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Social VR arrives in the market at a time when broadband and mobile devices have totally remade our model of media consumption. Where it was once appointment-based, in which families and friends would regularly meet in person whenever their favorite TV show was on, we largely use DVRs and streaming services to time shift. Where content consumption was once built around passive, location-dependent contexts — think movie theaters, living room televisions — we now place-shift, carrying our content wherever our smartphones and tablets can accompany us. As this change took root, social media took the place of TV viewing parties. Instead of taking the time to watch our favorite show together with friends, we now share our viewing experience on Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Combine these two trends — slow growth of VR, plus time/place-shifting of content consumption — and you can see that social VR as it is typically conceived confronts a near-insurmountable adoption hurdle. Facebook and other VR developers are asking consumers to invest a fair amount of money and quite a lot of time on a platform most of their friends still don’t use (since most of them don’t even own a virtual reality device) which also runs counter to every content consumption convenience they’ve enjoyed for the last 7-10 years.

What Lanier doesn’t say here – though he is well aware of the issue from his work on social media – is that the way content production is funded will impact how VR is used.In social media, the loudest voices get promoted through the algorithms (and get the views). We’ve been fortunate in the early stages of VR that the medium has been in the hands of artists who care deeply about humanity. They’ve been self-funded, backed by grants from film festivals and other organizations, and relied on a lot of goodwill.That’s not a sustainable environment for creating immersive content. VR content is not going to be free but outside of specific professional areas (e.g., medical education) and corporate use (eg., Wal-Mart’s training program) we don’t have a working business model. Resolving this issue is not just a business question – it’s a content question. It will directly shape the types of virtual environments and experiences we’ll have in the future.Lanier makes the point in another interview on UnDark,Let’s suppose that after Gutenberg, there was this movement to say all books must be free. Nobody can charge for a book. But it’s okay for books to have advertisements. What we would have ended up with is advertisers determining what books there were.

Occasional training tool and/or the future of high end entertainment — just possibly. But, hey, no one likes to feel sick at the movies. Feeling like you want to barf is only a good use of your time and energy if you’ve eaten something that might otherwise kill you. The wider question in the gaming space, which excels at entertainment and escapism, remains how big VR might get when the hardware isn’t so pricey and clunky, and when investing time and energy in building compelling content can start to look like less of a sinkhole prospect for developers who can now be seen pulling their horns in. These same types of content makers may well be having their heads turned by the potential of AR gaming. Which can, as noted above, already point to the existence of essential content generating wild excitement among millions of consumers. Rather like the solar eclipse, AR has been shown turning masses of heads and even gathering huge crowds of like-minded folks together in public. For now there is simply no argument: AR > VR.

As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney noted: “Over the past several months it’s become clear that the war is no longer HTC and Oculus trying to discover who is Betamax and who is VHS, now they’re just trying to ensure that high-end VR doesn’t turn out to be LaserDisc. Though few of the big players are keen to readily admit it, many investors and analysts have been less than thrilled with the pace of headset sales over the past year.” The bald fact that neither HTC nor Facebook/Oculus has released sales figures for their respective VR headsets speaks volumes. (Analyst estimates aren’t generous, suggesting <500k units apiece.) Sony did put out some sales figures for its Playstation VR headset in February which caused some initial excitement — with the company claiming 915,000 units sold since October 2016. But by June that figure had merely drifted past 1M.

Second, there is very little coverage of Web archiving, which is clearly by far the largest and most important digital preservation initiative both for current and future readers. The Internet Archive rates only two mentions, in the middle of a list of activities and in a footnote. This is despite the fact that archive.org is currently the 211th most visited site in the US (272nd globally) with over 5.5M registered users, adding over 500 per day, and serving nearly 4M unique IPs per day. For comparison, the Library of Congress currently ranks 1439th in the US (5441st globally). The Internet Archive's Web collection alone probably dwarfs all other digital preservation efforts combined both in size and in usage. Not to mention their vast collections of software, digitized books, audio, video and TV news.. Rieger writes: There is a lack of understanding about how archived websites are discovered, used, and referenced. “Researchers prefer to cite the original live-web as it is easier and shorter,” pointed out one of the experts. “There is limited awareness of the existence of web archives and lack of community consensus on how to treat them in scholarly work. The problems are not about technology any more, it is about usability, awareness, and scholarly practices.” The interviewee referred to a recent CRL study based on an analysis of referrals to archived content from papers that concluded that the citations were mainly to articles about web archiving projects. It is surprising that the report doesn't point out that the responsibility for educating scholars in the use of resources lies with the "experts and thought leaders" from institutions such as the University of California, Michigan State, Cornell, MIT, NYU and Virginia Tech. That these "experts and thought leaders" don't consider the Internet Archive to be a resource worth mentioning might have something to do with the fact that their scholars don't know that they should be using it. A report whose first major section, entitled "What's Working Well", totally fails to acknowledge the single most important digital preservation effort of the last two decades clearly lacks credibility

Finally, there is no acknowledgement that the most serious challenge facing the field is economic. Except for a few corner cases, we know how to do digital preservation, we just don't want to pay enough to have it done. Thus the key challenge is to achieve some mixture of significant increase in funding for, and significant cost reduction in the processes of, digital preservation. Information technology processes naturally have very strong economies of scale, which result in winner-take-all markets (as W. Brian Arthur pointed out in 1985). It is notable that the report doesn't mention the winners we already have, in Web and source code archiving, and in emulation. All are at the point where a competitor is unlikely to be viable. To be affordable, digital preservation needs to be done at scale. The report's orientation is very much "let a thousand flowers bloom", which in IT markets only happens at a very early stage. This is likely the result of talking only to people nurturing a small-scale flower, not to people who have already dominated their market niche. It is certainly a risk that each area will have a single point of failure, but trying to fight against the inherent economics of IT pretty much guarantees ineffectiveness.

1) The big successes in the field haven't come from consensus building around a roadmap, they have come from idiosyncratic individuals such as Brewster Kahle, Roberto di Cosmo and Jason Scott identifying a need and building a system to address it no matter what "the community" thinks. We have a couple of decades of experience showing that "the community" is incapable of coming to a coherent consensus that leads to action on a scale appropriate to the problem. In any case, describing road-mapping as "research" is a stretch. 2) Under severe funding pressure, almost all libraries have de-emphasized their custodial role of building collections in favor of responding to immediate client needs. Rieger writes: As one interviewee stated, library leaders have “shifted their attention from seeing preservation as a moral imperative to catering to the university’s immediate needs.” Regrettably, but inevitably given the economics of IT markets, this provides a market opportunity for outsourcing. Ithaka has exploited one such opportunity with Portico. This bullet does describe "research" in the sense of "market research".  Success is, however, much more likely to come from the success of an individual effort than from a consensus about what should be done among people who can't actually do it. 3) In the current climate, increased funding for libraries and archives simply isn't going to happen. These institutions have shown a marked reluctance to divert their shrinking funds from legacy to digital media. Thus the research topic with the greatest leverage in turning funds into preserved digital content is into increasing the cost-effectiveness of the tools, processes and infrastructure of digital preservation.

These studies demonstrate some evidence for the existence of disciplinary differences in technology adoption, which suggests that there is not a homogeneous form of “scholarship” within academia.

At some point, though, a presenter began reading a paper that caused me to look up at once from the wiki. This was Anna Kornbluh, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her paper was written in the same language as the others, but scythelike; she plied the language with weird skill, as if slicing a path toward some promontory of insight — and I found, to my surprise and unease, that I wanted to follow her there and stand and look out. Advertisement Her thesis was unsparing. “We have rhapsodized demolition as liberation while literally laying ruin to the university,” she argued, “a horror to be beheld by future historians — in the unlikely event there are any.” Literary theorists, by prizing an ethos of destruction in the name of freedom, had ironically aligned themselves with the external forces — political, administrative — that had for years conspired to obliterate the institution in which they work. “Human beings,” though, “are essentially builders,” she noted, channeling Marx — “architects of ideas” as well as topplers of norms. Both gestures, affirmation and dissent, are “life-sustaining”; ideally they coexist,  equipoised, twin components of a fulfilled life. A reconstructed university — and wider world — would depend on recovering the constructive and visionary impulse, which the profession had too long devalued in favor of critique. “Get building,” she enjoined the room.

The human/drawing interaction trope that Zuckerberg is rebranding as Facebook’s own innovation even predates animated cartoons. One type of scrapbook, the paper dollhouse, played with the appeal of mixing real-life and an invented world. It was most popular from 1875-1920, and over forty years its form remained consistent: A dollhouse unfolded theatrically to create illusions of progress and depth.

Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur is generally considered the first animated cartoon ever, and it made use of the same trope of mixing reality and man-made art when it premiered all the way back in 1914. McCay was a cartoonist famous for the Freudian, surrealist comic Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published in weekly instalments in the New York Herald and New York American—though its material is more frequently compared to Bosch than to Garfield. McCay, already two hits deep into his career in the first decade of the twentieth century, purportedly decided to animate a comic strip in 1909 on a dare from friends griping about his daunting productivity. Following a brief stint with an animated Nemo, McCay developed Gertie the Dinosaur, an amiable brontosaurus with a stoner grin, and took her on a vaudeville roadshow across America.

LAST MONTH Facebook premiered its vision for the future at its development conference, F8. The camera-app technology Mark Zuckerberg calls augmented reality (or AR) borrows heavily from the social network Snapchat, which enables users to layer animated digital content onto photos on the fly. On stage, Zuckerberg promoted this collaging as social media’s first steps toward modish virtual screen manipulations. “This will allow us to create all kinds of things that were only available in the digital world,” Zuckerberg bubbled effusively. “We’re going to interact with them and explore them together.” Taken in, USA Today repeated this claim to innovation, elaborating on the digital mogul’s Jules Verne-like promise: “We will wander not one, but two worlds—the physical and the digital,” For my part, I was particularly delighted by Facebook’s proposal to animate bowls of cereal with marauding cartoon sharks, savoring, perhaps, the insouciant violence I associate with childhood adventure.