Matt and Sarah are a dynamic duo. They stated Virtual Bytes in San Francisco and are rapid prototyping two Virtual Reality Programs per month. Their aim is to illustrate and better understand how thought/mind impacts movement using the Virtual Environment as a playground to explore this connection. You can check them out @ www.Virtual-Bytes.com
Sarah grew up in Israel, practicing martial arts, dancing, and thru a highly diverse and interesting path, found her way to a PhD in Neuroscience .
Matt grew up in Hawaii, playing with computers, aka ‘Magic' in Highschool, building virtual worlds as a way to express his genuine gifts and interests.. He found his way to SF, where he and Sarah have teamed up to launch Virtual Bytes…
They both share a similar passion about cultivating new and interesting ways to affect Mind. Learning about how the mind works, what are the controlling mechanisms and how do they interact to produce a model of reality? If the mind were purely programatic, analogous to a computer, can we hack it? They think so.
Not surprisingly, Many futurists find their way into these technologies early on. We’re starting to see more and more movies with ‘secret spy glasses’ and augmented reality, where dynamic images are being displayed, overlaid ontop of our ‘real’ reality. From a neuroscience perspective, and an experiential perspective… these experiences are becoming more and more ‘real’ to the mind. People experiencing these worlds can recall them as they recall a real experience in this world.
Just as the mobile phone explosion went from super expensive hardware you had to drive around in your car with (remember the early 90s, like with Miami Vice driving in that white Ferrari Convertible.. OK I digress..)… But, Now, cell phones are being deployed on the order of Billions across the globe, penetrating even the most remote villages of Africa used by people who can’t read, but are using their phones for banking, business and value exchange. We have dick-Tracy style waterproof watches with full cell and data capacity like the latest Apple Watch.
This mobile phone revolution happened in the last 25 years.
Well, VR is at the driving around in your car stage of the early 90s cellular phones. You have these big headsets, tethered to a computer to get a decent experience…. And yet, hardware is still doubling its speed and halving in size exponentially every year. If you’re a techie, you’ve probably heard about Moore’s law where the founder of Intel predicted semiconductors would double in speed and reduce in size every year at an exponential compounding rate. If you’re not a techie geek, welcome to my techie geekdom realm.
Anyhow, guess is we’ll have the first ‘iPhone’ version of this technology where you have a real computer in your eyeglasses in the next 5 years. It will replace the cell-phone. (Can you Imagine?!) Life without a cell phone? What does that mean to the future of our culture? What does that do to the future of our children’s brains, their minds, their perspective on what’s real?
And what would this podcast be without the Good/Evil question… what happens as Societies evolve? What are the driving forces that shape a society? How do technological breakthrus impact the society, and vice-versa? Does Society ‘feed the machine’ that it created to be better, stronger, more purposeful, and directed to their very human desires?
Hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did!