I officially live fast. Literally zooming on a hoverboard at 80 miles an hour across the dusty desert plains of Nevada. To my left, a digital light show bursts into the night sky, lasers beaming up at the stars. To my right, tents adorned with illuminated signs invite me inside. In the distance, I hear the cacophony of a good time: lively chatter, laughter and the thud of dancing music.
In spirit, I join many of Silicon Valley’s elite on their annual pilgrimage to the world’s wildest and weirdest festival, Burning Man. I’m actually sitting on my couch in my tiny home office in San Francisco wearing a virtual reality headset and I’m starting to feel nauseous.
For tech workers, as for others, the pandemic has brought the holidays to a screeching halt. But, without being discouraged by the physical blockages, several groups of veteran “Burner” have made it their mission to reproduce the art, the music and the spirit of free love of the Bacchanalian event – in digital universes. parallel instead.
In the virtual 3D world I find myself in called “Dusty Multiverse”, Burning Man’s seven square miles of Black Rock City have been mapped to scale, centimeter by centimeter, and the camps will be home to DJs and others. performances all week. . It’s both immersive and interactive; I can attend as an avatar, chat with other avatars, dance and enjoy the awesome cyber splendor that appears around me from my hoverboard.
However, not everything is smooth. In a few minutes, I rip off my Oculus headset to drink some water and miserable a bit. Motion sickness – a common side effect of virtual reality – has emerged.
I want to be a headphone hedonist. Sadly, everything I get is nauseous.
For years, companies in Silicon Valley embraced Burning Man proper, preaching the serious pursuit of “creativity” and collaboration. As I witnessed attending in person in 2019, festival-goers build – and then dismantle – makeshift camps in order to live in a cashless ‘gift’ society for a week, guided by a set of principles which include “radical autonomy”, “radical inclusion” and “de-commodification”. Tickets cost $ 475 (extra camp fees and travel add extra expense), and rumors say wealthy techies don’t want Morphsuits to attend unnoticed.
It’s easy to dismiss the festival – as, alas, I’m guilty of doing it – as a bit of a “woo woo” masquerade. But the idea of witnessing virtual reality this year piqued my interest as the concept of “metaverse” slowly seeps into the mainstream. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently laid out his vision that having a digital avatar persistent in a single digital world – or metaverse – will be ubiquitous.
After my lonely and painful debut on the desert “playa”, I decide to head to a second Burning Man virtual reality application, called BCRvr. There are no fast hoverboards in this world, thankfully (you can teleport between locations), but it’s slightly busier and I’m immediately forced to overcome some shyness and approach other strangers. masked.
Many are regulars, coming for nostalgia. But I also meet YEnS, a seemingly cheerful German whose digital personality wears dark glasses and a long white coat with pink dragons on it. He tells me he wanted to attend Burning Man for 15 years and never made it. “Now I finally have my chance! ” he says. I don’t stay long – I feel sick again and need to open my window to the real world.
Nausea is not the only problem. Much like the actual Burning Man festival, the virtual burn is nearly impossible to navigate. The digital toolbox lacks a map or timetable that lets you know where to go and when. I spend most of my time walking around trying to find activities, other avatars, new camps; many are empty, except for monotonous background music.
Ultimately, “radical autonomy” fails me. I hold on to a team of friendly, more metaverse-savvy avatars who know how to get around better and have already saved lists of their favorite places.
These superhumans also figured out how to open portals the rest of us can dive into to teleport elsewhere – as a group. We are cyber explorers! Adventurers of alternate reality! One click of my controller and I’ll teleport to a brave new world with my new friends! But the magical visuals disappear and are replaced by a loading screen; my headphones are purring and hissing.
Such delays and problems are frequent and shocking. (On one disturbing occasion, an avatar I was talking to froze, mouth agape, hands halfway. Finally, I politely continued.) A seamless experience, it isn’t. Our metaverse future will undoubtedly take many years, serious technical advancements and billions of investments from big tech groups with deep pockets to become a viable reality.
Luckily, there are some cute informational messages on the headset display as a distraction while you wait. “You can turn off or block others,” it reads, a stark reminder of the risk of meanness in such spaces – but also that in some ways we can have more control than we would in real life. . “Blocking them will remove them from your experience,” he adds. “Poof! ”
Many old-fashioned “burners” recent years have complained that the festival is losing its counter-culture edge as the rich, famous and Instagram friends have taken to the playa to pose for photos and collect “likes”.
For mega-fans, these alternatives to the cyberworld can offer some respite. Cartoon avatars, for example, eliminate some of that superficiality; I doubt that many influencers or models, if any, take the time out of their week to get the metaverse under control. (And, if I’m wrong, you can always make these people do “poof!”)
With only the toughest parts of the community present, an overly cultured frivolity gives way to. . . just weirdness.
The BCRvr website says it features “art that otherwise would never have been experienced because it could not be built.” In one of its camps, upon my arrival, a gargantuan neon cake appears in front of me then slowly melts in a sleet snowstorm as the Donna Summer version of “MacArthur Park” plays (which includes the lyrics “Someone Has. left the cake in the rain “), before a silver disco ball fell from the sky and the rain gave way to rainbows and sun. It’s so bizarre and refreshing that I laugh out loud; I’m afraid it won’t be long before business interest in virtual spaces means that we inevitably find ourselves bombarded with ads wherever we teleport. Better to take advantage of the relative safety.
On my last day at the Virtual Burn, I notice that a small wizard-like avatar with a robe and a long red beard has learned to fly high in the digital sky while drawing with a pink pen. “Are you a designer? Another avatar calls out to him, as he zooms in on the camp, leaving streaks of pink in his wake. “No,” he replies. “I’m just making a mess.”
Hannah murphy is a technical correspondent for FT in San Francisco
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