Vsauce I'm Jake and being able to go from
one point in 3 dimensional space to another is an incredibly cool concept and a major
mechanic in the game Portal, where you use wormholes as a means of physically connecting
two different locations, but unfortunately that it isn't yet possible. A wormhole is
a hypothetical shortcut through spacetime and one that requires negative energy to create,
however we would first have to figure out how to create negative energy...which is also
hypothetical. But that shouldn't stop us from thinking with
Portals, so let's start with what a Portal is. A Portal is defined as an entrance or doorway. They are gateways into different places, into
new experiences and new worlds. When you were a kid on the playground if someone
said the ground was lava, the ground was lava. You had entered the Magic Circle. Extra Credits
has a great video all about it, but imagine you're on a soccer field, in a classroom or
in a court - in those places different rules apply then in normal life and we accept them.
The same goes for books, movies and video games. While playing Metal Gear Solid there was a
moment when a character died that actually made me tear up. It was the first time I had
cared that deeply about a character in a video game - a mesh of polygons. And that got me thinking about how we connect
to fictional characters. In Frank Rose's great book, "The Art of Immersion"
he mentions an experiment by former game designer Demis Hassabis in which he took patients suffering
from a disease that affects memory and had them imagine laying on a beach. One of the
subjects could see the color blue, hear birds, the sound of the ocean and some ship horns.
That was as much as he could imagine. A control subject, someone with the full capability
of their memory, was asked the same thing and they described the sun, the sand, the
heat, the color of the sea, and saw palm trees running along the beach. What Hassabis discovered was that our memories
are what help us form our imagination, they're what allow us to integrate naturally with
imaged settings. His overall goal was to form a model of human brain function enabling game
designers to make characters with emotions, memories and thoughts. To create an intelligent
artificial intelligence. It is the reason why a game like The Sims
was so revolutionary. It felt like the characters, the sims, had virtual free will. We'd place
them in a world that we helped shape but we never knew the exact outcome. The game was
a portal into an alternate version of our own reality - one where we could live our
fantasies, one that we felt more in control of. When you enter a virtual world, an important
aspect that keeps you engaged is the illusion of choice, that decisions you make will affect
the outcome of the game, when in reality every game has been pre-programmed, even ones with
multiple endings, and all you're doing is checking in the boxes. The Stanley Parable
does a great job of making the illusion of choice a center piece in the game and then
mocking it. One of the reasons multiplayer games like
Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft are still so active, is because the characters you are
playing against are people, completely unpredictable people. There has always been that instinctive urge,
that desire, to live inside the fictional worlds of the books we've read, movies we've
watched or the virtual ones of games we've played. And faster than ever before, technology
is getting us there. The Oculus Rift allows us to explore the boiler room from Spirited
Away, be teleported to the bustling streets of Tokyo or maneuver your way through City
17 in Half Life 2 - all without living your home. Even when we're being passive and watching
content on television, the experience is becoming more immersive. Samsung was the first to create
curved ultra high definition televisions, displaying images 4 times that of HD. The
first time I watched a movie on one it felt like looking through a window. And right now you are staring at the biggest
portal imaginable....the Internet. You can start on the wikipedia page for Jelly
Doughnut and, 4 link clicks later, end up on the Meaning of Life. You can go on reddit
and explore fictional worlds other people have made in the World Building sub reddit.
You can go to college, watch pretty much any movie, read any book and if there is a story
you wish existed, there is probably a fanfiction of it or at least an epic rap battle. And with this incredible portal that we have
now, we are spending more and more time in virtual reality. We interact virtually, we
shop virtually, we live virtually...at least part of us does and we also consume a lot
more information than ever before. There are people that say that we spend too much time
playing video games or on computers, but there were also people in the 19th century who had
the same fears about reading too many novels. In America in the 1940s people would gather
and burn comic books. Even in 1605 the character Don Quixote "filled his imagination to bursting
with everything he read in books that it became the literal truth" which led to him thinking
he was a knight and jousting windmills. So what is the next progression for immersion?
It may be Brain Computer Interfacing. Jan Scheuerman is a quadriplegic who had electrodes
injected into the parts of her brain that activated when she thought of moving her arm
and shoulder. Those signals were sent directly to a robotic arm, allowing her to control
it. Once we can tap directly into our minds and have our sensory inputs feeding into a
computer, you could visit Mars without needing a spaceship. When you'd open your eyes, you'd
be seeing the Red Planet. When you wanted to walk, you'd just think it and your character's
legs move. The same would go for exploring virtual worlds. But with all the time we spend in imaginary
and virtual worlds, does it bleed into reality? If I asked you right now to write a paper
from memory about the history of Batman and a paper on the history of Einstein, which
do you think would be longer? Which would have more detail and information? If I were
to tell you that Batman's name was Jim Wayne, his parent's died in a car accident and his
batcave was in a Taco Bell - you would tell me I'm wrong. Because these are things you know about Batman,
things that are truths. Just like I'd be wrong if I said Einstein had long black hair and
had lived in an RV. If we can argue about a fictional character's
history or traits, does that make them, in a sense, real? I've, surprisingly, never met Abraham Lincoln
but I can read about him in books, see him portrayed in movies. I've also never met Luke
Skywalker but he is in movies and in books as well. In fact the Star Wars wiki for him
has 42,000 more words than the wikipedia entry for Abraham Lincoln. But we know that Abraham
Lincoln existed...so then I'd say...how do we know that Luke Skywalker never existed?
Sure nobody has met Skywalker but there is nobody alive that has met Lincoln. All we
have of them are stories. And on that point...how do you know I exist?
What you're watching right now is a bunch of code that is being interpreted by a machine
to display an image. If some of the code gets deleted, I become corrupted. Sure you can
follow me on twitter and instagram, but you can also follow Betty Draper a character from
Mad Men on twitter. Have you ever met me? Have you seen me in real life with your own
eyes? You fill in who I am by what you know of me, by what you see of me and by your own
experiences and memories to create a full picture. You have gone through a portal and entered
my world and in this world we have a magic circle that you accept as true. But it isn't
until we pull back that you actually get the full picture - that this whole time I have
just been a recording on a television screen. And as always, thanks for watching.
That's actually how I found out about this sub.
So... The Jake is a lie?
I thought I put the time code in the link, but it didn't work for whatever reason. I suggest watching the whole thing, but the mention is at 4:12.
I litterally heard about this subbredit 30 seconds ago, thanks to Jake. Immediate subscription !
Well, I didn't come here thanks to VSauce3. (It was actually Subreddit Of The Day, IIRC.) However, I have added The Art of Immersion to my library list thanks to this video.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have this sudden urge to play around with my Sims 2 characters for a while.
Dear /r/worldbuilding,
This video brought me here.
My attention: you fucking have it.
I may have found my new favorite sub.
Sincerly, -Sared
I watched through it all and there was only a tiny mention, but a mention at all is cool.
Wonderful to see. I am a fan of Vsauce for the video content they create, so it is great to see a mention.
I just found this because of that video!