Tag: Women

Dr. Ellie Sattler, Jurassic Park, and Narrative Plot. Or It Wasn’t About Dinosaurs.
It’s a rare moment when I can bring 3 themes into 1 post:
leadership, XR, and design. Also, I’m going to be personal. Believe it
or not, I’m not really personal on LinkedIn. Enthusiastic, yes. Personal, hardly.

Over the weekend, I wrote a gushing sentence to a friend that I
realized I’d never written down before: I became a Biology major in
college because of Dr. Ellie Sattler.

A mentor of mine once said writing is thinking. Writing that
sentence lead me to do a lot of thinking and reading about her character
and on the impact of the Jurassic Park (JP) movie. I’m not alone as a
woman in deciding to go further in STEM because of the Dr. Ellie Sattler
character. So huzzah all the Paleobotanists out there!

We have to time travel to talk about JP. In 1993, we’ve just BARELY
broken out of the 1980s. For the first time in STEM history, scientific
breakthroughs are being accomplished by teams instead of white men. Think: AIDS breakthroughs & the Human Genome Project. Teams means women included. Prior to this point, women were the “also rans” in science. Sisters. Mentioned on the side. Or worse, they had their research stolen.
Strong women depicted in media? Disney’s top film of the 80s was The
Little Mermaid and Aladdin was just released in 1992. Strong women, not
so much. Video tapes existed; the Internet did not. If you wanted to see
a movie, you bought a movie theater ticket.

We arrive when the music was rises in cool, dark, air conditioned theaters. And then you see this:

Caption: A character who does not care what you think because she’s solving a problem.

A character who lays out this line while she holds a stare on the richest daddy around:

“Look…we can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back”

I took that to mean that women are better in survival situations (not equal, as others took it.) and my life was shaped for the better.

I bought a $5 ticket 3 times over the course of that 1993 summer. Now that’s saying something.
To this day, it’s the only movie I’ve bought multiple theater seats
for. But realize, I have older brothers that saw Star Wars, what, a
bazillion times?

Jurassic Park became the first movie to gross US$1billion.

Reading some commentaries and watching some videos over the past few
days, I picked up some tidbits below. Some I agree with, some not.

1. To this day, the scene of the T-Rex crossing the paddock fence
HAS NOT YET BEEN BEAT in movie history & you don’t need to try.
True disclosure: the raptor jumping up to the ceiling shot? I still
can’t *barely* watch that. I wince too hard.

2. There’s been some 2022 commentary on the age difference between
the Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill)
characters. It’s been confusing and I’ve decided to weigh in.

In the book, Dr. Ellie Sattler was written as a grad student (Age
23, no advanced degree) but also no relationship. It was apparently
Laura Dern’s own idea to give the character a full doctoral degree and
in the movie the character holds her own against dinosaurs. In real
life, I’m disappointed to say, Laura treats Sam Neill patronizingly
and actually “left the party” of JP with Jeff Goldblum, which I find to
be a big mistake. (I said this article would be personal, yo.)

Caption: The look of faithfulness.

Don’t be like this guy and not see the sexual tension in JP: https://youtu.be/jSPxu3WprSs
As far as the age difference? The problem came in when, in the book,
the “relationship” was not there but in the movie it was. Laura was in her late 20s playing early 20s. Sam (then early 40s)
continues to feel the (physical) burden of the age difference. If you
need help to see what was happening, Deshi Basara has collected these gifs. Notice in gifs 2, 3, and 7 how his body immediately reacts to hers when she touches him. This is chemistry, folks.

I had to wade into all that because the point was that regardless of
an age difference (which, arguably could be *less* than 23 years),
there was a *quality difference* between Dr. Ian Malcolm and Dr. Alan
Grant.

I will concede this one point (I disagreed with so much here
that I couldn’t read more than 2 pages of this commentary) that Ellie
holds her ground just fine (and doesn’t move despite Alan’s come here
gesture) with a metamessage at the Raptor pit:

Vogue got an interview with Laura Dern
where she points out that the Dr. Ellie Sattler character went on to be
an activist and whistleblower. Interesting!! I’ll just leave that right there.

But most I really enjoyed watching these video analyses of the plot of Jurassic Park here and especially by Mike Hill here and why the movie worked when all subsequent versions of JP have not worked. The key was that Steven Spielberg worked in narrative plot. He carried a story all the way through that was human, basic, and emotional. Dinosaurs just happened to be there.

But that shows up in my VR/XR consulting work to this day.

The famous quote about rushing into things by the Choatician character Dr. Ian Malcolm:

Ian Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, uh,
inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power’s the most awesome
force this planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who’s found
his dad’s gun.

Donald Gennaro: It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling accusations–

Ian Malcolm: If I may, if I may. Uh, I’ll tell you
the problem with the scientific power that you’re, that you’re using
here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read
what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn’t
earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any
responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to
accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it,
you had, you’ve patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a
plastic lunch box, and now (bangs the table) you’re selling it, you
wanna sell it, well.

John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.

Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

I fight this battle every day.

Industry and indeed some in academia want to use XR liberally in
education. Yet, the power of XR is still unknown. Our early research is
pointing to one thing that seems firm:

The mind believes what the eye sees.

That means that the XR experiences we put our children into will be real for them.

What power are we wielding in the classroom? Everywhere?

There are those that say “XR is the Empathy Machine! We can create empathy, soft skills in the workplace!”

Oh yeah?

The most recent research I saw (from 2018) says that empathy coming from XR is a 50/50 gambit. That does not mean that it causes empathy for whatever you want half the time.

It means it causes empathy half of the time and causes the opposite of empathy the other half of the time!

So, would you like your employees to don a headset to be more
empathetic towards race, age, body size? Oh really? How would you like
results that say that half of the time, those employees are going to
take off the headsets and quietly say to themselves “Thank God I’m not
black” 50% of the time? That’s one hell of a bet you are willing to take
with XR.

XR is dangerous.

People say “Look at how you can look all around you! 360 degrees! A
sphere! Isn’t this cool? Isn’t this new? Just think how this will reach new learners!”

I can take a learner into a new real physical space (for example on a field trip) and have them be overwhelmed. We’re all on the spectrum, remember? Was that cool? Were they reached
in a new way when they cried? Would you like for me to even mention
harassment events in VR that have already happened? We haven’t yet
arrived into market saturation of haptic bodysuits, but it’s coming.

XR is dangerous.

I’d rather have a low, slow, plodding walk into an XR for education
experience than every bell and whistle thrown at them the first day. The
line “spared no expense” gives me chills.

XR is dangerous and if we aren’t careful, we will damage learners
along the way. Jurassic Park should not have been built or opened. Dr.
Alan Grant refused to give his endorsement. That was the lesson of the
movie.
- I’m proud that I don’t endorse some forms of XR (Dr. Alan Grant)
- I’m proud that I throw water on some XR ideas (Dr. Ian Malcolm)
- I’m proud that I tackle problems that no one else can survive. (Dr. Ellie Sattler)
But the parallel lesson of JP was “Build for story. Because the dinosaurs are not real.”

When I encourage XR design, I build for narrative plot.

I build for emotions,

because those are real.

#XR #Design #JurassicPark #NarrativePlot #InstructionalDesign #DrEllieSattler #DrAlanGrant #DrIanMalcolm #Dinosaurs #VR #VirtualReality #EmpathyMachine #Leadership #WomenInMedia #FemTech #Sexism #BestMovieSceneEver #Whistleblower #Scientist #PreoccupiedWithCould #SparedNoExpense #Emotion #DesignForXR

Article originally posted same day to LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dr-ellie-sattler-jurassic-park-narrative-plot-wasnt-dodds-ph-d-
June 15, 2022
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

Which groups tend to be targeted by microaggressions?

According to Derald Wing Sue, any group in society may become targeted, including women, people of different gender
identities, those with disabilities, religious minorities, among
others. For example, a forthright white woman might be labeled a bitch
just because she exercises assertiveness. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/microaggression

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…

😔

(more…)
January 7, 2022
I thought this story would end differently

I had stepped out of one meeting into another. It is rare that I have back to back meetings now.

But I left a truly back-slapping ha-yucking good time with 2 of my fellow instructional designers who were presenting on future horizons in education. We were all having such a good time (she says just like Uncle Albert, who loves to laugh, from Mary Poppins). And I had stayed in that meeting 15 extra minutes over time and wiped tears of laughter from my eyes hurriedly to prepare for the next meeting where I thought I would turn on my camera.

I had dropped into the next group meeting late before so I know it wasn’t a problem. I was an attendee, not a presenter. I scoped out the attendee list as I listened to the presentation. The topic was Native American use of XR in education. 20 attendees. From the names, there appeared to be 3 total women. I was the only one on camera. I was the only one that spoke at the end the meeting as it wrapped (the speaker had to leave quickly and didn’t take direct questions but the attendees did a little talking amongst themselves). We did a few polite comments– which included me commenting on how intelligent the speaker’s wife was–that he had referred to in his presentation/she wasn’t there– and the session wrapped up.

Later, I thought about the day and I thought about dropping my ID friends a note to explain the comparison of just how remarkable our friendship is…given that the following meeting was staid, and somewhat difficult to find a place for women (the 3 out of 20 thing.)

But I just contemplated that thought and didn’t share it. And then, the story changed.

That second meeting runs on a 2 week rotation. Before the next 2 weeks came up, I received an email in my inbox. I’m paraphrasing:

“Are you having a problem paying the membership dues?”

Oh, crap. I knew what this was. Exactly.

Now I have to take this story backwards before I take it forwards again.

Because we have to go back 2 1/2 years ago to when a certain educational organization advertised on LinkedIn that they were looking for new members. The topic of educational use of XR was very interesting to me so I submitted my interest. The President of the group replied by email to me directly that I would be welcome to join. He directly sent me the meeting information at that time (I actually still have it at this very moment, ahem.) He also directed me to the page where the membership fees were posted.

Now, here is where the story starts to turn.

(more…)

December 11, 2021
Don’t be like this. XR manels need to stop.

(more…)

December 3, 2021