By now everyone has seen multiple reactions to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision/rebranding announcement that posits that vast numbers of us will prefer life in a mixed-reality headset to face-to-face contact for significant periods of our waking hours. I can see the appeal for an ad-driven company: imagine having your eyes physically locked onto a television/monitor, unable to look away from what Facebook wants you to see. Instead of being able to control our field of view, vision would become more akin to hearing, which is hard to steer or focus: largely passive reception of whatever sensory input is within range. I won’t comment further; Benedict Evans wrote a great piece before Zuck’s announcement and he makes a solid argument.
Evans concludes by arguing that “the nature of our interactions with software, entertainment, experiences, displays and, yes, money, is still very early.” While something is going to happen in mass culture at this intersection (more likely, several distinct somethings), I’m going to go in a different direction. There is increasing attention being directed to various communities of people with conditions that formerly were characterized as disabilities. A reframing is afoot: there is now talk of “neurodiversity” (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and tics), and “multiple abilities.” If we look at the core components of Zuckerberg’s vision and leave out cryptocurrency for the moment, there are many opportunities to extend the range of human experience to more people. Just as I believe Google Glass should have been directed at B2B applications like aircraft maintenance or art and architectural tours, so too a mixed-reality plus gamification plus social network plus mass culture mashup can do a lot for particular people in particular circumstances. This isn’t how either Silicon Valley or the assistive technology industry typically work, however, so the following is largely aspirational.
Strabismus is a set of conditions, including “crossed eyes,” in which both eyes do not align in the same direction at the same time. According to a recent Nature article, VR headsets were successfully deployed to diagnose the disorder. There is also a prescription app called Vivid Vision that helps correct strabismus. In contrast to traditional patching therapy that covers the strong eye to force the weak eye to catch up, the headset varies the assist to the weak eye, decreasing it over time at the same time that the decay in strong-eye signal strength also decreases. The same visual lock-in that makes VR scary for advertising is essential for therapeutic benefit. Once the therapy is designed, content can be modified for most age groups, and delivered either in a doctor’s office or at home. From a kid’s perspective, headsets are cool; eye patches are often “a battle,” as one doctor told me. VR would appear to be a clear win here, so how many more conditions can be addressed with this approach to display technology?
Everyone has been lost in a new city. I have a hunch Apple’s experience in both mapping and body-worn computing could position it for a leadership position in next-generation wayfinding. Now extend that ability to a vision-impaired person new to a city: a social layer of “here’s both where to go and why you want to head there” on top of mapping would serve both individual and social objectives. Who of today’s tech companies would make the effort to address that segment? Similar logic could apply to people with intellectual disabilities, using a metaverse-like cluster to deliver supported decision making, transportation training, and multiple safety nets.
Another example: nobody really knows how many wheelchair users there are in the US. Estimates have historically run in the 1% range, putting the population at 3-4 million, a total that is projected to increase as the baby boomers hit old age. How many of those people would pay for a convincing meadow, a bustling cityscape, or a visit to an important site from their life? How could the VR layer be structured to increase rather than decrease sociability, whether in the same building or across distance? Again, who in either the assistive technology or VR/gaming industries would build and curate such experiences — maybe a Peloton-like experience for wheelchair users? The economic incentives, largely invisible populations, and requisite technical skills make it a tough ask from today’s providers.
How can we build expertise in and commitment to teen mental health via a rethought technology layer? Device/app abstinence is one path, but likely not a very promising one. Instagram does marked harm (especially in the realm of body image) according to the company’s own research, along with some acknowledged good. Teens themselves are fleeing the blue F (partially in favor of Instagram, to be sure), and the firm’s plans for a pre-teen “Joe Camel” service will disqualify them in the eyes of some parents. The consequences of our historical moment — climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality are all urgent issues to many teens, our mismatch between human scale and planet-spanning platforms, and the speed of both information and disinformation put many lives and psyches at risk. The sportswriter Ivan Maisel just published a memoir of his son’s suicide, and as a parent, I’m overcome with both grief and gratitude. We can do better by our teens, so for every child who feels isolated, frightened, furious, or hopeless, how do we design headsets, gameplay, education, and social interaction to promote health rather than furthering a negative spiral? The goal is achievable but not under the assumptions of monetizing daily average users, locking those users to a given platform, or reposting platitudes. I don’t trust Facebook, or the National Federation of Teachers, or the Autism Society to get it right. Judging from TikTok, give some teens the tools and some air cover (maybe in the form of protected spaces of human scale), and they will outperform the aforementioned incumbents.
The potential use cases rapidly multiply. Foreign language instruction, the preservation of cultural heritage, enhanced enjoyment of essentially every art form from dance to sculpture, job and skills training — a “metaverse” approach could deliver multiple benefits:
1) A local chapter/organization could use an App Store model to scale a contribution to a much larger community. All politics may be local, but platforms could scale dispersed efforts to help the displaced, people with disabilities, the aged, the lonely, the different. In other words, all of us at some points in our lives. One key is to modulate the scaling: just because the Santa Fe chapter of a given inclusion/advocacy group builds something useful doesn’t mean every person in the US, or English-speaking world, or world with hip dysplasia, PTSD, or MS joins in one big tent.
2) The potential for isolation behind a headset (Facebook’s Oculus remains unacceptably goofy for many of us) must be balanced by new forms of participation and inclusion.
3) Immersive environments can break out of gaming applications into education, training, data visualization (CAVEs are old news), and others: maybe a grandmother could revisit the Woolworth’s, Macy’s, or Dayton’s of her childhood, for example, either with or without a commerce layer.
4) I began by noting that a reframing of ability is underway. Metaverses could be an important part of this discussion. There is already a movement toward rethinking “assistive technologies” from being largely artisanal (hand-made custom prosthetics) to benefitting from network effects (shared, adaptable 3D printer files for those same prosthetics). These technologies are traditionally defined by their steel and rubber, but when will they become more routinely microprocessor-enabled: why not smart crutches? Finally, as assistive technologies move from being prescription items to sometimes becoming community assets, it will change not only the technologies but also the communities of people — of whatever abilities — that coalesce around their co-creation, their procurement, and their use. The phrase “Nothing about us without us” ("Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”) dates back 600 years to central Europe’s early constitutional democracies. Today, it is coming into wider usage within disability-based groups. What better use of emerging metaverse technologies and worldviews than moving toward more inclusive policy discussions, product design, and environmental modification — both virtual and physical? With some will and creativity, we can improve both the range of options for people of varying abilities, while also improving the processes whereby communities do so. The trick will be far less a matter of technology and far more a matter of redesigning our organizations to mobilize those emerging capabilities.
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