6, 2009, pp. 4–9.
15. Elizabeth Olson, “For FarmVille Players, a Crop from a Real Organic Farm,” New York Times, July 15, 2010.
16. One key to staying in flow, well understood in gaming but not so much in other aspects of Virtuality, is sub-second response time. Anything but very rapid response time takes us out of what we’re doing, destroys our concentration, and gets us thinking (either about the lack of response or other things on our mind). See the IBM white paper, “The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time,” by Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani, GE20–0752-0, November 1982, also available at www.vm.ibm.com/devpages/jelliott/evrrt.html.
17. Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life, 129.
18. “Globe Genie,” Joe McMichael, web.mit.edu/~jmcmicha/www/.
19. See “Projects,” CyArk, archive.cyark.org/project-world.
20. Michael Kimmelman, “Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks,” New York Times, November 4, 2009.
21. Although virtual, it is a real embassy, inaugurated simultaneously in both SL and RL on May 22, 2007; see “Virtual Embassy—Maldives,” Diplomacy Island, www.diplomacy.edu/DiplomacyIsland/Embassies/display.asp?Topic=Maldives.
22. In Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization: Managing in the Wake of Reengineering, Globalization, and Overwhelming Technological Change (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 103–8, Bob Johansen points out the need to design work spaces for Same time/Different time and Same place/Different place. It seems Same matter/Different matter should also be considered, which we could equate to Real person/Avatar.
23. See “CityOne,” IBM INNOV8, www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html. Note that Smarter Planet is a Mirrored Virtuality initiative enabling companies to use sensors to track their activities and the effect of those activities on the world.
24. Quoted in Steve Silberman, “The War Room,” Wired, September 2004, 155.
25. See “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Assessment and Treatment (PTSD),” Institute for Creative Technologies, ict.usc.edu/projects/ptsd/C45, and Benedict Carey, “Virtual Healing for the Real World,” New York Times, November 23, 2010.
26. Silberman, “The War Room,” 154.
27. “Institute for Creative Technologies,” USC Institute for Creative Technologies, ict.usc.edu.
28. “America’s Army Medic Training Helps Save a Life,” America’s Army, forum.americasarmy.com/viewtopic.php?t=271086.
29. James Glanz and Alan Schwarz, “From the ‘Avatar’ Playbook, Pro Teams Adopt 3-D Imaging,” New York Times, October 3, 2010.
30. Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll, “Leadership’s Online Labs,” Harvard Business Review, May 2008, 66.
31. Karl M. Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll, Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration (San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2010), 19.
32. Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), vii.
33. Ibid, 5.
34. Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, and Sander Duivestein bring this conversational and connecting aspect of the Web together as “the glorious age for Me-Media,” in Me the Media: Rise of the Conversation Society: Past, Present and Future of the Third Media Revolution (Bariet, The Netherlands: VINT Research Institute of Sogeti, 2009), 12, also available at www.methemedia.com/download/.
35. Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001, with the first edition published in 1997), 23–24. She was actually citing awed Victorians who believed that the telegraph meant “the annihilation of space and time.” Ah, the good old days.
36. David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 2002), 24–5.
37. Ibid., 164, Weinberger notes that “words have always built worlds, just as they build the Web,” and encourages his readers on 164–5 to dive into Huckleberry Finn: “Now you’re in the world of a fourteen-year-old boy floating down the Mississippi on a raft. The sky, the clouds, the sound of the river, the way a campfire carves out a warm spot in a moonless night, all of this becomes more present to you than the world your body is occupying as you read. The clang of the phone feels like it’s calling you back from another world. Words are Matrix-like in their ability to create a world. And because the world that words build is constructed entirely out of meanings, not atoms, the meanings can’t slide off that world.”
38. Anne Friedberg makes the same point in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 7–12, noting that the term long predates the rise of digital technology. Friedberg, 10, quotes Brian Massumi, in “Line Parable for the Virtual (On the Superiority of the Analog),” in John Beckmann, editor, The Virtual Dimension (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 309: “Nothing is more destructive for the thinking of the virtual than equating it with the digital. All arts and technologies envelop the virtual, in one way or another.” Massumi, 306, asserts that “imagination is the mode of thought most precisely suited to this vagueness of the virtual,” and Friedberg herself, 11, adds that “once the term ‘virtual’ is free from its enforced association with the ‘digital,’ it can more accurately operate as a marker of an ontological, not a media-specific, property”; that is, as its own independent dimension of experience.
39. In “Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination,” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, vol. 1, no. 1, July 2008, 2, Maria Beatrice Bittarello also asserts (citing others before her) that “virtual worlds have always existed in literature, religion, and art.”
40. Pierre Lévy, translated by Robert Bononno, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Plenum Trade, 1998), 47.
41. Ibid., 51.
42. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 110.
43. Celia Pearce and Artemesia (her avatar), Communities at Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 20.
44. In addition to our own research and experiences, these two lists of attributes draw from ones given in Pearce, ibid, 18–20; Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World, 45–62; Reeves and Read, Total Engagement, 27–29 and 61–90; and Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 71–90 and 126–129.
45. The possibilities here are discussed in Chapter 7, “Augmented Virtuality.”
46. “The ultimate game gear,” The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 8, 2007, 13.
7. Augmented Virtuality
1. See—and we do mean go to the Web and see it—“AR Business Card,” Augmatic, augmatic.co.uk/vid2.html.
2. American Heart Association and Nintendo, activeplaynow.com.
3. “Toy Island Partners with EA to Develop Innovative Sporting Goods,” Toy Island, www.toyisland.com/press_release_ea.cfm.
4. Reena Jana, “The (Game) Doctor Is In,” BusinessWeek, March 3, 2008, 70.
5. “Boy racers,” The Economist, January 7, 2006, 56.
6. Quoted in Viv Bernstein, “Simulated Racing Gives a Real Advantage to Drivers,” New York Times, March 4, 2007.
7. Quoted in video, “Virtual Reality made easy,” Product, www.ps-tech.com/product.
8. Dom Nguyen, “EyeToy Takes Off,” Wired, August 2004, 60.
9. Respectively, all from the New York Times: Ashlee Vance, “With Kinect, Microsoft Aims for a Game Changer,” October 23, 2010; David Pogue, “Invitation to Play, and Sweat,” November 4, 2010; and Seth Schiesel, “A Home System Leaves Hand Controls in the Dust,” November 4, 2010.
10. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003; originally published in 1876), 19–20.
11. Adam L. Penenberg, “Everyone’s a Player,” Fast Company, December 2010–January 2011, 140.
12. Quoted in Steve Lohr, “Computers That See You, Read You and Even Tell You to Wash,” New York Times, January 2, 2011.
13. Jaron Lanier, “On the Threshold of the Avatar Era,” Wall Street Journal, October 23–24, 2010.
14. Ibid.
15. Claire Cain Miller, “Technology Designers Focus on the Fingertips,” The International Herald Tribune, September 2, 2010, and Tom Simonite, “T. Scott Saponas, 29: Detecting Complex Gestures with an Armband Interface,” Technology Review, September/October 2010, 49, respectively.
16. See “Gallery,” OpenKinect, openkinect.org/wiki/Gallery.
17. White paper, “Harnessing Human Touch,” Immersion, 1, www.immersion.com/docs/harnessing-human-touch.pdf.
8. Physical Virtuality
1. Give up? We discuss the unlimited nature of LEGO building bricks in the Afterword, “To Infinity and Beyond.”
2. For a resource on extending CAD with Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and on to an entire digital factory, see Yves Coze, Nicolas Kawski, Torsten Kulka, Pascal Sire, Philippe Sottocasa, and Jaap Bloem (editors), Virtual Concept > Real Profit with Digital Manufacturing and Simulation (Bariet, The Netherlands: Dassault Systèmes and Sogeti, 2009).
3. Quoted in “A factory on your desk,” The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 5, 2009, 27.
4. Quoted in Ashlee Vance, “A Technology Sets Inventors Free to Dream,” New York Times, September 14, 2010.
5. Susan Smith, “3D Printing Lets FigurePrints Play Outside the Game,” Desktop Engineering, March 13,2008, available at www.zcorp.com/documents/216_2008–0313-Desktop%20Eng-3DP%20Lets%20Figureprints%20Play%20Outside.pdf.
6. Deeplocal, www.deeplocal.com.
7. Cited, if not necessarily quoted, in “Cyber Grand Prix: Wieden + Kennedy for Nike’s ‘Chalkbot,’ DDB Sweden for VW’s ‘Fun Theory’ …,” mikidevic’s posterous blog, June 24, 2010, mikidevic.posterous.com/cyber-grand-prix-wieden-kennedy-fornikes-cha.
8. Spencer Morgan, “Scent Branding Sweeps the Fragrance Industry,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 16, 2010, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_26/b4184085987358_page_2.htm.
9. The field was created by physical chemist Hervé This; see “How Molecular Gastronomy Works,” HowStuffWorks, www.howstuffworks.com/molecular-gastronomy.htm/printable.
10. See Daniel L. Cohen, Jeffrey I. Lipton, Meredith Cutler, Deborah Coulter, Anthony Vesco, and Hod Lipson, “Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production,” Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF’09), August 3–5 2009, available at ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/SFF09_Cohen1_0.pdf. A summary of the research paper with pictures of sample output can be found at “Printing Food,” Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory, ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/node/194.
11. “Making a bit of me,” The Economist, February 20, 2010, 77–8.
12. Quoted in “Organovo Develops First Commercial 3D Bio-Printer for Manufacturing Human Tissue and Organs,” News, www.organovo.com/news/press/17.
13. Stan Davis, Future Perfect (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 138–190. Davis did so in the chapter immediately after the one entitled “No-Matter” that inspired me (Joe) to conceive of the Multiverse. Long before that, however, Davis inspired my own book on this subject of Mass Customization, and the two concepts converge here in Physical Virtuality. (If I ever run out of ideas, Davis had three other chapters plus an Aftermath and Beforemath in that seminal book.)
14. B. Joseph Pine II, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
15. The decreasing number of exemplars in each category is roughly indicative of the decreasing number of total companies mass customizing up the Progression of Economic Value, including none in transformations that we know of.
16. Quoted in Mikal Belicove, “Mass Customizers Hope for 8 Million Facebook Impressions,” Entrepreneur Daily Dose, August 5, 2010, blog.entrepreneur.com/2010/08/mass-customizers-hope-for-8-million-facebook-impressions.php.
17. “All Milk or Sugar Products,” MilkOrSugar Custom Shopping, www.milkorsugar.com/custom_made_products.
18. Commodities, being fungible, cannot be materially changed (merely refined or processed) and thus cannot be customized. If it is tangible and you can customize it, it qualifies as a good.
19. Configurator Database, www.configurator-database.com.
20. See “Visual Configurator: The Killer App for Mass Customization,” Scene7, available at www1.scene7.com/registration/s7visconfigwp.asp?src=Scene7VC_WP_blog.
21. “Rickshaw Bag Customizer,” RickshawBagworks, www.rickshawbags.com/customize/custom-bag.
22. Hanulneotech, www.arhunt.com.
23. Quoted in Joey Seiler, “Ridemakerz, Now in Open Beta, Making the Virtual Real,” EngageDigital, April 2, 2009, www.engagedigital.com/2009/04/02/ridemakerz-now-in-open-beta-making-the-virtual-real.
24. Joann Muller, “How to Build A Mountain,” Forbes, October 27, 2003, 87.
25. Quoted in ibid.
26. “About Us,” Ponoko, www.ponoko.com/about/the-big-idea.
27. “Sign up,” Shapeways, www.shapeways.com/register.
28. Clive Thompson, “A One-of-a-Kind Revolution,” Wired, March 2009, 34.
29. Tim O’Reilly, “The Significance of Threadless.com,” O’Reilly Radar, radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/the-significanc.html.
30. Homaro Cantu calls his inkjet printer modified to print edible paper a “ ‘food replicator’ in homage to Star Trek,” according to Laura Goodall and Sandrine Ceurstemont, “Futuristic Food,” FirstScience, www.firstscience.com/home/articles/technology/futuristic-food_1734.html.
31. Quoted in Kevin Maney, “Physics genius plans to make ‘Star Trek’ replicator a reality,” USA Today, June 14, 2005.
32. “Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs,” TED, www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html.
33. Neil Gershenfeld, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 4. We return to the notion that the universe literally might be a computer in Chapter 12, “Third Spaces.”
34. Bruce Sterling, “The Dream Factory,” Wired, December 2004, 88.
35. Quoted in Clive Thompson, “The Dream Factory,” Wired, September 2005, 129. As you can tell, Wired magazine positively loves Physical Virtuality. In a piece not entitled “The Dream Factory,” editor in chief Chris Anderson writes (“Atoms Are the New Bits,” Wired, February 2010, 64): “All these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world. In short, atoms are the new bits.”
36. “Programmable Matter,” Defense Sciences Office, www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/physci/newphys/program_matter/index.htm.
37. Gershenfeld, Fab, 42.
38. “Fab Academy Sites,” Fab Academy, fabacademy.org/index.php/fab-academy-sites.
39. Highly personal, not “personalized.” Personalization, properly understood, is a subset of customization. Think of monogrammed towels or cuffs, custom-printed T-shirts, and the like; all take a standard, off-the-shelf product and then personalize it to the individual. It is cosmetic customization, one of four different types, where the function of the offering remains standard while the outward representation of it is customized; see James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, “The Four Faces of Mass Customization,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 75, no. 1, January/February 1997, 91–101.
40. Quoted in Thompson, “The Dream Factory.”
41. This model of the four stages in the evolution of business competition—with Continuous Invention a fifth stage mapped back onto Invention at a higher level—can be found most fully in B. Joseph Pine II, “You’re Only As Agile As Your Customers Think,” Agility & Global Competition, vol. 2, no. 2, Spring 1998, 24–35. It was originally developed by Bart Victor and Andrew C. Boynton; see their Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization’s Internal Growth and Profitability (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998) as well as B. Joseph Pine II, Bart Victor, and Andrew C. Boynton, “Making Mass Customization Work,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 71, no. 5, September–October 1993, 108–119.
42. Gershenfeld, Fab, 17.
43. Some of these examples are from Rhymer Rigby, “Fancy a Duff Beer? The real market for fake brands,” Financial Times, August 23, 2010.
44. Quoted in Jennifer Reingold, “Weird Science,” Fast Company, May 2006, 49.
45. Josh Dean, “Saul Griffith’s House of Cool Ideas,” Inc., February 2010, 75.
9. Mirrored Virtuality
1. David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.
2. Wade Roush, “Second Earth,” Technology Review, July/August 2007, 40. An expanded version of the article is available at www.technologyreview.com/communications/18911/page1/.
3. Twinity, www.twinity.com/en.
4. Sean Koehl, “From the labs: Virtual Yellowstone in ScienceSim,” Intel Software Network, January 25, 2010, software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/01/25/from-the-labs-virtual-yellowstone-in-sciencesim/.
5. Anand Giridharadas, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis,” New York Times, March 14, 2010.
6. Roush, “Second Earth,” 41.
7. See Gelertner, Mirror Worlds, 6 and 22 in particular.
8. Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 5.
9. Google Flu Trends, www.google.org/flutrends/.
10. “How does this work?” Google Flu Trends, www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html.
11. Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer, Mark S. Smolinski, and Larry Brilliant, “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data,” Nature, 457, 1012–1014, available at www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature07634.html.
12. www.google.com/trends and www.google.com/insights/search/#, respectively.
13. Christopher Caldwell, “Government by search engine,” Financial Times, October 16–17, 2010.
14. Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian, “Predicting the Present with Google Trends,” ii, static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/googleblogs/pdfs/google_predicting_the_present.pdf.
15. “Products,” Ambient Devices, www.ambientdevices.com/cat/products.html.
16. Trendsmap, trendsmap.com.
17. At the exact time of the first draft of this chapter—11: 36AM on Friday morning, July 23, 2010—the particularly hot term in Minnesota is #smbmsp, the Twitter tag for Social Media Breakfast—Minneapolis/Saint Paul, which this morning conducted a session on the topic of “Small Business Gets Social” at Deluxe Corporate Headquarters in Shoreview. Ibid. and Social Media Breakfast—Minneapolis/Saint Paul, smbmsp.ning.com (both accessed, naturally, at 11:36AM on July 23, 2010).
18. In an extra sidebar to Roush’s article online, available at www.technologyreview.com/communications/18911/page7/, Gelernter says that when he wrote the book, “the response was, ‘Let’s get serious. We know you’re an imaginative guy, and it’s an interesting book because it’s about effective programming tools, but the general framework was crazy.’” But that was before the rise of the World Wide Web. Gelernter says now he was being too conservative: “Not that the web was anything like mirror worlds in detail. But there was one very important thing—that institutions in the real world would be mirrored in the cybersphere, that I would be able to visit a software version of the DMV or the hospital or the university—and the web really did do that.”
19. Peter Cashmore, “10 Web trends to watch in 2010,” CNN.com, www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html.
20. “ ‘Nowism’: Why currency is the new currency,” trendwatching.com’s November 2009 Trend Briefing, trendwatching.com/trends/nowism/.
21. Quoted in Clive Thompson, “Live in the Moment,” Wired, October 2009, 46. Elsewhere, in “Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning of Ambient Streams,” EdoSegal.com, www.edosegal.com/?p=15, Segal says that real-time search is a misnomer and argues for what he calls “ambient streams”: “These are streams of information bubbling up in realtime, which seek us out, surround us, and inform us. They are like a fireplace bathing us in ambient infoheat. I believe that users will not go to a page and type in a search in a search box. Rather the information will appear to them in an ambient way on a range of devices and through different experiences.”
22. Gina Kolata, “New Tools for Helping Heart Patients,” New York Times, June 22, 2010.
23. Gary Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 2, 2010.
24. See The Quantified Self, www.quantifiedself.com.
25. Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life.” Note that in the article the middle paragraph here actually came before the first paragraph.
26. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (New York: Dutton, 2009), 13.
27. Ibid., 23. Many argue that with all of us leaving a trail of bits online, we also need a way of digitally forgetting the past. See in particular Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Rosen, “The End of Forgetting,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 25, 2010; and Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, (In)Visible: Learning to Act in the Metaverse (New York: SpringerWeinNewYork, 2008), which refers to this possibility as a “kind of universal prosthetic memory.” Bell himself, 20, states his digital record is for his personal use, recognizing the need for sharing personal information “cautiously, considering the trustworthiness of the individual recipients.” “Public publishing,” he continues, “is only for what I am glad to have the world associate with me—forever.”
28. Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, 52. Interestingly, on pp 185 and 190–193 Gelernter writes of “Chronicle Streams,” which his student Eric Freeman extended into the concept of “lifestreams”; see Lifestreams Project Home Page, cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html.
29. Nancy Gioia, Ford’s director of hybrid-vehicle programs, as quoted in Matthew Dolan, “Ford Device Stretches Gallons,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2008. In Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), 161, Tom Chatfield points out the efficacy of gaming to the design of dashboards: “Because everything can be visualized and managed in real time, it allows people the kind of control over—and understanding of—complicated real environments that they have previously extended to virtual ones. If there’s one thing that games have demonstrated over the last thirty years, it’s that people have an extraordinary aptitude for managing the use of resources within real-time systems, so long as they have suitably clear data, visuals and interfaces—something the games industry has an unrivalled expertise in providing.”
30. “Empathica Launches Mobile Reporting Solution for Multi-Unit Retailers,” Retail Customer Experience, www.retailcustomerexperience.com/article/177886/Empathica-launches-mobile-reporting-solution-for-multi-unit-retailers.
10. Multiverse Excursion
1. Famously but elusively. We cannot find the original source of the quote, although it is all over the Web and you can find it without an original citation in “Carver Mead,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead. Our first exposure to it, also without citation, was atop the preface to George Gilder, Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 11. Not coincidentally, Gilder’s book is a wonderful explication of the capabilities of digital technology past, present, and future. Well, “future” from the perspective of 1989 in the hands of a master prognosticator.
2. Michael S. Schmidt, “To Pack a Stadium, Provide Video Better Than TV,” New York Times, July 28, 2010.
3. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” quoted in The Four Quartets, Wikiquote, en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Four_Quartets.
4. We note that one electronics retailer, Best Buy, partnered with Shopkick on its app that identifies consumers as they walk in, and then offers them discounts; see Jefferson Graham, “Shopkick app can lead you to discounts and sales,” USA Today, August 11, 2010, www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2010–08-12-shopkick12_ST_N.htm. We did not include such functionality, because here we want to generate ideas that provide greater customer value, not commoditize ourselves through discounts.
5. Jena McGregor, “USAA’s Battle Plan,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 1, 2010, 40.
6. Apple’s iPod would be nothing without iTunes and Apple’s business agreements with the owners holding the rights to the music, for example. Getting the business model right plays no small role in Apple’s rise to become the largest provider of music to consumers. For more on business models, see Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), a book to which Kim contributed.
7. For example, focusing your attention on a specific human capability, such as sensing, or even more specific yet to seeing, tunes your thinking into a narrower set of specific possibilities likely to conjure up more robust ideas across multiple rounds. And on the flipside, once you have generated that great idea to improve seeing, consider the possibilities to capitalize on this new sensing capability to improve performing, linking, and organizing capabilities as well.
11. Offering Depiction
1. Quoted in Daniel Terdiman, “How ‘Avatar’ may predict the future of virtual worlds,” CNET, January 28, 2010, news.cnet.com/8301–13772_3–10443265-52.html. Paffendorf, one of the organizers of the Metaverse Roadmap mentioned in Chapter 12, “Third Spaces,” adds, “It seems like even in pure virtual worlds, you always get pulled back to real world references” and concludes, “The real world wins, so all the augmented reality things are going to be especially compelling, because they’re reality, but plus-plus.”
2. “Avatar (2009 film),” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film).
3. See “Gramophone Record,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_ record.
4. A record album sleeve or jacket is 12⅜ x 12⅜ inches, making it 153 square inches. A CD jewel case cover is just under twenty-five square inches.
5. “What’s New in iTunes?” Apple, www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/ (accessed May 21, 2010; it has changed since—as you might expect with something called “What’s New”—with some of these same words on various other iTunes pages).
6. In the meantime, seeking to reduce the dependence on a specialized place, Cisco intends to make it possible for anyone with HDTV to participate in its TelePresence setup; see Peter Burrows, “Innovator: Martin De Beer,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 17–23, 2010, 38.
7. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is in fact a small B2B practice, originally initiated by Professor Bart Victor of Vanderbilt University, where people examine their organizations, business models, and offerings by playing, seriously, with LEGO bricks. See “LEGO SERIOUS PLAY—Build Your Way to Better Business,” LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, www.seriousplay.com.
12. Third Spaces
1. Alex Hill, Matt Bonner, Jacob Schiefer, and Blair MacIntyre, “ClearWorlds: Mixed-Reality Presence through Virtual Clearboards,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 8, no. 3, July–September 2009, 56.
2. Bruce H. Thomas and Wayne Pickarski, “Through-Walls Collaboration” in ibid., 42.
3. Daniel Horn, Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Tahir Azim, Michael J. Freedman, and Philip Levis, “Scaling Virtual Worlds with a Physical Metaphor” in ibid., 50.
4. Joshua Lifton, Mathew Laibowitz, Drew Harry, Nan-Wei Gong, Manas Mittal, and Joseph A. Paradiso, “Metaphor and Manifestation—Cross-Reality with Ubiquitous Sensor/Actuator Networks” in ibid., 28.
5. Joseph A. Paradiso and James A. Landay, “Cross-Reality Environments” in ibid., 14–15.
6. We are of course inspired here by sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s coining of the term “third place,” a physical place set apart from home and work—such as pubs, taverns, cafes, and the like—where a person can interact with others he has come to know as members of the same community, in The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1997).
7. John Smart, Jamais Cascio, and Jerry Paffendorf, “Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web,” Acceleration Studies Foundation, 2007, www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf, 4. Intriguingly, the 2 × 2 at the heart of the Metaverse Roadmap includes Augmented Reality, Mirror Worlds, and Virtual Worlds in the exact same relationship to each other as in the Multiverse (with the No-Matter arrow turned directly toward you to form a 2 × 2 on its digital substance side), with the only difference being Lifelogging instead of our Alternate Reality. As briefly mentioned in Chapter 9, “Mirrored Virtuality,” we consider lifelogging to be a form of Mirrored Virtuality related to the “Quantified Self” and Gordon Bell’s concept of “Total Recall.”
8. See “YouTube Symphony Orchestra,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You Tube_Symphony_Orchestra. For the Carnegie Hall concert, see “Act One: YouTube Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie Hall,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueJcRmfweSM and “Act Two: YouTube Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie Hall,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cS653udPCM; for the mashup see “‘The Internet Symphony Global Mash Up,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC4FAyg64OI.
9. Seth Schiesel, “Tragedy and Comedy, Starring Pac-Man,” New York Times, July 16, 2010.
10. Seth Schiesel, “Motion, Sensitive,” New York Times, November 28, 2010.
11. Ibid.
12. Elizabeth Svoboda, “Cellphonometry,” Fast Company, November 2009, 60–62.
13. Sara Corbett, “Games Theory,” New York Times Magazine, September 19, 2010, 54–61, 66–70; see also “Games lessons,” The Economist, September 5, 2009, 86–87.
14. Brooks Barnes, “Disney Technology Tackles a Theme-Park Headache: Lines,” New York Times, December 28, 2010
15. This relates to Henry Jenkins’ concept of “transmedia storytelling.” In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95, he describes how a “transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.” Jesse Schell also provides a good discussion of transmedia storytelling, with at the end a set of principles for what encompasses them, in “Transmedia Worlds,” Slideshare, www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/transmedia-worlds-3656102, with the video here: transmythology.com/2010/11/14/jesse-schell-dust-or-magic-conference/. See also The Art of Game Design, 300–307.
16. See, for example, Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990). There is of course a fatal flaw with socially constructed realities (SCRs) and all such “there is no objective truth” worldviews. The fact that SCRs themselves are socially constructed means that there has to be something outside of SCRs that they are differentiated from, and so not all of the Universe can be said to be socially constructed. That’s just a specific instance of the philosophical fact that saying there is no objective truth makes a claim of objective truth, and therefore is self-defeating. Of course, there are those today who do have different beliefs about the rules of logic, but there’s no arguing with them.
17. We cannot, however, all go to the rainforest; in fact, if we did it would very soon cease being the authentic, pristine wilderness we want to experience in the first place, if it isn’t already. On this see the section “Nature Versus Nurture” in James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2007), 84–87. But we can all go on a Web-surfing expedition or take a virtual jungle tour to bring elements of the rainforest to us, and while, no, they can never replicate the experience of being there, they can give us enough of an appreciation to want to support endeavors to save it for posterity.
18. In Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, originally published in French by Éditions Galilée, 1981), 1, Jean Baudrillard regards simulacra (with Disneyland foremost among them) as representations with no referent, “models of a real without origin or reality.” However, all representations, simulations, and virtual creations still refer to what people have experienced in the real world to provide context for whatever flights of fancy on which they wish to take people. You can’t change the laws of physics, as Scottie often asserted on Star Trek, but even when a Virtuality experience does, it is recognized as a change, not a wholesale creation of something new. This is what Tolkien meant, as quoted in Chapter 6, “Virtuality,” when he used the term “sub-creator.” All of mankind’s creations are subordinate to the creation. Janie B. Cheaney affirms this in her discussion of the awe-inspiring movie Avatar, in “Reel beauty,” World, February 13, 2010, 30, when she says, “The truth is, everything in the movie was taken from real life and rearranged, enlarged, or color-enhanced. Every creator works from the original creation.”
19. Stephen Wolfram, renowned scientist and creator of the Mathematica program, most famously stated this view in his book A New Kind of Science (Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media, 2002). As he attests on his website, “Quick Takes on Some Ideas and Discoveries in A New Kind of Science,” wolframscience.com, wolframscience.com/reference/quick_takes.html:
In its recent history, physics has tried to use increasingly elaborate mathematical models to reproduce the universe. But building on the discovery that even simple programs can yield highly complex behavior, A New Kind of Science shows that with appropriate kinds of rules, simple programs can give rise to behavior that reproduces a remarkable range of known features of our universe—leading to the bold assertion that there could be a simple short program that represents a truly fundamental model of the universe, and which if run for long enough would reproduce the behavior of our world in every detail.
Earlier, University of Texas architecture professor Dr. Michael L. Benedikt concludes his article “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information,” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, vol. 1, no. 1, July 2008 (originally published in 1996), 19–20, by writing, “Finally, this is what cyberspace is about…. Even as the world we know becomes placeless … we must construct another one which we have not yet fully seen, a world in another image and from a material that is actually the universe’s oldest and only material: information itself.”
This idea was first proposed by physicist John Wheeler in his paper, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” presented at the Santa Fe Institute in 1989 and published in Wojciech H. Zurek, editor, Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990), 3–28. His pithy summary of the entire idea: “It from bit.”
And most recently, University of Oxford physics professor Vlatko Vedral, author of Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010), contends, according to “A Quantum Calculation,” The Economist, April 24, 2010, 81–2, “that bits of information are the universe’s basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer.” According to the article, “He argues that all of reality can be explained if readers accept that information is at the root of everything.” We do find this view intriguing, for it seems to apply Occam’s razor to the creation of the universe.
20. Virtuality not only underlies all our experiences of Reality but also life itself. As Hubert P. Yockey shows in Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ix–x, when James D. Watson and Francis Crick uncovered the structure of DNA as a double helix, they also discovered the digital underpinnings of life:
[Watson and Crick] discovered that there is a genetic message, recorded in the digital sequence of nucleotides in DNA, that controls the formation of protein and of course all biological processes. The message in the genetic information system is segregated, linear, and digital and can be measured in bits and bytes. Computer users will notice the isomorphism between the program in computer memories and the genetic message recorded in DNA…. The genetic information system is essentially a digital data recording and processing system.
21. As Paul Harris, development psychologist and Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, puts it in regard to child development, “The imagination is absolutely vital for contemplating reality, not just those things we take to be mere fantasy”; quoted in Shirley S. Wang, “The Power of Magical Thinking,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2009.
22. In a fascinating study of one Virtuality, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5, Tom Boellstorff asserts, “Second Life culture is profoundly human. It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been ‘virtual’ all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human ‘nature’ to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being. Culture is our ‘killer app’: we are virtually human.”
13. From Design to Deployment
1. Respectively: Nathan Shedroff, Experience Design 1 (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2001); Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003); Jesse Schell; The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008); Dan Saffer; Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2007); and David Lee King; Designing the Digital Experience: How to Use Experience Design Tools & Techniques to Build Websites Customers Love (Medford, New Jersey: CyberAge Books, 2008).
2. See Chapter 3, “The Show Must Go On,” in B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 64–105.
3. See Chapter 2, “Setting the Stage,” ibid., 41–64.
4. See Chapter 5, “Experiencing Less Sacrifice,” ibid., 123–143, as well as the previous chapter, “Get Your Act Together,” 107–122, on mass customizing.
5. See Chapter 6, “The Real/Fake Reality,” in James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2007), 95–114.
6. See Chapter 6, “Work Is Theatre,” in Pine & Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 153–179. At its simplest, this means providing an engaging storyline with a beginning, middle, and end. We prefer the more complicated but incredibly rich form known as the Freytag diagram, which is covered here on 160–162, but explicated best by Brenda Laurel in Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 81–92 in particular. It involves seven stages: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, and dénouement.
7. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15.
8. See, for example, Adam L. Penenberg, “Everyone’s a Player,” Fast Company, December 2010–January 2011, 135–141, and John Tierney, “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming,” New York Times, December 7, 2010.
9. In “Games Theory,” New York Times Magazine, September 19, 2010, 70, Sara Corbett quotes Paul Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol, as saying, “I think in 30 years’ time we will marvel that we ever tried to deliver a curriculum without gaming.” And in “The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind,” Games and Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2007, 169, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown conclude: “The model that virtual worlds provide offers a glimpse into the possibilities of what our classrooms might become: spaces where work and play, convergence and divergence, and reality and imagination intertwine in a dance where students grow to understand the importance of communities of practice and learn how to be the things they imagine.”
10. Nonetheless, in the Google Tech Talks presentation “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI, Amy Jo Kim provides five essential game mechanics for social media: collecting, earning points, feedback, exchanges, and customization.
11. Note that “aesthetics” here—the elements of beauty—differs from “esthetic” above in the hit-the-sweet-spot design principle; the latter applies to passive-immersive environments, using the architectural term, heavily influenced by Michael Benedikt, For an Architecture of Reality (New York: Lumen Books, 1987), 4, where he says that “in our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns.”
12. Schell, The Art of Game Design, 42–43. For the inciting incident of much of this application of gaming to learning, work, and life, see Schell’s presentation to the DICE 2010 conference, “Design Outside the Box,” G4, g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/. It should not be missed.
13. Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 189, citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Intrinsic Rewards and Emergent Motivation,” in Mark R. Lepper and David Greene, editors, The Hidden Costs of Rewards: New Perspectives on the Psychology of Human Motivation (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1978), 215. Schell echoes this element in the last of his one hundred lenses in The Art of Game Design, 461, “The Lens of Your Secret Purpose,” which says: “To make sure you are working toward your own true purpose, ask yourself the only question that matters: Why am I doing this?”
14. Although we hasten to note that there is little evidence that violent games turn otherwise sedate players into perpetrators of violence. All change happens at the margin, as economists like to say, so surely in some cases, at least, it has made a difference in the personalities and actions of certain players.
15. You can find a model for doing so, Here-and-Now Space, in Chapter 9 of Gilmore and Pine, Authenticity, 179–218. Kim was helpful in developing this model, particularly the steps to operationalize it.
16. We are inspired here by James G. March, who in “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” Organizational Science, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1991, 71, defines the two types of learning in organizations as “exploitation of old certainties” and “exploration of new possibilities.” Our next book together, Regenerative Management: Creating Persistent Advantage, will tackle the issues of this section for all companies, showing how to orchestrate exploration and exploitation together in order to thrive.
17. S. Craig Watkins and H. Erin Lee, “Got Facebook? Investigating What’s Social About Social Media,” The Young and the Digital, www.theyoungandthedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/watkins_lee_facebookstudy-nov-18.pdf.
18. William Powers, Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (New York: Harper, 2010) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, The Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2001).
19. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).
20. Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2008).
21. Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2008).
22. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), David Williamson Shaffer, How Computer Games Help Children Learn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See also John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, The Kids Are Alright: How the Gamer Generation Is Changing the Workplace (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006) and David Edery and Ethan Mollick, Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2009).
23. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 4–5.
24. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 4–5 and 7, respectively.
25. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 33 and 4, respectively. In a similar, albeit more prescriptive, vein, see Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (New York: OR Books, 2010).
26. Pine & Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 269–270.
27. This is the summary of Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 258. For the original, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in the Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
28. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). See also Pine & Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 153–164.
29. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 269.
30. Benedict Carey and John Markoff, “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot,” New York Times, July 11, 2010, and Anne Tergesen and Miho Inada, “It’s Not a Stuffed Animal, It’s a $6,000 Medical Device,” The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2010, respectively.
31. As Tom Boellstorff says in Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 156, “One of the most surprising and consistent findings of cybersociality research has been that virtual worlds can not only transform actual-world intimacy but create real forms of online intimacy…. Second Life residents often saw it as ‘an intimacy-making culture.’” Turkle, however, disputes this in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
32. Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009), 13.
33. Ibid, 21.
34. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 4 (capitalization of this section head removed).
Afterword
1. The Ultimate LEGO Book (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1999), 8.
2. Søren Eilers, Mikkel Abrahamsen, and Bergfinnur Durhuus, “A LEGO Counting problem,” Institut for Matematiske Fag, www.math.ku.dk/~eilers/lego.html. The professors show that the original LEGO number is off by four; the correct number is 102, 981, 504.
3. Ibid. This was calculated considering the efficiency level of their 2005 computer program.
4. Ibid. Their range of estimation lies between 78N and 191N.
5. All from “Company Profile: An introduction to the LEGO Group 2010,” LEGO, 8 and 20, cache.lego.com/upload/contentTemplating/AboutUsFactsAndFiguresContent/otherfiles/
download98E142631E71927FDD52304C1C0F1685.pdf.
6. Neither in Reality nor Virtuality can there be an actual collection of infinite objects (whether material or digital substances), nor an infinite progression of time (whether measured in millennia, centuries, years, seconds, or any other unit), nor an infinite expanse of space (whether measured in light-years, miles, feet, nanometers, or any other unit). Mathematician David Hilbert showed this with his concept now known as Hilbert’s Hotel; see “Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_hotel. For a good discussion of this and other ways in which actual infinities are impossible, see William Lane Craig, Apologetics: An Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), 75–81.
7. “Eternal,” The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. V, 417.