Hi, my name's Toshi Hoo. I'm the director of the Emerging Media Lab at here at Institute for the Future. We're really looking at the future of communication and collaboration. I've spent the last 25 years of my career thinking very deeply about how the new forms of media and communication technologies are going to affect us in all walks of life. I think part of why I'm interested specifically in communication technologies, is in some ways, a communication technologies are the enabling technologies for all other innovation and changes in our society. Of course in our lifetimes that we've seen in the last couple of decades, we've had the Internet enter into our life and that's been a dramatic change on society. Twenty-five years ago the world was a very different place. So in the Emerging Media Lab, we not only do foresight work and research and research reports, but we're also interested in prototyping. We're looking into a whole new different paradigm of media as we shift away from the really powerful abstract representational media systems of print and video, and now the Internet, to what we call experiential media. It includes things like virtual reality and augmented reality where we are going to be stepping inside our computers, into our data, into simulations, or with augmented reality, we're going to be laying our data and our computing interfaces right on the world. So one of the experiments or prototypes that we've been working on in the Emerging Media Lab is creating a immersive storytelling platform for Institute for the Future to be able to share our scenarios of the future, allow people not only to look at or hear about these future scenarios, but actually step inside of them using VR technology. So with that in mind, we've created an immersive storytelling platform called Simtainer. Welcome to Simtainer, an immersive journey developed by the Emerging Media Lab at the Institute for the Future. Simtainer uses a VR system to allow folks to put on a VR headset and literally step inside some of these forecasts and scenarios that we've created, and the first thing you experiences if you're inside of a virtual shipping container. We're looking at this idea of shipping container, we're using that as a metaphor for the idea that basically VR is going to change our sense of presence in the same way shipping containers allows us to globalize the world by moving goods and things throughout the world, and the way the Internet has basically globalized the world by allowing us to move information. We're about to be able to move our presence throughout the world, both geographically, where we're going to be able to move through different scales of time and space, we'll travel through time in VR. So of course, we can go into the past, but we're very interested in also allow people to step into future scenarios. So when you step into Simtainer, you put on the headset, you put on the headphones, you're inside a virtual shipping container. You'll hear a voiceover explain to you what the project's about a little bit about Institute for the Future, and then we ask you to close your eyes, and when you open your eyes again, suddenly you're not in a shipping container anymore. You're actually in a microclinic, a mini hospital inside of a shipping container. Open your eyes. This high-tech medical clinic was built inside a shipping container the same size as the one you began in. We do a small story about that, we ask you to close your eyes again, you open your eyes again. At that point you're inside a little micro home, a micro apartment, and then the final scene, we take you to a micro farm, like a shipping container farm where people are growing lettuce. You're actually able to go and harvest some of that lettuce. We created this as an experiment, we were very interested in understanding what are the tools required to create a VR experience? What are the ways that you can tell stories inside those kinds of experiences? One of the interesting experiments that we included in our Simtainer, first version of Simtainer platform was a mixed reality element. Now mixed reality is when you have a virtual reality experience, but you integrate, physical objects or experiences into that experience so that you have embodied haptic, sense of touch experience with that. So when you enter into the micro clinic, we actually at the end of that scene invite you to sit down on a chair. Now, you look at, you're in VR, you're looking down at a virtual chair, and we've actually placed a physical chair matching up to that virtual chair. So as you sit down in that virtual world, you're actually sitting down in a real chair. Now that's a really powerful experience because even though you know you're consciously being tricked by a simulation when your body sits down to that chair, you have a real sense that that world is real. So we first created Simtainer as a exhibit for one of our conferences to help people understand not only what the future of VR was, but how they might think about what the future of new modular architecture, how could shipping containers, one of the most prevalent architectural forms in the world be used in new ways. So we presented this at our internal conference, but it was so successful and we got such great feedback. We've then got invited to present this all around the world. We've taken it to China and to the Middle East, into Canada, and I'm most excited about our invitation. We were invited to bring Simtainer to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, and of course, it was exciting to present our work, but what was really exciting there wasn't just that we're bringing an exhibit, but that we're bringing an exhibit that really helped the folks, the world leaders, and all the delegates that were at the General Assembly. Think about what it would be actually like to step into these futures. Often, the future is very difficult to imagine and discuss because it doesn't exist yet, and we have a lot of methodologies and tools for trying to describe the feature, and explore those possible futures. But a lot of it's very abstract, and so to create an experience that really makes that even though it's virtual a more of a reality, and something that you feel that you've stepped into, was a very powerful not only demonstration itself but it was a way to allow people to imagine how we might use these new types of tools for futurist thinking itself, and in a place like the United Nations, they're often dealing with difficult big problems. Often the solutions that they're looking at require very different ways of looking at the world and possibilities that don't exist yet, it might even seem quite outlandish, and of course, as we know, in futurist work, often the things that are actually that seem very unreasonable or improbable come to pass often. The things that seem improbable are often become inevitable eventually. So how do we convey those, and even design, and iterate on those. Virtual reality is going to be one of the platforms that's going to allow us to really explore that. We're very excited for folks all around the world to get more access to creating immersive experiences, to help communicate our ideas about futurist thinking and our future scenarios that we're imagining, and to be able to create those together, to be able to share those, and explore them together.
