‘VR and AR
spatial tech has
the ability to
follow through
on the internet’s
promise of
letting us all
work together’
achieved a pleasant atmosphere with futurist-looking
buildings and lots of glass and raised ceilings that
increase the semblance of natural light, the developers
at Dream realized their ambience less literally. When
you meet your workmates in Dream, you meet in a cave
that opens onto a lake and a view of treelined hills.
There, you gather around a prehistoric stone conference
table and an outdoor screen on which you can surf the
internet and work on documents as a group. Dream’s
emphasis is on the quality of the human interaction.
‘Most communication is non-verbal,’ Wormhoudt
remarks. The software works best with a VR headset- Dream is designed for use with Oculus – and hand
controls. These carry real data about your head posi-
tion and hand gestures directly to your avatar. Rather
than a limited lexicon of keyboard-operated standard
movements – in eXp World, you can clap, wave, shrug
and dance – Dream simulates your real head and hand
movements while you talk.
Mediating Reality
One of the things that makes software design for spatial
technology so interesting is that it requires careful
consideration of how the digital world should relate to
the real one and how, as users of the software, humans
should engage with the virtual environment. For Dream,
the philosophy is simple: ‘We don’t fall into the trap of
novelty. We ask “How do I get the most power with the
least cognitive dissonance?” We’re not necessarily after a
facsimile of the real world. And if we can’t do something
well, we don’t do it,’ asserts Wormhoudt. As a result,
since headsets can’t yet provide accurate information on
the body’s movements or position, in Dream, your avatar
is only head and hands.
Wormhoudt is quick to remind us, ‘Cut-paste and
right-click were interactions that somebody had to invent
before they became ubiquitous.’ He and Beck found the
point-and-click system of most existing virtual keyboards
too laborious, so they went to the trouble of creating
their own virtual reality interface protocols from scratch.
In Dream, you play the keyboard with virtual mallets
like you’re playing a xylophone. eXp World’s avatars and
interface may seem fey and rudimentary by comparison,
but eXp Realty’s Chief Technology Officer Scott Petronis
insists there’s a reason their avatars remain cartoonish:
‘There’s psychology to it. People often ask why we can’t
make the avatars more lifelike. The reality is that that
would be really creepy for people.. .’
Interface designer Jinha Lee disagrees. He sees
a gradually diminishing wall between the two-dimen-
sional and three-dimensional worlds in the evolution
of computing. He co-founded Spatial, which launched
in October 2018. Instead of an alternative immersive
environment, Spatial uses augmented reality to turn
any physical room into a 3D collaborative workspace.
Never mind being uncanny, Spatial comes closest to
realizing experiences hitherto only familiar to us from
sci-fi movies, by ushering the digital world completely,
seamlessly – and almost tangibly – into our existing
space. Designed to work with a Hololens headset, Spatial
allows you to conjure all kinds of media in front of you
like you are a magician. Photos, websites, post-its, web-
cam feeds, 3D models, even text and drawn lines appear
suspended in midair. Everything, whether conventionally
composed of flesh, ink, text, image or 3D-illusion, shim-
mers in high-resolution pixels. And crucially, there are
no buttons to click: ‘You just do what comes naturally,’
Lee explains. You grab and arrange digital information
with your bare hands, you orchestrate media in and out
of the room, you can even swipe data from your phone
there. Rather than being a cartoon-like avatar, you areCo
ur
te
sy(^) o
f (^) D
re
am
DREAM
Doug Wormhoudt and Idan Beck created an inspirational
but unintrusive environment that placed emphasis on
communicating body language.
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