Tag: best of

  • 2021 Bests and Worsts

    2021 Bests and Worsts

     

    I drew up my list of Best and Worst for 2021 and to make it balanced, it has 3 on each side. Here we go:

    Best

    1. Meeting Sriya Chintalapalli.

    I count meeting Sriya as a golden moment of 2021.  I actually haven’t had long chats with her. But I was given a small heads-up for a student XR conference that I was supporting that a speaker was coming that was going to be amazing. I think the ‘knock socks off‘ phrase might have been used. I was under FERPA regulations to know that she needed extra protection at the conference and I volunteered to give it. That means I stood on the virtual stage with her, playing the role of direct tech support but also crowd control if necessary.

    But what did happen meant something much more to me.

    Sriya gave her presentation. It was a great topic and very forward looking. Then, she took questions from the audience. Because the topic was on brain-computer interfaces (BCI), it didn’t take long before questions of invasion of privacy questions came from what were obviously professors in the audience.  

    I’ve seen these verbal examinations before. I’ve seen them break college seniors and Master’s Degree students. It’s just enough questioning to find where the student does not know the answer. That’s the push point. Several men in the audience were going right for her, directly and academically.

    Standing on stage with her, without her knowing it, I would have thrown up a shield if she needed it and blocked those men from getting to her/embarrass her/humiliate her by making some excuse that we’d run out of time, audio wasn’t working, etc.

    But, she held the stage. She held her ground. More than once she said “The data doesn’t say.”  

    Good line! Don’t let them pin you where you have not staked a claim.  She’d been trained well to enter an academic fight.

    When she was done, I let out my breath.

    Were those men plants in the audience? Not sure. Maybe. Either way, my hackles were real.

    And the lesson for me that day was: if I can do anything to help women like Sriya…even if it is only shouting “Make a path!“, I will.  It’s very hard to be a woman in the technological sciences. The road ahead will shape her in ways I’m sorry to contemplate. May she always find a woman like me standing by, ready to help.  

    Please follow her. Great things are ahead.

    2. A small unheralded research paper, HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
    of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips.

    I was able to meet the first author, Pejman Sajjadi, at the IEEE VR conference in March/April 2021 in avatar form here. This small piece of research stayed in my mind all year as a great example of the piecemeal way that scientific research works its way slowly towards practitioners and teachers.
     

    The write up of this study is pay walled behind IEEE, I believe, and Pejman would be the first to point out the small sample size. Therefore, there was no fanfare and no social media on this paper. If you look at his research background, what you see is this paper is just one of several papers generated from one research event, so it’s pretty generic par-for-the-course research.
     
    Taking into account all those discount factors, this tiny study investigated something that teachers do really want to know:   
     
    Are expensive VR headsets worth it?
     
    The answer is no.
     
    There is much more to the no, of course, related to content, learning objectives, scalability, etc. But more so than ever in 2021, educators turned to VR as a more realistic mainstream learning choice. The price drop of the Oculus Quest 2 to $299 and further, the Facebook push for the work use of Workrooms to bring VR use directly into the workplace show that we are going to have to get more and more comfortable with VR headsets and quality will be a question.
     

     (Image source: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/)

    Quietly researched, small sample size, no social media presence.  
     
    But bit by bit, researchers are answering these questions. I hope teachers are listening to the work of Pejman.

    P. Sajjadi, J. Zhao, J. O. Wallgrün, P. C. La Femina and A. Klippel,
    “HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
    of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips,” 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2021, pp. 546-547, doi: 10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00155. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9419337

     

    3. Equal Entry and XR Women 

    It’s a tie! Both organizations work for similar goals: 
    • Equal Entry has a strong drive for accessibility and has a section of work dedicated just for VR, AR, and XR.
    • XR Women‘s mission is dedicated to getting women’s voices up on stage as part of the narrative about the ongoing and future directions of XR.  
    • Both organizations stay focused on their task and welcome listeners, newcomers, and allies.
    Both groups alike are working on accessibility into the coming metaverse for all.  I applaud their efforts.
    Now time for the worsts.  Is worsts a word?  You will notice a theme from the Bests that carries through.  Here it comes…

    Worst

    1. Not necessarily restricted to 2021 sadly, say the phrase “Women in XR” and you will likely get this image:

    Or this one.  That’s not even a woman on the right. #dehumanizing means you treat women like animals.

    Actually, as I prepped for this article, I went to find one screen capture of a woman in a short skirt playing Beat Saber so that I could use it as a example of a poor behavior.  I thought finding one image of a woman in a skirt would be hard. I had remembered seeing one.  
     
    Much to my shock and horror, it turns out….it was drop dead easy.  So easy, nearly EVERY image on YouTube for playing Beat Saber is of a young female scantily dressed.  Check it out:

    I counted ~9 images of women playing with either bare legs, bare midriffs, sports bras, etcs, for every 1 man.
    Think that’s a coincidence?  Oh no. It’s BY REQUEST.  Look video info at the bottom of this image I just posted above again.
     
     
    It says:
     
    “Song + Outfit per George T’s request! To request songs & outfits/costumes become a Patron at…”

    This woman is taking money to have herself videoed/green screened playing Beat Saber in a short skirt.  Don’t tell me that the Patron isn’t begging for that skirt to fly up at some point. I know what you can see through that black skirt by outline.  In these videos, women have not only lost body space control, they are selling it.

     
    It’s disgusting. And this is ALL OVER YouTube.  There’s a research project in there to count the views of Beat Saber videos without skirts versus those with.
    Remember that the Quest 2 was a major Christmas gift for 2021 and your daughters are now –January 2022– watching YouTube videos to learn how to get better at Beat Saber.  Is getting better at the game the only thing they are learning?
    Think that this is just about fun, though?  Really? Did you read what happened at late 2021 a technical conference ad?  Reminder: Major “Game” conference, no women speakers on the ad, and a sexbot prominently featured. This is what women in tech are facing when we “go to work.”

    Women have been getting groped at tech conferences during large standing-room only keynotes. It’s real that women feel less comfortable in HMDs because they give up body space control. 
     
    At any conference right now, by putting on a headset, women take a risk that men do not.

    2. Major immersive learning researcher responds to an accessibility question with “I don’t know why a blind person would ever use VR.”

    I was running tech support. I was on mute. I sputtered.  But the researcher’s mic was hot. The video caught that…I think. It’s out there.  
     
    But what does that matter if it’s on video or not, if the researcher truly thought that?
     
    I don’t even know what to do with that.
     
    Major. US. Immersive Learning Researcher.  
     
    😔
     
    By the way, for you, reader,  in answer to the question, contemplate this:

    Screenreader Experience of a Virtual Reality Conference by Rhea Althea Guntalili

    and  

    Virtual Reality in the Dark: VR Development for People Who Are Blind | Accessibility VR Meetup Recap by Aaron Gluck (YouTube link and transcript available at this link)

    3.  Microaggressions against women in the XR industry
     

    I left 3 organizations in 2021 and am no longer associated with them. It’s apparent now that I could not stand up for the rights of women and for accessibility in XR without being targeted myself.
     
    “A microaggression is a subtle behavior – verbal or non-verbal, conscious
    or unconscious – directed at a member of a marginalized group that has a
    derogatory, harmful effect. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist at Harvard
    University, first introduced the term microaggression in the 1970s. ” https://www.thoughtco.com/microaggression-definition-examples-4171853
     

    The last organization I left questioned if I was a dues-paying member, so they used an institutional rule to execute an exclusionary move.

    We’ve heard about headset straps that do not adjust for varying hair styles. Women and people with disabilities that are not recruited into research studies so that research results are invalidated when applied to major populations, conferences that not only host but advertise manels with sexbots, and the list keeps going already 7 days in 2022…
    😔
     
  • Best Avatars in XR

    Best Avatars in XR

     

    At a recent conference, I asked a panel for their opinion of best clothing/avatars in VR right now. To my surprise, one panelist answered “RecRoom”.

    I thought about her answer afterwards and realized that she was probably referring to the creativity that the avatars can wear many different add-ons in that platform. Users can each be very unique with what they purchase and wear in RecRoom.

    But also interesting in RecRoom is the fact that the base avatar is not gendered.  An avatar is made male, female, or other completely by the choice of clothing or add-ons. The base shape is exactly the same size (no difference for child or adult, same head, torso, and hands).

    Interesting choice…but I disagree for different reasons. I pick a different platform for a different reason altogether.  To me, it’s not about how the avatars look, it’s how the avatars move.

    NeosVR

    First place in my judgment of best avatars in XR in 2020 is NeosVR. (By November 2021, it appears to be now named just Neos.)

    NeosVR is a download and I found that I really needed help to set up an avatar.  So the entry point is really high on the difficulty scale.

     

    Spaces in NeosVR in 2020 could hold a maximum of about 40 users (somewhat low, now in 2021 compared to the competitors). Neos has a nice Discord Community and I recommend it.

    However, NeosVR has one feature in April 2020 that was ahead of the pack:

    Avatars could – in live time – impact OTHER avatars.  That feature barely exists as I write in November 2021.  I saw one avatar reach up and wiggle the ear of another avatar.  That’s not a script, program, animation, or pose ball—it was spontaneous and live.  Neither avatar user (as best as I can determine) was wearing a haptic suit (over the ears?) so that point is irrelevant.

    But the closest I’ve seen to this in other platforms so far is the fictional moment from Ready Player One when Art3mis touches Wade Watson on the chest and he’s wearing a haptic vest and “felt” it.  Of course, that’s all staged…touching a vest that is designed to be touched isn’t really news.

    If you’d like to dive down that rabbit hole, go ahead and read Ready Player One fully as the book because it goes “all the way” and I think provides a good commentary on body touching in VR.

    Spoiler alert: people reject it.

    There is another close item to this but…now I can’t find it (very typical for me). It is the grabbing and moving of fabric in real time in VR.  Again, NOT a program, not planned, not preset. It is spontaneous. So we are getting very close to this being in EVERY avatar…very close now.  We’ll barely remember the days when we could not do this.

     

    2nd place is a love/hate time with Sansar and their avatars.

    First, the hate. I hate that, in 2020, of the dozen or so default free avatars you could pick, the ONLY female avatar was scantily clad and her boobs deserved their own zip code.  Really.

     

    But now the love. Once I figured out how to change my avatar AND dress the clothes to fit her body, the avatar’s thighs jiggled!  Since we tend to see our avatars from behind as the default camera view, I was delighted to see my avatar run, dance, and jump with some real junk in the trunk.  It was awesome. Well done, Sansar.

    P.S. Worst avatars in XR?  Oy. I gotta say that the limited choices in both Engage and Virbela are tough to look at. 😕