 You know, a few different people. Specifically, this is an ex-unth lead-in. It's likely thought about it. This is an ex-unth lead-in into the idea of talking about one of the largest challenges that a number of us who have been working in these forms have run into is like, what is the infrastructure? What is the actual spaces? How do we work in these spaces? And how do we solve those challenges? Because not all of us have the opportunity to build something new. Sometimes, very often, it's just working in individual spaces. I know that one of the experiences that we had with our first Toaster Lab project, when we did our project, the Future of Storytelling Festival, none of us involved in the project could be on site during the actual festival that it ran out. We got it set up. We went ahead of time. We got everything set up. And we tried to document it as much as possible. But something that is phone-based out of doors is using GPS, what do you show to have somebody understand that they should interact with it? And on the subject, if someone's keeping a running list, that's one of our failures as Toaster Lab. Since then, it's always been about how do we have somebody there as the guide that can at least get you started with what's going, even if you feel confident in using the technology once it's there. How do you crush that threshold with somebody? So for our conversation that will lead us up to lunch, we'll lead up to right before noon, Patrick, if you would mind staying, I'm also going to ask, come up to the stage, please, we'll come over here to our panel setup here. And also, Bernard, can you come up to the stage, please? There you are. So I'll stay off to the side here. Patrick has already had a lovely introduction here as well and has kicked off our conversation here. Bernard Reich is from, who came up in the presentation earlier, is associate professor at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive. What? Science, I came up there. Yes. You're a psychophysicist working in cognitive science around human multimodal spatial cognition, spatial orientation, self-motivation, perception, many other things that I want to know more about that because I'm not entirely sure what all of those are, but are things that I know are important to the types of way that we're thinking and runs the iSpace lab over there. And Tayan Enchen is an interdisciplinary writer, media artist coming from, well, Hamilton, but is a colleague of mine also at York University and School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design, who will be presenting actually specifically on her work within our panel, our third panel of the day around research creation, but is also joining us now because she recently launched an exploratory space at York called Betaspace, which is about bringing in undergraduate students to have a research space to start working with these technologies. So we're going to have a conversation about infrastructure. I know. So where it would be good to start, because I mentioned each of the spaces. And Patrick, I don't know if you want to mention another space that you'd be using as well. But the first question I had for you was, can you talk a little bit about the spaces in which you're working, when you're trying to build out whether or not it's a laboratory or an exploratory space? What are these spaces that you've been working in? Both, what did they start as? And how did you bring things into them? I'll take your scissors to start. One, two, three. You just go. Oh, you know. No. Patrick, secret he wants to start. Oh, OK, exactly. All right. So the image here is of a hangar space at the center of the media, which is on greater than the campus. And it is co-owned by four universities. That's the first thing to juggle in your brain. What that means is that there are a lot of hoops to jump through to put on an event like this. And including, do I want alcohol? Probably not. In this particular case, which allowed us to bypass certain licenses, which was a really good ad insurance, as many of us know when we produce with alcohol in mind. The space itself, the infrastructure, you can see the grid above. I think this grid could take more weight, just to give you an idea. The space itself was not really created to stage events. It became possible because of the vastness of the space and the modularity of it. It's predominantly used as a teaching space, because that's the main activity that occurs in the Master Digital Media Program in its use of this hangar. However, there have been events there. So when events are co-produced or co-created with different types of partnerships, Yangos and Marcos just did recto VRSO there. And that was another lovely use of the hangar in terms of mixed reality. Again, we all had to deal with the constraints that is not really a space set up for the type of staging that I think many of us in theater are used to, nor can it handle the rigor, so including electric, including weight bearing, including lighting. So all of those things had to be considered in terms of the infrastructure. But the awesome thing is that because the carnival of mixed reality was part of a course, then I was allowed to use it and allowed to occupy the space, along with others, for a long period of time, key, that stretch of three weeks, essential. It allowed us to go in there and do a lot of moving around of movable walls. Where are we going to set stuff up? All of those things were important. So in terms of that infrastructure, extremely lucky, but it has to be related to curriculum. So I think this is fabulous. I haven't seen this before. And three weeks you did this in. This whole setup? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. So beta space is we're just starting it, actually. So when you're talking about starting up, we just got funding in the summer and we're just building it up. We have a space in the basement of the arts building at York. And it's about twice the size, I think. And it used to be theaters, actually. But I'm actually in cinema and media arts, so I'm not in theater. We are in the art school. And I don't know what is here, but there's often these silos between departments that don't. Amazing. Amazing, because there are in our, you know, part of what we're trying to do is sort of break these silos open, right? So we're like, yeah, we're media arts. And Ian is in theater. And I know dance also does a lot of VR work. And I really love to bring people doing media and mixed reality performances. Because we consider this is like expanded cinema, right? So there's all these different terms for it. So we call it expanded cinema, because we're in cinema. But it is building out toward the same kind of works. And we don't have any of this kind of setup right now. So part of our infrastructure is like, okay, I think that we do need to work more in this way, where we consider the experience, we consider lighting. We don't have any of that yet. Right now we're just trying to build up like, oh, equipment, right? What equipment are we gonna buy? And as you were saying, it does need to be tied to curriculum. So that's one of the challenges is, okay, so we have like a media arts course. But how do we make it interdisciplinary? How do I get students from other departments to come and collaborate, right? So the whole idea of beta space is like this media arts incubator that can get undergrad students to collaborate with each other and bring their own discipline strengths. But that's proving right now within the university. It's like, well, how do dance students in their fourth year, how do they sign up for it? Because we don't have a course code for it. How do we, are they all independent studies now? How do we grade them all between these, so this is like one of the hurdles that we're just trying to surmount right now. Do you integrate with organizations or nonprofits as well and artists? We don't right now because it's, as we say, we're just starting out, right? And we can't even figure out how to collaborate within departments. Never mind trying to branch it out. Yeah, so, but that would be a great thing. Because the, so the entire idea of beta space is to bring something from idea, conception, to beta release, right? So whatever form that is, whether it's exhibition or platform or selling something on Steam, which is like another possible way. So we're just trying to like work through all these, these siloed problems of how to work interdisciplinary. And it's pretty difficult so far. There's lots of structural issues. There's a lot of structural. I think it's part of parcel with university. Let's keep going with spaces first. Because I have questions of talking about those. Because one of the key things that somebody might be wondering at this point too is what happens when you're not at university? And we, I will ask that question in a moment at first. I can talk a little bit about the lab space that you have at SFU. The lab space or lack thereof something. So we don't have like a dedicated large hanger there. So most of our labs are just flexible use spaces. And so they're used for research projects, teaching spaces. We don't really have like a dedicated immersive MR whatever teaching space. So when I started teaching our immersive environments course before Oculus existed. So the first part is okay, do we even have a computer lab that can handle this kind of stuff. So we had to find ways to equip at least one of the computer labs with fast app computers and graphics cards. So you could actually do that. And then what do you do the showcase? And so we don't have a dedicated showcase space but we have the mezzanine which is kind of like an open space where a lot of people walk through. And it's nice and large. And if you ask early enough you can basically get it reserved. But there's not necessarily internet connectivity or wired internet or even getting power there. So there's so many challenges then and how do you get the computers from the labs into there if they're tied to the desks. So there's a lot of interesting challenges there to do. So I want to show some images of that mezzanine. Sure, yeah. You can just. And the word that you and I did. Yeah sure, you can just go to the website or whatever. Yeah, so with Patrick together we co-taught and designed a new 15 credit course which we call the semester alternate realities where we really ask students to embrace the agile process and really create, co-create in teams and in larger teams in the whole class even different experiences using immersive environments to create meaningful positive experiences there. Okay, I'll just keep talking. Yeah, well it's coming up. Well actually. We cannot just ask the next question yet. Sorry, my next question was sort of like what are the key challenges of bringing somebody into those spaces? Like what, you started highlighting some of those in terms of like the infrastructural challenges there but I think that those are common across a lot of different spaces as well. Talked a little bit about the structural systems and grids, power, connectivity, all of those sort of things. Well the other aspect is really the user experience. So if you walk into a theater space you have a certain expectation that something's gonna be different because it looks like a theater we have this convention, okay, this is different. Now if you repurpose this space then you somehow need to even create this expectation as priming and how do you even do that especially if it's a very public space like we use for our showcases. How do you get the audience to even want to engage with those experiences especially if it's just a one off event and it's not like a large conference where you sign up for. So how do we even prime these? Okay, some of the examples. So often we ask people to really at least try and think of the user experience. The other thing is I mean especially if you want people to have a deeper experience you cannot just let them be there openly and everybody else watches them. You cannot have a private experiences in public so you need to create a physical safer space so they can have a virtual safer experience. Now with starting a beta space how has that gone? Cause it's only been a matter of months that it's been open. It has only been a matter of months. What have been some of those surprises that you've run into with the opening jitters? Well, it's funny cause you just mentioned movable walls and actually that's one of the main things that I've discovered that we need are movable walls, right? So we just bought a couple and I was just looking at that and I was like yeah, we need to get a lot more movable walls. So to create these private spaces cause we had like on wheels, yes. Be able to move things around. So we did have our initial opening showcase and that really helped was just to have a couple of those walls to build these private spaces but really envisioning the space. How could it be? It has been a large part of just working toward cause we want to make the space usable in many different ways cause it's teaching, prototyping and then exhibition, right? And as you're saying, like that's one of the main things like no one's gonna see it if we don't have a good exhibition space. Yeah, and I think the flexibility in the space is really almost the most important thing because you don't exactly know what will not work and what will collapse and what might not. Flexibility in imagining what the space could be and then just building the infrastructure to be able to address the many, many different kinds the needs of it. You know, cause some of our students they don't only do augmented reality they also just do straight video, interactive video and then more of these performance type things as well. So all of it has to go into this one space like this. So it's really great to see how you, you're. Yeah, I mean this is just all kinds of events including gala dinners and addresses and concerts and so on. So there's no pre expectation what you can turn it into. So you have to really work and create that experience. All within one day because that's the maximum you can book it for. Yeah. Oh really, yeah. So that's one thing with that. There's no choice out of four. Yes. So much work. Five to two. So you sort of scale what you're able to do based into the available time that you have getting back to that sort of a three week idea. I know that one of the issues that we run into on the theater side at York whenever we're trying to install something is just like the limitations of actually working in the space too. There's a user experience for the person coming into it but there's a user experience for the person actually installing it. So we're having a conversation now because of any set of things that there's a new campus, there's like a York is invested in a new campus space which in which there will be production space and like there's been a fight to keep the ceilings low enough that somebody can work on them from ladders so that there's not the regulations that go into that we have to train everybody to work on a lift because of the height of their, yes. So it's, and sometimes the people designing the spaces don't necessarily, they just don't think about that aspect of it that it's like actually if I put this ceiling height of 18 feet and we have a bunch of spaces in theater that are 18 feet because that's the size of our studio black box. And so they put everything else at 18 feet but then it took years of figuring out how we can actually work at that space without just having somebody babysit. Students within the labor setup of that are specific milieu. And so like what does it mean when you go like 10 feet up, 12 feet up, both in terms of time and then infrastructure? Was that something that in this, how did that play out in the hangar because you've got these scaffolding. I don't know what you're talking about. All right, well then I forget that I even asked that. There were no safety issues. Right, there were no safety issues. That was not a Russian student on a scaffolding. It was safety, I just, just to be clear. He just flew in from Russia and accidentally went up there before you could check. Yeah, there was only, I mean, in order to get on a lift, that was one person. Right. And that was Josh, who I didn't mention yet, who actually acted in all those capacities that I was trying to like, I mean, in a lot of ways but he was new to theater as we discovered when he was trying to help in other capacities but he had a license to go up on a lift. He was insured, you know, though all those things have to be taken into account, especially in the space that size. Right. We had in what unfortunately we didn't capture at any shots was a student team that Bernard and I, which was, and they were, one of the students, they told us that they were an experienced carpenter and we believed them. Mistakes are made, right? Especially when a fly would wall. Nobody got killed or hurt. Nobody got killed or hurt. No one got killed or hurt when the giant plywood wall came crashing down half an hour before, go time. Those things have to be considered. A life in the theater. Yeah. I think it really contributed to the student learning and they realized, okay, we really need to work with what happens and improvise and learn from it at the moment. What's the take to get a license to go on a lift? Connor? Today. It's a day. We're creating a session that a certification location. Oh, it's not bad. Yeah. Yeah. The money. We've lived because we can't work in our theater spaces without it, it's been built into the curriculum at York due to the ministers. So they end up with a ministry of labor, Ontario approved lift ticket, because otherwise they couldn't actually do the work. That's for it. For a while we used to do it where we had faculty. I was trained as a trainer in Ontario, so. I'm not. That is expired. I have a current lift ticket, but I'm no longer signed up as a trainer. But that was like, it took my entire time that I've been faculty at York, which has been seven years of trying to figure out once the ministry said, this is how you have to do it, to actually build out how do we actually absorb this, how do we absorb anything new into the way that we teach for it, and all these things become invisible because it's like, I wanna track people in a large amount of space, I need something that has a high point of view, well now I'm in a lift. And now I've added the hours of doing that sort of thing. Here, go ahead. Well I had a question because we're talking about infrastructure and that's all good internally, and we mainly deal with the issues that come to us through universities and the training and the learning, the research. Small stage is a company that we wanted to have come in for a period of time. Kendra's got a company we'd love to have her come in for a period of time. Those are, I think, some of the challenges that I'm facing moving forward. I want to have that. And I wonder if that was important to you as well. Yeah, that's my big question, no, no, that was the question because we've talked a lot about working in university spaces, which are both regulated but also resourced in a different way. And there are benefits to that, there are challenges to that. But then wanting to make this work usable either whether it's students once they leave or any of us maintaining work outside of the university setting or for those who are interested in it, how do we get these considerations in this learning off campus? Good question. You're thinking about it. Yeah. One thing that came to mind when you said that is what I've experienced commonly in mixed reality events of any type on any scale is that there's generally a lack of presence, unless it's a production company that's hired to manage all of this, right? And to set all of this up. There's generally a lack of stage crafters present. And that I think is a compelling story to tell because I think there still is a lot in the ecosystem of software development, there's a misperception somehow of theater practitioners and what they can bring to the table. And that means just, that needs to change. Can you talk a little bit more about what those misconceptions are? I mean, some of the misconceptions are, oh, it's theater and there's kind of a bias that theater is, you know, it's, okay, I'll give you some words that I've heard in meetings that I shall not name names. Oh, I'm kind of flaky, kind of disorganized. Like they have no idea about how rigorous staging is in our disciplines, right? So I think that is a story that needs to be told and retold so that when Julianne comes in with Small Stage and Lisa and a bunch of dancers that students know as well, right, we can learn from them. And that's one of the challenges that I face persistently, right? Because there are lessons that there's life, there's professional experience and there's this idea of staging that it seems to be a concept that flies over the head of a lot of events that I've seen. There's not really, I've been to events where like, why did you take that down? That wire? I don't understand why you take that down. Can you tell me why that's taken down? Like even thinking like that, right? How are we taking care again of our audiences who are not used to this? And theater, for me, has those practices. Not always, right? But the rigor is there in the training that is. So. I mean, that's a typical thing that happens if different disciplines come together. Unless you already know enough about the other disciplines, it's often not appreciated what they can actually bring to the table. And I mean, in my department, we combine a lot of different disciplines inherently. But I think it really takes some time and appreciation. It also trusts that, okay, I'm not sure exactly what theater people are good for, maybe. But once you work with them, then you realize like, wow, they're absolutely amazing at that part that I have no idea of. I didn't even know it was important. But just even trusting that somebody from a different field can bring that to the table without necessarily knowing the details of, okay, why it's taped on there. But just kind of trusting, they probably have a reason that they do it. If I have time, I might ask if I'm really interested. If not, I'm just let them do it. So we take things down in film as well. Yeah, oh yeah. Right, you have to take things down in film. But beginning back to the original question, which is how to get out of the academy. And at least in cinema, there's a lot of film festivals that are branching out now into VR and mixed reality. And I think that there, I don't know if there's more exhibition opportunities in that sense, maybe, but there is a lot of exhibition, at least opportunities within film festivals, right? So. So I'm not sure in the theater world, again, like the silos, right? What it's like, but it is becoming more accepted in my field anyways. Yeah, I want to open it up to questions and I'll run the mic. I was going to ask a young poster marker this week, to that, because they've been- All the better for me to run the mic. Did you like the question? Well, the idea of mixed reality entering in it would be more of the discipline of film. I know you guys were involved. Yeah. The bigger international film festivals are really engaging XR as a medium and to design around XR experiences, you have to design the space as well, I think, if it has to be done the right way. So more and more conferences are doing that. I think it's still figuring out a bit on how to do it. Some of them just put a couple of laptops in a basement and think that that's going to do the trick, but that's not going to convince anyone to go there and check these experiences that are made with a whole bunch of love and effort out. So I think it's these two disciplines that come together and trying to find out. We see a lot of points that can be filled, but not everyone is willing to approach this with a bit of an open mindset of just like, I have these laptops will do, right? You just presented your VR work at Sundance and it was really well received, but she said that even within the topography of Sundance, all the X installations were way out on the margins. So if you wanted to go to them, you had to go. That's marginal. It's marginal, right? So they had to go away to go see that. I did see that there was a VR experience in a pool at Sundance that was for underwater, which was pretty neat. On the other hand, I'll make sure that I'm moving so that I'm actually in light. Cretation for StageTrap, that convening that we met up, I'm not gonna name because I'm going to take them to death a little bit, but there were a number of VR films that were shown and they were all on Oculus Go, which are gray, and it was in like a conferencing room, which was gray. They just sort of set out a table with the lights on. And so they were really engaging experiences, but there wasn't a lot of sonography around like, how do you come into that space? And if there wasn't somebody there to hold your hand and be like, put on this headset, then you would have just been like, oh, someone left a bunch of stuff in this room, right? There was a question right here. With the design of the physical space that you're born to experience study, and if there is a dialogue between the designers of the physical space and the planet of the virtual space to make it more of a linear kind of experience, I think a lot of it would be kind of a challenge. When I look at this perspective too, it doesn't look like something that is going to really bring it in and sign in and immerse it. Maybe bring up something from our showcase. It's a design space. If I come from a physical space, I'm kind of a viewer and I'm more of a traditional student. So how do I get my students to know how it is, to come in there and be engaged with it. It's just a bunch of heads that we're able to really know, put these on, and trust me. Right, there's the first holding question of how you actually get some money. And also too, I think the best audience experience is when you don't even notice the technology. It's just all one unified experience and the fun palace managed to do that from sort of the staging of the physical space and integrating it with the virtual. But how do we, is there a method for this? Well, it's really caring about the user. I don't think there's like an accepted written down handbook of that. In essence, it's very simple. Think about the user, walk in their shoes and really think from the beginning to the end. What happens when you enter the space or even hear about the event and so on. And if you have three weeks to set up something, then you can do a lot more. Then if you have two hours in the morning before you have to start, or if you have multiple months, that's completely different. But I think it's really thinking of every single moment in the user experiences. Why do they even want to go in there? How do you transition in and out? What happens after the experience? Like one, we are experienced, I tried, that was probably the most powerful. There were like two posts, we are stages and rooms, basically, and I really needed that time to really put everything to sync in. So in a way, it's almost like theme parks probably have it down the best because for them, they have to handle more numbers, but they design the whole experience from beginning to end and after what most people think is the end. And what's interesting about bringing up theme parks too is that as I did my graduate degree at Cal Arts, which is down outside of Los Angeles, and half the people I went to school with for theater and theater design are working in themed environment because of the storytelling and the wrapping around the user experience of how you have the story through, even if you're not putting something on stage. I mean, we literally just did some research to really try and investigate what really happens if you have a pre and post experience that's actually a lot longer than the actual VR experience and how does it change the user experience? Yeah, so what I would offer is that that's the last thing, observing a lot. I think we both have a lot of experience of putting people into headsets and seeing how they react. But if you're a student, I got that right, to teach them how to observe. There's a lot of stuff that you can just see when you put people that have never been in VR into a headset, in all different sort of contexts, how they feel, if they feel observed, if they feel isolated, and all these small little inhibitions that stop people of fully engaging with the content, I think are very important to design these experiences. So one thing is thinking about it, but then also actually observing because it's a bit of a difference sometimes what comes in. Can I add something to respond to Claudia's question One of the most powerful experiences that I had that engaged with multiple realities was in Toronto and Julianne will know Bill James and Peter Chin and a bunch of other creators and they were in a site-specific location and there was an opera singer on top of a mound of dirt with televisions flickering. So just imagine that for a second, you walk in and the entire space, about twice the size of the hanger that you guys saw, very minimal lighting, beautiful piece, beautiful. And I think that we can also take advantage of the history of theatre in site-specific spaces and to be able to look what can we take advantage of in the actual existing design and how can we manipulate that to what we want without radically transforming it or changing it because that's the limitation we have, right? And don't paint anything. I want to bring to a question that I have here too. Actually, just a quick comment looking at the photos and what I'm seeing in the display aspects. And it makes a lot of sense to me that when you're making alternate realities that you want to think about the reality you're stepping into but a lot of what I'm seeing could just be cleaned up by taking it right out of the trade show playbook. Sorry, can you repeat that last? The trade show playbook of what you would see when you go to a conference and looking at the layout and just having a head report on the specs of it in a booth and cleaning it up that way and then putting on the layer secondary. So just toss that out there and one more. I'm thinking a lot about also how we avoid the bad habits of both forms because I think we also drift towards those in time, right? That more and more of these events are like how many planning meetings go into the live stream versus the experience in the room and at what point is the live stream ruining the experience because it makes a flat surface, right? It turns us into proscenium designers. Even though the people I know who are best in this field are radically not from the proscenium tradition. And in fact need to, and the thing that's interesting to me as a theater maker about all this stuff is that it's not screens. Ha ha, no editing, no jump cuts. Na na na na, we work in that. That's our world, right? And especially in non this relationship. And then also how do we design those spaces? So it's not this weird thing where I'm holding a mic but it has no impact on the room other than as a talking object, right? This mic is not for you, right? I could get. I won't. And all the rules that would make me not do that in a live show, which is that it's awful for my audience. Like I could get away with doing it. And I can't judge, is my mic too close? Am I soft? All of the things. So how do we keep those interactions and the humans that are interacting as a primary focus? And especially that's what to me the most interesting parts of theater can bring into this. Isn't like this is our show but you don't have to come to know we're really good at how humans interact with each other. And we've spent thousands and thousands of years on that. And so let us use that part of our wisdom not only our taping down and the space needs to be cared for. There's a project that I'll share that I don't necessarily have images to share but was presented in the last symposium, Blue Hour which was at the Prague quadrennial which used in addition to having so I'll have to sort of stage this a little bit. So the way that you came into the VR experience is that you were in sort of a circular pool like a circular sandbox so that you were being tracked in the space and the way that you were in and of itself it would take over a hockey arena it was not dissimilar from the fun palace it had some other artists working on it so there were other things it looked different but same sort of idea, large space with a lot of time in it that people were able to figure out a lot of these things and within it were contained a number four different VR stations they all hosted the same thing but the way that you were introduced to them they were mirrored these other pools that had other people performing in them some had water in them some of them had plants growing in them et cetera in this grid and some of them were set aside for this sandbox and you would be invited into the sandbox like as you were starting the experience you take off your shoes, take off your socks take plant your feet so that you had a bit of a grounding there and then when you put on the VR headset after that you were brought into a space that was mapped onto the space that you were just in so it was relatively low resolution but it was like the same massing and then brought into the sequence of that VR experience started and ended in the same place where you were planted and throughout that there was a reference to that grounding that you had so even though you were lifted above and moved around it was always in reference to you are on a still platform and you could feel the edges of it where you got to the parapet sort of like the edge of it with your toes and that sort of like I think about that a lot in terms of the care that somebody went into thinking about everything that you couldn't see and how that lined up with the internal external world blend that made it much more effective than it could have been a very compelling VR experience on its own but I think that I remember it much more because there was a sonography surrounding it that I came into as an audience member there. Before we wrap, I didn't know I used that to make my cross but that was my monologue to make my cross back to the stage. One of you might highlight any taking us to the break here any persistent myths if you could highlight one persistent myth of somebody coming into this way of working or this type of space that and I'll offer an example one having worked in video-based VR a bit is the expectations around resolution in the headset and what that's actually going to look like and what a camera can actually see. I mean, there's so many myths or sometimes also realities I mean, I think one of the big fallacies is to put the technology first instead of the goal, the aim, the core, the user experience and so like, okay, we want to use the technology and then design the experience for the technology instead of first thing of what should the actual experience be and then see like, well, I don't know maybe it's not even an HMB maybe it's something completely different where you don't need all of this technology. So really questioning, okay, what technology is useful for what specific user experience and then remaining flexible enough to say like, well, maybe it's something else that I don't have an experience in so either we can't do it or we need to get somebody else to help out. So that's one of the things I run into when I teach my students so one of the questions I tell them in advance is like, I'm going to question you so if you could provide a similar experience without VR just with a nice video or acting or staging or anything like that then I won't accept it as a project in our VR course because it doesn't make sense. Hmm. They don't necessarily like that. Yeah. But it really helps them think about the affordance of the medium. So kind of playing off that, I think one of the myths in working in mixed or virtual reality is that you need a lot of technology and you really don't, right? I give all my students cardboards and a lot of them have not used one before and it's amazing they actually are quite amazed at what you can do it's just a simple cardboard and they also do like an exercise where you just build a world, a VR world in Photoshop, right? Because you just use the dimensions and then you make that wrap around and you can put that in the cardboard and all of a sudden you have, you can do anything, right? And just using Photoshop. So I think one of those myths is that you do have to have all the stuff, because you don't. I mean some of that I think comes really from the history. I mean 20 years ago whenever, it's longer ago now that I started in VR that was not an option. Yeah. I mean, cell phones did not exist. That was just what you, yeah. So one of the computers was literally $2 million just to be able to render that simple city that took years to create in VR because it was nothing automatic. Right, and I mean, don't get me wrong, the technology does make it so much easier than not having it, right? Well, it's really, I think now we're at the point where we can care more about the user than the technology, which in a way is great. I don't have to reinvent and design the physical aspects of the technology anymore. Now we can actually start using it and just hopefully trusting the technology creators. Exactly, and every year, like even things like Premiere, like all of those tools that we added in are developing so much every year that now there's just filters, now there's just like, oh, you know, 360 video apps that do so many things. Like the example of the motion capture that we're doing before used to be something where you need a room of this size and now iPhone X and later just does it. Like it's built into it, yeah. Incredible, so. My myth is I'll demonstrate the myth that as developers of technologies, anything that involves a mask is that we need to embrace the idea, the reality that this is performative, especially in public spaces. And to get away, because I like the comment at the back about getting away from the trade show idea, one way to do that is to acknowledge that this shifts someone, everyone here, your perception of me right now in the moment, regardless of whether or not I accept that, oh, yeah, they're just in their own world, experiencing their own reality. Because like it or not, I'm not enclosed in a space in private behind curtains and having my own private VR experience. Now there are experiences like that, but what's more prevalent in the field are open, publicly viewable. And I was obsessed for the last two years in unethically capturing people in VR who are being watched by other people, not in VR, because I was just curious. And some people were like, you know, like that close, uncomfortably close. And there's something to be said about in the tradition of the performative, that this is performative. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. As we continue to tally up our failures across projects over the course of the day, we're gonna go to lunch now. Hopefully you will not fail in finding sustenance. And we will return back for our afternoon panel at one. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Patrick, do you want to announce where lunch is available on campus? Like different.