 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining this event to celebrate Virtual Reality Day. My name is Keith Webster. I'm the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean of University Library at Carnegie Mellon. Delighted to welcome you to this event. Virtual Reality Day is now in its fifth year, technically the day is tomorrow, but we are celebrating today. Virtual Reality Day represents a series of voluntary grassroots efforts to help professionals and enthusiasts bring focus to this exciting and emerging field. Typically, events are held during the third week of November, and we really are excited to participate this year in VR Day. Carnegie Mellon is an innovator in virtual and augmented realities, both as a platform for collaboration, utilizing virtual reality studies and tools within disciplines and colleges across the campus. But in Hunt Library we are proud also to host the IDEAD program. IDEAD stands for Integrative Design, Arts and Technology, where we seek to connect disciplines through a merging of technology and arts expertise. And virtual and augmented reality are playing a significant role in our programs and in our minors in fields such as game and media design, intelligent environments and sonic arts. Because the University Library serves as a center of activity for these diverse fields of study, we are excited to participate in these festivities, and this panel discussion serves as our inaugural Virtual Reality Day event. Before I introduce the participants, I'd like to just spend a couple of moments thanking those who made this possible, Andy Prisbilla, who has brought the whole event together, and Joel Chisnell, senior librarian, and liaison to our schools of art, architecture and design. And as always, our colleagues Katie Morrison, Ryan Freitag in university events and alumni and constituent engagement. They are tremendous partners and we are grateful for their support. The panelists you will be spending time with in the next hour are three of my colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University, Emma Slaton, data curation, visualization and GIS specialist in the university libraries, who serve as host and moderator. Ralph Fatuccio, a professor in the Entertainment Technology Center, who has produced and or created several virtual reality and interactive documentary programs. He is an award-winning and internationally recognized filmmaker, and Kristen Carland, Professor of Architecture Information Systems and Public Policy, both in Heinz College and in the School of Architecture. And Kristen's research focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations in health, the built environment, spatial analysis and data visualization. Our featured panelist and special guest today is Rodney Asher, filmmaker, whose latest work is A Glitch in the Matrix. Rodney is known for exploring the subjective experience in his films through found footage, collage, lost media, and other remix culture activities. The panel discussion will focus on A Glitch in the Matrix, which remixes cultural artifacts like movies and music with design, animation and video game design to explore simulation theory through a multitude of styles. Rodney's film looks at the very nature of reality itself and dares to ask the questions, is the world we live in truly real? Does reality even exist, or are we simply avatars in someone else's game? So with that, I am going to wish you all a very pleasant event. I believe I'm going to be booted out into the audience. I look forward to enjoying the event. And I'm going to turn over now to Emma Slaton, who will moderate and lead the discussion. So over to you, Emma. Thank you, Keith. And thank you for your wonderful introduction. You've covered a lot of what I wanted to discuss about how exciting it is for us at CMU to be having a virtual reality day where we can put focus on the interesting work that's happening around our campus, both in our classrooms, through several dedicated courses in the various departments that Keith has already mentioned, but also in the interest of our students to engage with programs like open office hours for VR at the university libraries, and through engaging with content such as this. I'm going to invite Rodney Asher to also now join me. And first off, thank you for making such a wonderful film that made me completely question my own reality called The Glitch and the Matrix. And I do have a couple of questions for you now, but I would also like to invite members from the audience as we go through the process of our conversation, both with Rodney and later with Ralph and Kristen as well to start thinking about adding questions into the Q&A box in your zoom. So we can also hear from you, your thoughts as well. So Rodney, I'd like to begin with the first question that I had when I watched your wonderful film was thinking through how many of your interviews were actually done through zoom and how those processes of conversing with someone through a virtual space aided the conversation around simulation theory. I want to start there. Thanks, I'm not great to talk to you and I'm thrilled to be invited here. Yeah, most of all the interviews that we did in this film, they were actually done on Skype, right? We were doing them, the bulk of them in 2019, before at least in my life zoom had cut on and sort of reinvented the online webcam experience. And I really liked it, that one thing that I try to do when I'm interviewing people is to create as informal an experience as I can, and showing up in somebody's house or inviting them to a studio with a 12-person crew and lights and chairs, and all that baggage that comes with making sure that the studio is perfectly quiet and queuing people to go can sometimes create a little bit of tension and that it takes a while to break through. But a webcam has a really nice formality. In an earlier film in 237, those interviews were only done on the telephone. I mailed people, I sort of FedExed them audio recorders that they could record their own voices as we talked, but it was just a phone conversation. And the other thing that that allows is we can talk for an hour, we can talk for two hours and talk for three hours, and we don't have to, you know, make sure that the grips, you know, keep themselves quiet and keep their phones off and aren't crunching into a bag of Cheetos too loudly. I don't feel like another being watched by, you know, the crew who are all gathered outside. So, you know, I really, I, in some ways, I prefer it. And, you know, I do have to say also that, you know, in the course of it, you know, I think in almost every conversation I had, when we would be talking about ideas of, you know, simulation and virtual reality and things that, you know, we would have to, even if the connection felt very, very real and very visceral. From time to time we'd have to pull back and say, granted, you're experiencing me only in a, you know, 360 by, you know, 240 pixel window, and you'll assume that there's a real person on the other end of this. But, you know, from your experience, it's not all that different from, you know, watching a YouTube video or playing a game that this, you know, what we're doing here, right, that we're experiencing each other, you know, strictly through, you know, a video window of a, you know, a fairly limited amount of, you know, pixels and sound data moving back and forth, which was very on theme. And I kind of overthink things sometimes and I very much want the style of, you know, all the projects that I work on to, you know, work hand in hand with the ideas that we're talking about. Exactly. And I very much appreciate you're mentioning how virtual spaces in Zoom or Skype, I think I'm starting to use Zoom like the new version of Kleenex. Also, and how it relates to the fact that having a virtual Q&A about your film is also very fitting for the style that it took place. And I'm wondering too, how you view the film in that format now post 2020 and the forcing of people into their homes and onto their virtual screens. Do you feel that that's changed the meaning of the film for you at all? Well, you know, certainly my experience has been, you know, this is the first time that I've yet to see, you know, the finished film in a theater with an audience. You know, I've only done virtual Q&As and, you know, our premiere, you know, we were lucky enough to be invited to Sundance but it was a virtual Sundance, which meant everybody was watching, you know, at home and you know, a lot of folks, you know, mentioned to me that, you know, watching the movie on an iPad in bed in the dark was kind of really fitting experience, you know, for this film in particular. I mean, even at Sundance, they went so far as to have one thing that that festival is known for is having really great parties. And they went out of their way to keep that rolling by doing parties and VR, like they built a virtual space station. And when you put on the helmet and fired up the software, you were like this strange robotic, you know, avatar looking at the window of a space station down at the earth, chatting with people with tiny little video windows or thumbnails, you know, where their faces should be, you know, and when, you know, the cast and crew of our film got together to talk, you know, it couldn't have been, you know, a more perfect, you know, if in some ways terrifying way to do it. I mean it was so on message with the theme of the movie in some ways it feels like maybe they were sort of a monkey's paw thing happening where by talking so much about virtual life and you know, living through digital media, we found ourselves, you know, we continue to find ourselves trapped in it, you know, in the aftermath of the movie. Monkeys power picking up on the vibrations of the simulation to lead us all to interesting revelation with your film. And one of the things I noticed speaking about that picking up on the history of simulation theory and who has been clued in or who has been thinking about this for a long time. You referenced a lot of segments from Philip K. Dick's interview from 1974. Is that what inspired you to to go down this rabbit hole or did that come up through research. No, that was something I found after research. But, you know, as I watched it, you know, moment after moment after moment. You know, just have this uncanny resonance, you know, with our own time and place. But one thing that he talked a lot about, you know, was that the clue to the idea that we're living in a simulation would be memories of the past, having, having changed. And, you know, when he was describing that was a very abstract idea, he had an example that in his house he remembered he reached for I think a pull chain to turn a bathroom light on, and instead found a switch on the wall. You know, and it was certain that that light had a pull chain, but that someone had gone back in the past and changed and changed the layout and, you know, back in 1977 when he was talking about that. It was a completely new and bizarre idea. But, you know, today, you know, for years people have been cataloging, you know, Mandela effects, which purport to talk about exactly the same phenomenon. I mean, there's that whole movie that they made about the guy who woke up and he was the only person who remembered, you know, the Beatles, which was like a Mandela effect feature film on a zillion dollar blockbuster based around that kind of idea. He also spoke in that speech and it was in an earlier cut, but you know, actually, you know, things had to go. He was talking a lot about the impeachment of Richard Nixon. And while we were while I was working on that sequence, you know, it was some happening simultaneously with the impeachment, you know, Donald Trump, and the echo of that, you know, felt very eerie at the time. You know, like you work on a project like this and then, you know, every stray coincidence feels deeply, deeply meaningful. And that's sort of a clue that you're onto something. I definitely found myself finding instances in my own life after watching the film and speaking with you and prep for this session. That's like, Oh, here's another evidence. Here's how it all fits in. One quick question I do want to ask before we invite our other two panelists to join is you use a lot of B role in your film, either through six sections of other films or advertisements or other documentaries. What's that figure into your thinking about copyright issues when making this film as a process and what about fair use agreements for that librarian fascinated. Yeah, well, you know, when I was in film school one of the I think more influential movies, you know that I watched was Bruce Connors, a movie, which is entirely, you know, collage from preexisting films, but also transformed radically by, you know, by what he cuts the shots into and, you know, the relationship to one another and looking at them 20 or 30 years after they were shot. And I did a lot of experiments playing around, you know, with a lot of, you know, with a lot of footage and you know, favorite songs, my record collection. So that's a style that I've always enjoyed working in and thinking about. And when I did room 237, which is a film about people obsessed with the shining. And not to that movie, you know, is actually, you know, footage from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and in working with a legal team, you know, to get that stuff to get to get that stuff legal to use in the film, you know, I really went to fair use boot camp, you know, fair use being the, you know, the aspect of copyright law that allows you to reuse copy written footage, depending on depending on how you use it what you're what you're saying the context, etc, etc, etc. So it's a, it's a style I've gotten used to working in. And, you know, this film in particular uses a lot of like 90s, you know, cyberpunk movies, but also a lot of video game footage and YouTube videos, which were different. A lot of it was fair use but like you go through it in the course of making these sorts of films, like you make a spreadsheet that includes every shot in your movie, and where it comes from and what you're trying to say with it. And, you know, have these discussions with the clearance team and, you know, there's a lot of furries in the film but there's also a fair amount of footage that we had to license things that, you know, the claims team said, right while you're using it but that doesn't count as fair use. And I mean we could do a four hour fair use, you know, seminar here because the rules of how it works are, there's a fair amount of interpretation involved, but there's a lot there's a lot of fair use in this movie but some license stuff as well. I'm mentioning having a four hour discussion because I won't call you for that. As a librarian, I find the idea of copyright especially in a film space very engaging and actually this question was suggested by Ralph Atuccio. So I'll actually invite Ralph and Kristen to hop on as well. So we can have a more collaborative discussion you can maybe ask some questions you have for Rodney directly. So, to welcome everyone to the question section together I'm going to shoot out a question to the group. One of the things that came up in the film was the idea that when everything is social suddenly nothing is, and the belief that societies do not die because of a lack of communication, what are all of your thoughts on that and how that relates maybe to either your work as a filmmaker or your work as an academic. Kristen, why don't you go first. Okay. So, well that's a great question because I think communication is really at the core of what we're trying to do in architecture. And for one of the things that I like to think about is what is the purpose of using these technologies, and you know who is using it and what are the scales that people are using this for. So one of the things that I've been doing recently is looking at how we take urban design and changes to cities and get input from citizens. And I think when we start to communicate design. It's very difficult to do that in, you know, a plan, you know, especially you know, nobody can really read to read two dimensional plans. But how do we start to look at that from an artistic perspective and so one of the things that I really love about my work at Carnegie Mellon is that it is very interdisciplinary. You know, we draw on the architectural design. We have, you know, faculty that are using these technologies to look at lighting as a destroyer is using a course right now looking at lighting and the art and the science of lighting and how that's in spaces. But I think we I personally also draw a lot on the work that's being done with Ralph in the entertainment technology center and the gaming aspects, and then also the film aspects of how do we bring in the detail and how do we communicate that. So I think that for me, communication is a big part of it. I also wanted to take a step back and say within architecture. It's not just, you know, architectural spaces, it's really useful for I just I just did a panel on the modernization of ports and airports. And it's really useful for, you know, sort of the reality of how are we using these technologies to maintain facilities. And Francisco airport just gave a really interesting example of a digital twin, which is really important when we start to look at this and architecture and how did digital twins fit into building these technologies and, and it was used for maintenance. You know, it might not be a glamorous thing but that's an important thing for our for architecture. How do we go in and we take a look at the space without having to be there. I think it's, it's, you know, it's a really interesting area that we're in right now. And I'm looking at this from a lot of different perspectives in the field of architecture. I'll take a darker side to that approach. And I think, Emma, the quote you met you mentioned about all societies. What is it the societies. What was the quote. It was a, with the more communication there is the worst sometimes it becomes the more problems you have and I think, obviously, that's an obvious problem right now with disinformation and Facebook and the internet and there's a lot of good things about schools. And like, like, like Kristen said, the communication for for improvement of society, and is wonderful, but there's a lot of negative things to it and I think that the quote was from Jean Boudry, Boudry are a French philosopher and sociologist as well. And he wrote a lot about simulation theory and simulacra and the simulation in fact the book I think if you remember, in the matrix, right at the beginning in a matrix when Neo gets the chips and puts him he gets a book it's hollowed out where he puts his money and puts chips in, and it's a book by Jean Boudry, it's like the simulacra simulation book he puts the stuff in. And that was the whole sort of theory of that film, based on, you know, a lot of Boudryards theories about simulation. And the communication thing I think is an interesting one because what happens particularly in our society now is that there's so much of it that it's in, you don't know which real and what's truth and what's lies what's fact you just have no idea. It becomes even it becomes chaos, you know, you know, the reality is sort of a thin layer of ice above this sort of mass source of information that is sometimes real sometimes good sometimes positive and constructive, and sometimes chaos and destruction. So that's a little bit more of a negative approach to and I'm not a negative guy don't get me wrong, but, but that's but it's. Yeah, I see that side of it, but going back to my work. I, I'm really into the social using VR and interactive documentary work and linear pieces for social issues, dealing with issues that deal with racism or other cultures or, you know, so I'm really into that and and I believe. I believe the technology we have access to VR. It can be used for for those kind of purposes. Yeah, I mean I think when I hear that quote, my head goes to a lot of the same places. You know I think that Ralph's does, you know one phrase that you know comes back to me is, you know, as hard as it is to find a needle in a haystack. You know what's much more difficult is to find a needle in a needle stack. And, and remember, you know in the 90s, watching the internet come together, I had, you know the sort of completely wrong intuition that nobody was going to be able to get away with a lie anymore, because everybody's going to get on their computer and fact check them, and that would be the end of it. But, you know you go on you go on to any topic where there's a little bit of controversy and you know dispute on Wikipedia, and you say like I remember the day where you know I heard some plausible, you know counter argument about climate change and I'm going to get to the bottom of this, right like in an afternoon over coffee, and I went to the Wikipedia page and of course it was 500 pages long, and footnoted to 1000 places that would continue to open up and expand, you know in the, in the attempt to get my head around it would be never ending. Another maybe aspect of it, you know, I'm not sure if this is what he was getting at but you know when you say everything is social, you know nothing is like you see that, you know that promotion for the metaverse that Zuckerberg just put out, you know and it's like okay so this business looks kind of like a video game. Well it's, well when everything looks like a game, you know games aren't anything fun anymore. I know how disappointed I was as a kid I went to speech therapy to get my Rs and like she gave me a list of activities to do the therapist that included you know you play tic-tac-toe and before you do each move say one of these, you know complicated words, and you know I was so insulted I was like look we can, I'll put away some time and speak these words and do these exercises but don't ruin the game for me by trying to make it fun. You know so I see gamification of work as something that people are trying to do and you know I think it could be the worst of both worlds sometimes. You know Emma I just want to add that you know you asked an important question I think at the beginning and how as the pandemic change you know the way that Rodney created the film and the way that you know Rodney you explain how you know the Sundance and the interactions of the you know the celebration of the film. You know I think that this is really important because I think that this is really a great opportunity for us to be able to use these kinds of platforms. You know go back into what I was just talking about with reaching citizens. I think people have you know it used to be that if we wanted to have somebody you know test a design they would have to come to a place. And that wasn't you wouldn't get general citizens doing that coming to a critique whereas if we can do it in these environments now we can start to use these technologies in different ways that people are much more. I think if you look at the average citizen you know they're much more comfortable in these environments now than they were in the past. Yeah then you can save the face to face in real life encounters for things that are actually really important. So it becomes more like a boutique experience. Yeah true. And then there's always that yin yang you know there's always that light side and the dark side there's always what can what what it can be used for for the good of society. And there's always what it can be used for for the opposite of that. And I again I'm not a cynical person so like but I keep on sort of hitting that note those chords but but I'm aware of that all the time that what appears to be good in is good can also be used for for as a with with bad actors as well. I think in I think in academia, we tend to focus on the good and I think elsewhere like the metaverse you talked about Rodney I think that is you know and again it was started on us like the same thing you what you said struck a chord with me that you know you hear information and what do you do go straight to the internet to find out if it's true or not there's any truth. Yeah, and I think what you're all talking about in terms of how we relate to virtual spaces what we're trying to find from them be at the internet or a VR experience or I really appreciate what you're mentioning as well. Kristen about community engagement and how we're connecting with each other as citizens and with our physical space around us both physically and in VR. And not to maybe ask you to do this too much well to play the devil's advocate antagonist here but. I'm really wondering to about how the focus on mental health that came in through the film not only in terms of the actual crime that was committed but in every person who was interviewed seem to touch on at some point, an issue involving mental health, and how much the virtual space that we're becoming more accustomed with is for the better or for worse affecting our engagement with each other and with ourselves as mental health individuals. Well, I can say, you know briefly that you know the film does go to a lot of dark places, right in there and you see a fair amount of mental health crises within it most, most specifically, you know within the story of Josh Cook, but some of the other participants, you know are getting to some fairly negative dark places to but I do have to say that while you know finishing the film, you know, admits lockdown. I can tell what a panacea digital communication was for my son I've got a 11 year old son I guess he was 10 during the worst of it, and being able to stay connected to his friends, you know while playing video games for him where it was more network video games than zoom was the way that he would interact with people but you know that really made a world of difference for him in an ice in our sort of isolated emergency lockdown. Now I'm still trying to pry him out of it, you know, now that we're looking at the other side of it, but you know, you know I have to admit that I saw, you know that the lighter side of things as well during that period. No, and I agree with that I mean and I don't want to always be on the dark side of it but because when it when the pandemic first hit and I'm sure Kristen went through the same issue. My whole class turned into a remote course and I was like, Oh, this is not going to be good. And I know a lot of people who it wasn't good for but I was, I was ecstatic at how well it all worked. I thought you know we had and I had a class of you know 40 people wasn't huge, but it was amazing how well it worked and and I see a lot of, I see it could be used in a number of ways and it was really, it was a really productive class even everything done on zoom and I had students working in different all over the world, working on projects that were, you know, interactive projects or cooperative film projects, and it worked really, really well. I was surprised how well. Hey Emma can I take it in another direction to about this because we're talking right now about you know Ralph just mentioned you know how well the zoom environment worked. I've been experiencing some other environments where it is more like an avatar environment. On a panel at Penn State had a panel for Geo design and I was on the advisory panel and for many years, we would actually attend these meetings in Penn State's, you know, building that they had built a digital twin of. And I, it was the first time I experienced it as an avatar. And, you know, I think there is a big difference here between just being boxes on the screen, versus you know what you were getting at Rodney, you know, being there in that environment I didn't have to have a headset on or anything like that in this environment. But I really felt like I was sitting at the table, you know, with the other participants, and I could we broke when we broke into breakout rooms we actually physically went to separate rooms. And it was you know mimicking the actual architecture that was there where we would normally have driven to go there or flown in to go there. So I think that when we start to look at teaching, and they were teaching in the studio environment with these avatar type, you know applications they've been teaching online for many years. But I think that when we start to look at that immersive experience. It does it is going to hopefully in the future go well beyond just the boxes that we're seeing here on these screens and I think Rodney's really starting to get at that with what he was, you know, doing in this film and I it's very exciting for me to see that in the film with education. No, that is, that is, that's happening a lot, Kristen that there really is it's going to get better and better now. I, I, I participated, I did an event sort of a Q&A within Alt Space VR, you know, and they had built a they had built out sort of a look like a music venue, like a bar, you know with the stage and about 50 people in the audience and me and the you know on the stage and it was a very, very convincing, you know, sort of environment and one that, you know, immersion, I guess can be sort of an overused word in these kind of things but very effectively immersive very much felt like I was in the room with these folks and, you know, likewise, there's a program called spatial there are other versions of it where, you know, I wanted to work on a project a writing project with a friend in Atlanta, and the two of us put on our oculus is oculi, and, you know, met in this room, you know for an hour or so what was cool is we could throw our, our post-it notes up on the wall and they would be there when we went back next the week after. You know, so we were able to sort of create this messy three dimensional workspace and then revisit it again and again and again, you know, and change it and update it. You know, in a way that, you know, living hot living on the other side of the country, you know, the only other real alternatives were phone or, you know, phone or zoom and this felt, you know, much more like, okay the two of us are hunkered down in a place together. Very much. And that actually makes me think of a question for Kristen based on what you had talked about earlier in terms of the future of architecture and how we're constructing spaces virtually. What do you see as the potential for changing how we as people view space and place with the introduction of AR or VR skills. Well, I think that I'm going to go back to again some of the work that some of my colleagues are doing. You know, Azadeh Sawyer I mentioned her course is, you know, shaping light through simulation and virtual reality. And, you know, we talk about this. And I do a lot of this, not just with the research of this and how we're using virtual and augmented reality and our own design. But again, how do we communicate it. And, you know, and I think that it for me is exciting because it is one of the only ways to truly feel immersive, and to truly test it. You know, how are we going to truly test how we're experiencing this, and whether it's just with research and figuring out how that light into work from the designer's perspective. How do we feel? How do how do the people feel about this, which really is an art and a science. And so I think that these technologies were on the cusp now of really making them truly integrated in our research. And I think, you know, Rodney and Ralph might know a little bit more about, you know, the hardware around it, you know, and how all of that works. And, you know, Rodney and I were talking earlier. And hardware is, you know, more commonplace. And I was, you know, I made the comment, oh, my father, you know, is in a nursing home I don't see him putting it on this but Rodney said oh no my mother was able to do this and play ping pong and so I think that, you know, a lot of it is both how we're using the tools to design but how we're using them to again communicate to people. Yeah, I agree. And particularly with VR, I mean, some of the early practitioners of VR were referred to as an empathy machine, people like Noni de la Pena and Chris Milk were doing a lot of work in VR and they were, they talk about it as if it can create empathy. But this is one way they can be used to reach people to help people understand, you know, situations to help them, whether they're, they, you know, some people are using VR for burn patients to put them in a, a cold environment, an arctic, where there's snow coming down. So in so many other applications we just did one, some students of ours just did one with training doctors how to deal with talk to patients and I was just sat in a VR prototype yesterday where you have a patient and it was voice activation and voice recognition. So you could talk to this person, and this person answers you I mean it was a prototype so there was a lot of issues about it. But the idea of it and it's the technology gets better and the computing power gets better. This is, yeah, this is going to, it's pretty incredible what it's going to be able to do. Yeah, I saw a VR clip I actually use a short clip of it in the movie because pretty quickly, where they're using a VR simulator to teach middle managers how to fire people. So it's a related character would say I put my best years in this company, and then you had to find a way to talk him down. And of course, yeah, the turf on flip side of that is, you know, going into what was when you take the step into simulation theory and say, Oh, was that why I was created to train somebody out there, how to do how to fire me how to do how to do this or that. Yeah. It's really interesting kind of reminds me of the film up in the air where the premises sending people around the country to fire people at the end of the film the new solution is we're not going to fly you anywhere anymore you're going to be firing people virtually through a computer. And so this is an interesting like resonance of that conversation as well I do want to invite the audience if you do have any questions that you have either from watching the glitch in the matrix or from coming up through discussion we've been just having. Feel free to put them in the Q&A box. I'm going to pass it over actually based on what we just been talking after that reminder to Ralph. So you're talking about your experience creating content for VR, creating, in some cases also your work as a VR designer and film. How has that shaped your belief in simulation theory and do you believe the theory is plausible. Interesting one. I, I think, when I think about simulation theory and I listened to people like Elon Musk and Neil Tyson, you know, Neil like the grass Tyson, talking about your Tyson says is a 5050 chance and, but Elon Musk believes it's counter percent there. To me, to me, what's that, what's that Rod? Billion to one. A billion to one. To me though, I, and I have to buy and I'm totally honest with you to me it's a smacks of religion. And I grew up at a Catholic, you know, house and I don't, I don't follow religion anymore but it was like, it's like, it's like a religious kind of belief you know and you know, and that's the key word belief you have to have belief in it, in order to buy into it 100%. And I don't necessarily have all that much belief in it it's like mixing science with religion which I don't think is always never turns out to be a good thing. I'm a very suspect of it. I mean, if you believe it, I mean, look at Q and all, you know, in a way that's kind of a simulation, people, you know, being in a simulation, sort of, they, they believe in it 100% conspiracy theories they believe in in the 100%. They are, you know, in a way in a simulation, here in a theistic religion is sort of in a way a simulated environment to believe everything out there is, is concerns, you know, this certain type of God or belief system. And I don't, I don't necessarily, I find it too much like religion. Yeah, well religious questions came up really quickly in the course of the movie and most everybody I talked to in a way that surprised me going in, like I didn't expect so many religious themes to kind of grow out of it. But, you know, I kept saying parallels to you know, God's assuming human form to come down into the world or imagine, imagine, you know, that notion of, like who created the universe and what for that they all had really really striking religious elements. I know, you know, at a certain point in the movie, I was trying to find I had read about these. This video game that was designed that allows you to explore, you know, countless planets, and each planet had flora and fauna. And because so much of that stuff had to be created. One at a time, you know, by hand, but they had to find an algorithm that would allow plants and animals and things to grow naturally on this planet on each of these digital planets, and there was an article I read that they couldn't find the right algorithm until they came across one reprinted in Nature magazine about how trees grow, right, and how they, you know, how the branches expand and split, and at least come and it's all kind of fractal and repeats at different scales. So you just imagine one of those game designers after, you know, watching, you know, their plants grow, you know, on Planet 10 and whatever galaxy they're working on, going on a hike in seeing that same pattern, you know, replicated in Nature and how that would how that would strike them. Interesting. Yeah, really interesting. Yeah, I noticed that in the film to religion was always there is this sort of, you know, it was always people were ready to take it. It was always people were ready to talk about it was this undercurrent of that going on. Yeah. Yeah, one of them wanted to build a tower of Babel so that they could, right, so that they could reach out into the heavens and communicate send a message to the creators. You know, what are the other interesting thing I'm sorry Emma you're going to ask, what are the other interesting things about the film, Robbie was the one person who talked about. People do not have original thoughts anymore. I thought that was really that struck me that really resonated with me because I think that sometimes too I think is the more I read the more I watch the more I do this and more of that. And I have an idea, and I go, you know, I think that idea coming from me is an original idea or am I remediating it somehow, or my remixing it somehow rehashing it. And I thought that was a really interesting comment that he did an insight that he had. Yeah, well, I mean I spend way too much time on Twitter and you know whenever I find myself about to embark on a political argument. It's depressing because I can see every argument and counter argument up and down like five or 10 steps now knowing that none of them even came from me originally, but that I would pick the role that seemed to feel right based on my gut. But, you know, it wasn't my doing the reasoning. It was me repeating arguments that are that I've seen out litigated, you know, but just in text to write on Twitter is very simple. No character based text but those ideas sink into your head and those are the moves to make in sort of the chess game of a political political argument you might have. I completely agree and I remember that to to religion and to how we behave in our systems were all byproducts of the social environment that we have been raised in. And seeing those same kind of processes of thought applied to something like simulation theory makes perfect sense to me and I think what shocks me the most about the film is when people were talking about non player characters. So how we view people who are outside of the belief of simulation and how close that's resonated to me with other groups that also deal with exclusion or, you know, how do we determine one from the other. And on that very positive note, I'm going to transition into questions from the audience, because there is actually questions from the audience that does fit very closely with this. And it's does the golden rule, the rule where you treat others as you would like to be treated, still hold true in a world where a simulation exists thinking about others as non player characters and how we deal with the believers in simulation versus the non believers in simulation. Sure, there's an algorithm for that. It's a pretty big question and there's no reason to necessarily think that I've got the best answer, but I remember having a conversation with us about, you know, on this topic with someone else and it was a, he had a really interesting way of putting it which was, you know, the simulation makes raise the big question of, are you, is this the solipsistic world where you're the only person or is everybody, you know, in a pod like me or like you is everybody as real as you are, or are you, or are you different and he brought up Pascal's wager as a way of saying, since it's almost impossible to tell the safer bet is to treat everybody as if they are a real fully human person like you like like you are that there's that that's a fairly low risk thing that you can do with a very hot with a very high reward. And yet I would think the same might apply to climate change and we don't as a society really go treating the planet how it should be treated to keep it alive even if it is a simulation. Another question from the audience that connects exactly to the same question is if the world goes more towards VR or these more virtual spaces. So where where we slide as a society into an only I matter philosophy or rise of solipsism so just exactly what you're talking about. But Morris perspective, not only from simulation theory but also from just being in virtual spaces where we can connect with one another but not in the same space as one another. And he's going to say a little bit from my experience that in a way I have the opposite when we're in these virtual worlds, I've been teaching online at Carnegie Mellon now since 1999. And, you know, a lot of times people would say to me you know isn't it so isolated that you're teaching in that that world, but I got to know the students a lot better in this in this environment for for a long time. But I think it's the way you structure your interactions. You know I would purposely ask everybody to make a homepage wiki so I knew about everybody personally. You know I think there's ways that you have to engage so I think that you know it's it's about again how we communicate and engage. And I don't know if the technology and maybe Ralph and Rodney have more thoughts about the actual VR technology and how you do that but I think it's still human behavior. And in fact, to that point, one of the things I was doing in one of my classes that I was all totally online and only at 12 people, so a class larger than that would be hard to do. And I know my co instructor was getting fed up with me because I was taking too much time, going individually to each person and saying, Emma, how are you today, how's everything, how you feeling. Rodney, what was your day like did you see any good movies recently, you know, and I would go down everybody and personalize it. And ask, you know, try to be a little bit more, you know, just, you know, touching base with them on a human level. And I think that helped quite a bit and I think it addresses exactly what you're, you know, you were talking about and I found that I found the students to be really appreciative of that. Well, you know, and I might just add that the problem of getting of having everyone treat each other decently predate simulation theory by several thousand years. Simulation theory is not necessarily the only philosophy in which you divide people into more and less valuable groups. And as these guys are saying, there are, you know, amazing things about digital tools that do allow us to, you know, get to know each other a little better, a little deeper. I was struck in, in the film talking to Emily Thomas, who was talking about how human touch in some ways can be the antidote to, you know, solipsism, whether you're, you know, and whether you're talking about something erotic or even if it's just a slap on the shoulder or, you know, a game of, you know, or a game of tag, you know, what have you, that that can go, that can go a long way into proving the, the realness of each other. I really love your point there. Something I noticed isolated on my own in an apartment during COVID was that human touch was something that I would have craved more than anything else probably having just engaged with these screens for so long. And that, I think too relates to exactly what Kristen and Ralph, you're talking about in terms of the intentionality that we have to have in virtual spaces to be socially connected and inclusive. And thinking of that in mind. Do you have any thoughts on how virtual reality can lead to greater inclusion spaces, not only for people who might be divided by physical space but also for people who are physically disabled or who have other accessibility challenges. I think so. I think Kristen mentioned when Penn State example, where she was visiting, you know, virtually with groups of people around in a table with Kristen, were you in a headset, was it a VR thing? No, no, it was, yeah, it was just, you know, in this space. And yeah, that's a good question. Now I can't remember how did I feel like I was there somehow the technology and I don't know the tools that they used. But I felt like I could see, as I was looking in my computer, I was feeling like I was, you know, looking at the other person in that space. But I think you're right though, you know, and you look at disabilities, you know, people with disabilities and having them be able to participate in a way that they couldn't before. You know, we're going to look at a lot of blended modes where, you know, I was just in a review yesterday with a group of students where they were presenting live on campus but we had participants that were on Zoom. And so, you know, if somebody does have some type of a disability that they cannot get to the place, they can in another way. I just want to mention one other thing. I think that it also, people's personalities come out differently. I see that students in a virtual environment in some cases are much more communicative than they were in a classroom. You know, some students may sit in the back of the classroom and not talk ever and I would get to know them much better in a virtual environment. So, you know, I don't know how, you know, avatars will fit into that Rodney but you know, if you're not yourself, you know, you're a different being. How does that pull out? And, you know, for all, you know, let's say that the four of us are all just, you know, our avatar people. How will that communicate differently? Well, I mean, I think one thing that when I did that VR, that all VR thing, you know, I designed an avatar who was sort of like a blue elf in a cowboy hat. And I was sort of surprised that most of the other people that I knew there were more or less cartoon versions of themselves. And I was the one who created a fantastical character. But I mean, it really made me think about comparing avatars to just the way that, you know, people present in real life, you know, that no matter how interested in fashion you are, you're still making, most people still make very active choices about their hairstyle, the clothes they wear. Right. But you're still designing your avatar. Even if you're trying to make it look like you didn't put any effort into it, you know, that all communicates, you know, a little bit as well. Hey, Rodney, I have a question for you. It just came up. I just thought that some of the people in your video and your film, why were they wearing masks? Why would they not reveal themselves as people? Was there a reason they had for that? Was that your decision that they're a decision? That was my decision. And that came really early on. And it was sort of a playing with the idea of avatars, and of playing the idea that, you know, as we communicate these days, you know, like, you know, I spend a lot of, I probably spend more time texting with people than I do. Actually talking with them on the phone. And, you know, we all have different images that we're speaking with, you know, thumbnails that we're all getting very used to communicating, you know, via some kind of an avatar, whether it's, you know, even an image of us or our favorite anime character or, you know, or of a movie star. So we were kind of playing with those notions and my imagining sort of a near future where avatars are increasingly common. I mean, I was struck in that video that Zuckerberg made about the metaverse, and I hadn't even thought about that, but he was like three or four of his buddies around the table, and some of them were human and some of them weren't. And at a certain point he mentioned, you know, that we'll have multiple avatars that, you know, there's the business avatar, you know, with your professional avatar, which is a very, you know, serious low key looking character and then you might have your video game avatar who was a more fantastical one versus your personal one for your friends. I kind of suspect that you'll be using that same one for most of them. You know, in that your boardroom meeting, you know, we'll have robots and Smurfs, you know, sitting at opposite sides of the table. So it was all sort of playing with those ideas and, you know, as each of these projects that I do, you know, I kind of hyper focus again on doing them in a style that says something about the subject. And, you know, at a certain point, there was something fun about the idea that, well, in a way, these are kind of like video game characters on their day off. You know, when you see that cartoon with the coyote and the sheepdog, it's a Warner Brothers cartoon where they're fighting and chasing each other off cliffs, but then the whistle blows, and they go into the break room, and they are still those characters but they're having this very mundane conversation about their family and the holiday and upcoming holidays that I love seeing those sorts of broad characters in mundane situations. The other practical thing it gave us was the ability to do those dramatic reenactment scenes, you know, with the same character who was in the interview, right, and actually to put them into a world where they made more sense than in the, you know, Skype backdrop of the spaces they were actually in. And in some ways making them appear to be in, they are in a simulation to us as an audience but also possibly in a simulation in actuality. Yeah, one of the things. There are other things that I wonder if we're allowed to choose our own avatars and meetings, am I ever going to show up a meeting with five people dressed as Brad Pitt, and how copyright and licensing is going to work to that effect as well. Well that's going to happen in cloning to when you know you can decide whether to have a custom to make a custom baby or to choose one of the more popular models. It's about you know licensing and how we deal with image creation, especially in your work Rodney, and for using other people's content as a way to further your own. We had a question from the audience that said the idea of fair use as a factor in style is interesting. Could you speak more about that. Are there things that you've skipped, including in your work because of legal obstacles, either when you felt that it was an idea or insight that you would want to express, but for simplicity sake, you just had to give it up. I remember a couple things that I had to fight fairly hard for. I don't know that I ever lost a shot that I really really wanted. But one example, and this one's very much about avatars, and I had to do, you know, I had to have a fairly elaborate conversation with the lawyers to get away with this. But there was one of our guys Jesse was imagining our world in a way in which highly achieving people are probably being played by real people outside the simulation. Right, while some of us loser slubs are, you know, just NPCs, and he threw out the example of Kanye West and Michael Phelps. And to illustrate that idea, you know, I found a video game clip of like these two. It was like the predator versus like some ninja in Mortal Kombat. And, you know, what I like doing the most, sometimes when you're using archival material, it can be a very literal expression of what's being talked about. You know, in 1944, you know, the Allies invaded here, here in the footage of that stuff. But, you know, when I can show something apart from what people are talking about and force the audience to see the connection, right. And to see Kanye West as a highly desirable video game character for the players to assume the same way the predator might be. You know, I think that that's more fun and more interesting. Definitely. I will say one quick thing that I was totally the movie with all the B roll footage. It was like this incredibly intricate complex puzzle. Because as a filmmaker, I'm thinking, oh my goodness, going through all that footage trying to source it and find it and put it into perspective and juxtapose the right things together. I was like, whoa. So I, you know, it was a really, it was a really, it was, it was a really nice piece of work and it was a lot of work. But thanks, I appreciate that. And I think, as was discussed by one of the three lines in the film, having connections to pop culture definitely makes things more real for the audience, especially in terms of if we think about science fiction and the lead to technology. You know, how much is the matrix expressing what possibly already exists or what might exist one day so even if the simulation isn't happening now, we could create one in the future. And speaking about like the future of VR. What are some opportunities that you see using this new technology and quotations. I might appreciate now that we could build on or what's going to become a new frontier for the increasingly digital world over the next 10 years. Well, we're heading there for sure. I mean, and the fact that you know I was just looking at, you know, the history of Carnegie Mellon and the School of Architecture computation design is at the forefront and, you know, we're talking now about representation. And, you know, in architecture, we still have hand drawing is very tactile. You know, so we go from hand drawing to augmented and virtual reality to represent, you know, spaces and atmospheres and I think that, you know, one of the things that we're embracing is all of these ways to understand and design and understand and communicate. And I'm very excited about it. Only because I've seen, you know, how this is reaching other people and having have them experience what they're going to be seeing or what they're going to be living in, as well as the practical things, you know, like, you know, Ralph mentioned, you know, safety aspects. I mean, we were looking at simulating safety and fire drills, you know, before you come to a situation of, you know, trying to make decisions because this is an extreme situation. We're using these tools to simulate what will happen so you're prepared, whether it be for an interview or exiting a fire, you know, situation. There's so many possibilities for it. But I'm also really excited and Rodney especially that you know the film really hit home with me with how we're experienced this not just in a virtual reality but how do we have these characters and how are we experiencing all of this which I think is very important as well. Yeah, the military is uses, you know, using a lot of VR and AR for, you know, combat situations and also for training as well. And in my cases with my VR pieces I've worked on it again everything is for some sort of social aspect that teach I'm working on one right now on using VR for Asian hate crimes. And we were interviewing a person and to who documented with her cell phone, someone who kind of costed her verbally because she was Asian American, and we're going to use that footage and turn it in VR, turn it into a volumetric representation of the person. So when you put that headset on, you could walk at her shoes, you could be there. And as this person gets closer to your face and starts, you know, getting meaner and angrier and, you know, you feel that. But then again, you know, there's some people who do not feel won't will not feel that empathy. And so, and I've just had an interview, a discussion I'm meeting yesterday with a person about using VR to possibly look at racism. And biases, but use it use, think of it is as a way of how you could create deep reflections in in people to so they see their own biases, which is sort of, you know, it's kind of a difficult thing to think about but I think VR can be used in that in that way as opposed to dealing with racism like hitting it right in and punching it right in the nose with, you know, very obvious replications in VR, but look using VR for people to have these sort of sort of deeper sort of creating deeper reflections in their own sort of conversation, which below the surface as opposed to what what we just see what we just know about something. Yeah, and I remember earlier in the conversation the term empathy engine came up, I think, from your health, I'm wondering how effective our VR experiences empathy engines. When I first came out people loved it but you know, like I mentioned Chris milk. Yeah, I think he coined the phrase as you know an empathy machine. But you know, there's been a lot of people writing about it after that saying yeah, maybe not it's not such an empathy machine. But you know it all depends on a person I'll tell you two examples real quick you know that we're on the act. I'm sure he has an opinion about this. So some of my students a student of mine, seven or eight years ago did a VR piece on racial profile. And it was called injustice. And I work with fellow Jay he and I now are doing the one an agent hate crime. Anyway, so we put a lot of people through it and people were people really were moved by it really move. And then I showed it to a couple other people and there was a couple people, you know, after you get out of it you ask questions and I went. That's alright. That's alright. So, you know, it's, it's, it's not it's not a magic bullet, you know, everyone's different how they, how they allow themselves to feel empathy. And it's, yeah, so you never know. But you try your best. And for you Rodney have you seen any indication of where your filmmaking might go in the future now with these new changes and VR and our possibilities. Well, you know, in a way, I feel like it's connected to a lot of the stuff that I've been trying to do that these last couple of film projects, you know, is maybe not the most straightforward, you know, way to do a documentary but they're all to me about as Ralph is talking about, put the audience into the heads of of the people that we're talking to. Right. If, you know, room 237 was about, you know, how do these different people, you know, wrestle with this one really complicated piece of art. In this case, you know, the shining, the notion was, let's get, let's try to get the audience to see that film the way each of those people see it. And in, you know, the nightmare, we were talking to people who have, you know, this, you know, who suffer from sleep paralysis, and in that state of consciousness see these sort of ghostly figures and rather than talking to psychologists and sleep experts, you know, and neurologists, you know, about REM sleep and, you know, where hallucinations come from that was all very much about. Let's just talk to people who go through this and try to understand both what their experience is like and literally what they see. And glitch in the matrix, you know, for me is very much trying to do, you know, a similar thing. And, you know, there's that sequence towards the end, you know, the kind of real that really heavy sequence where Joshua Cook is walking through his house and we built a 3D model, you know, of this space and, you know, that would have translated really well to the R because it was about creating a 3D space and moving the audience through it. But in fact, when we were filming it, and it was a complicated process called photogrammetry. So what we did was we dress based on his descriptions and the information we could get about his house. We dressed a house to look like his would have back in 2003 in fact we had to get two houses because of basement was an important part of the story and in Los Angeles basements are kind of hard to come by. So we asked them to be the basement and the other that have the bedrooms in the right place, and how photogrammetry works is you move through the space twice with all these long, you know, kind of tripods one of them has sort of this machine that measures the that shoots lasers out everywhere and measures the three dimensional space. And the other one had like three or four cameras that would take photographs from every angle and they would move through like a grid. And then, somehow, some people much smarter than me were able to take the data from the laser machine and create a three dimensional model of the space and then map the photographs over over that map photographs onto the 3D map and then we could move it 3D virtual camera through the space and in order to tell the animators how this was going to have this how I wanted this to play what I did was I listened to the interview on headphones while I walked through the house with a camcorder. And that was one of the more eerie and disturbing experiences. I've ever had like doing that walkthrough, but then when we were able to animate it was very much like that experience, you know, come to life, you know that so, you know, I would love to be able to to move into a VR project which is about, you know, which would be about visualizing, you know, one or more people's highly subjective highly personal experiences. And I think it's like a lot like, you know, what Ralph does and put the audience into that person's place only, you know, that much more, you know, immersively. How many times we said immersion in the course of this. Once or twice. It comes with the territory right. Yeah, but I think you're really on to something because there's so many times with empathy people can't put themselves in that situation. And, you know, I've seen this in health care, you know, put yourself in a position where you can't move. You know, and how do you experience that and you know these kinds of technologies Rodney will allow people to, you know, for for all different reasons, you know, and exactly what you're doing Ralph in health care. You know, allow people to really experience what the other is experiencing. Yeah, Allegheny General Hospital worked with us a couple years ago, very much a similar thing for nurses to teach nurses to be more empathetic to patients. And it was it was a, it was done in VR you put the headset on, you don't see it in that situation you didn't see real characters you saw graphic representations avatars. And the question with that though is whether it's more believable and more, more, you get you, you feel more empathy if it's a real person as opposed to an avatar, which I don't know the answer to that question, but it's a good question. I kind of suspect the avatars might work better that I know I read a I saw this great article about a police station that hired sort of a carnival character as opposed to the regular police, you know, sketch artist to, you know, take to take people's descriptions, and the more cartoonish caricature was 100 times easier to recognize the, the suspect from then rather than when they're the two dry the two specific. Yeah. Yeah, you're right, Roddy Scott McLeod, and cartoonist he has a book and he talks about that very thing. Yeah, yeah. I think how you put into a face the less people will relate to it. Yeah, it's, or it's only got one bad nurse, instead of nurses, right, be represented by avatar. Yeah, and I think too. I'm having the idea that if you have something that's not fully represented as a what we would normally conceive of as a human space we can might relate to it more, because we can find in that virtual representation in that avatar, something that is pleasing to us as individuals that helps us connect with that object but that's, that's a real anthropological. If you're familiar with the Kuleshov effect right there, experimental filmmaker who had an actor, you know, who filmed, you know, seen of an actor with with a completely blank face and edited into multiple scenarios, each of which the audience felt a lot of investment in, whether he was looking at a lover, or a bowl of soup, you know, or a coffin that, you know, you're projecting onto that blank canvas. You know, it's a principle that, you know, I think it's been repeated, you know, 100 times, 100,000 times. And I know you need to wrap up soon, but I just real quick, Ronnie, can you tell us some things you're working on, because I mean you're this is, you know, this this this film this this, you know, meeting was about you and your film and I, it's for so many interesting things that I can see. Thanks. Well, there's nothing I'm quite ready to announce but they're all projects that are moving in the same, that are moving in the same, you know, sort of category and the one that seems about closest to jump into, you know, there's one person story which makes a difference from, from some of these others and it's, you know, somebody who was sort of suffering from delusions but then they, in some ways they sort of strangely came true, and a flip side of it was that, you know, when you look at this complicated story. He wasn't the only person who was not seeing reality, you know, as it was, you know, it was like there were multiple parties, you know, involved in this, you know, strange, and, you know, kind of frightening event and, you know, the guy suffering from a manic episode was not the only person who was failing to perceive reality exactly as it was, if that's not too vague to talk about but it's very much about, you know, subjective perceptions, you know, from multiple, multiple characters experiencing the same, the same event, you know, in radically different ways and trying to get the audience to see it that to, you know, to see it through each other eyes. And that relates very well to also thinking about human experience in VR, we're all experiencing the same virtual space in different ways. And I'm Kristen beat me to my last question. No, it's great. I'm really appreciative of all three of you for the wonderful discussion that we've all been able to have today thank you to the audience as well for coming up with some really interesting questions for us to discuss. I know that I'm excited to see what Kristen Ralph continue to do in VR at CMU and watching Rodney's next film as well as evangelizing for a glitch in the matrix with everyone I've talked to this past week. I think they're tired of hearing me talk about it. Such a good film. I hope everyone who's been part of the call has a chance to watch it as well. And with that, I think that we can say goodbye. Thank you and thank you Rodney for all your work and Ralph too. Thank you. Great talking with you guys. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for including me and it was great to be with you.