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Preston SoDesigning content for immersive experiences has been around longer than you might think.
Many people jump straight to modern VR headsets when they think about immersive digital experiences, but the craft of immersive content design also shows up in applications like location-aware text alerts and games like Pokemon Go.
Preston So has just written the first book on immersive content design, drawing on his unique background in programming, product management, design, and content strategy.
We talked about:
- his background at companies like Oracle, Acquia, Gatsby, and Time Inc.
- an orientation to immersive design
- the differences between how we experience web content and how we experience immersive content
- the two types of immersive content: embedded and environmental
- how the idea of locomotion fits in immersive content
- the unique challenges of addressing accessibility in immersive designs
- the relevance of disciplines like architecture and urban planning to immersive design
- the benefits of taking a generalist approach to immersive content design
- the importance of cohesive content strategy and adopting an omnichannel mindset when thinking about immersive content design
- equity and inclusion within the immersive space, especially issues around accessibility and identity
Preston’s bio
Preston So (he/they) is a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader, digital architect and strategist, designer and developer advocate, polyglot educator and speaker, and author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a content architect since 2007, and a conversational and immersive designer since 2016.
A product leader at Oracle, Preston has led product, design, engineering, and innovation teams since 2015 at organizations like Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, a columnist at CMSWire, and a contributor to Smashing Magazine and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. A globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code, he is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.
Connect with Preston online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 144. When you think about content in immersive experiences, you might first picture a teenager in a headset scanning the scenery in a virtual game environment. In fact, immersive content spans a range from low-tech media like text messages to those full-blown virtual reality experiences. Preston So has written the first book on content design for these immersive settings, drawing on his unique background in programming, product management, design, and content strategy.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 144 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome back to the show Preston So. We talked a couple years ago, I think, about his book Voice Content and Usability, and now he’s got a new book out called Immersive Content and Usability. And just a quick introduction, Preston is a product and design leader. He operates at the intersection of content, design, code. He’s a one person operation in the technical product world. But anyhow, welcome Preston. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to.
Preston:
Hey Larry, thanks so much for having me back on the Content Strategy Insights podcast. It’s always a pleasure to be on the show and to hang out with you. Yeah, I’m Preston So. Pronouns are he/him/they/them. I work at the intersections of content design and code as you mentioned earlier.
Preston:
I’ve worked across my entire career with a lot of different organizations on problems that revolve around content design, content strategy, and how to architect content in the way that works. Folks like Oracle, Acquia, Gatsby, Time Inc. A lot of different companies and customers. I’ve also written several books on the topic from not only the developer side of things, the coding angle, books like Decoupled Drupal in Practice, and Gatsby: The Definitive Guide, but also two books on content design and content strategy, Voice Content and Usability, which we talked about a few years back.
Preston:
And my newest book, which it will have already come out – most likely by the time this podcast is released – on April 18th and that’s content and usability. And currently what I do is I work on a lot of stuff that revolves around how we can architect content better for omnichannel use cases, and how we can design content better for these omnichannel use cases, and for channel specific experiences as well.
Preston:
By the way, quick plug before we get started. If you are looking for a conference to attend this summer, we’ve got the Decoupled Days conference happening in August in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the call for presentations is open and we’re looking for sponsors. So check it out at decoupleddays.com or follow our Twitter or LinkedIn at Decoupled Days.
Larry:
Yeah, we’re actually working together on that, and I will second the recommendation. That’s going to be a great conference. I mean, we’re in this new modular decoupled world. I’m hoping we can push things along there.
Larry:
But in terms of immersive content, what are we talking about there? Kind of set the scene. Because I think a lot of content people come out of copywriting or journalism or something like that, and that kind of transition into product content writing. There’s some stuff to be done, but there’s a whole new orientation and there must be an analogous challenge coming from wherever you’re coming, into doing immersive content. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re getting into when you start writing immersive content?
Preston:
Sure. I think that there’s a bit of a misunderstanding of the idea of immersion that exists in the technology world today. I think a lot of people focus immediately and perhaps a little too much on the notion of immersion or immersive technology revolving around those goofy-looking headsets that your teenage nephew wears locked in his room for days. What I will say is that immersion is that, but it’s about so much more.
If you look at the way that Forrester, for example, defines immersive experiences, immersive experiences are those you experiences that really facilitate a almost lack of separation between different devices, and between those devices and the environments in which we spend our lives.
Preston:
The way that I like to think about immersive experiences is as a continuum. We have a lot of things in our docket as content designers, as people who work in content strategy, that revolve around the user experiences that we have on our screens, on our devices. And for the most part, those of us who write copy, write content for those devices are writing for what’s really for content’s purposes a rectangle. It’s a glowing rectangle, it’s a glowing blue-lit rectangle. But there’s not really any way to write content for what goes beyond that proverbial rectangle.
Preston:
And what I mean by this is that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of user experiences and content-driven experiences that allow us to experience the world around us in a more rich way, and isn’t limited to or captured in, the devices that we use on a daily basis.
Preston:
One very, very simple example of this is location-based content. And for example, all of us have received a text message that says something about a severe weather alert, says something about, for example, a COVID-19 exposure. Those are all examples of immersive content as well.
Preston:
So a little while back, I wrote an article for A List Apart that defines immersive content. And immersive content, really essentially when you boil it down to its bare essentials, is content that plays in the sandbox of physical space.
Preston:
We’re not talking about content that’s on the page, that’s limited to the page, that’s on a web browser. Or content that’s limited to the web mobile screen on your mobile browser. We’re talking about content that might be driven by outside forces, outside landscapes, outside physical settings in which we live in work.
Preston:
So location-based content is one good example of this. Extended reality, augmented reality, virtual reality. And also things like beacon-driven content, digital signage, orienting content, maps of content, that allow us to experience the physical world around us in a more rich way, driven by interfaces that might not bear much resemblance to the devices that we use on a daily basis like computers, and smartphones, and tablets, and so on and so forth. But they still play a very important role in that lattice work of devices that we’re going to use.
Preston:
Now, one of the quotes that I really like from my book is I describe immersion as a flow state. And I think that’s really what a lot of the early thinkers around immersive technology were getting at when they wanted to conceive of this virtual world or a sort of fully immersive world.
Preston:
What they’re really looking at is the ability for us as users to feel that our devices and the digital experiences that we have are in complete sync with, and are in complete tandem with, the experiences that we have in the physical world around us, whether that’s a virtual world, or a world that is our actual real physical, visible and tangible.
Preston:
So immersion is a flow state that comes from that sense of seamlessness, and you don’t get that sort of flow state when you have to swap in between, let’s say your phone and looking around the world, and maybe put it on a VR headset. There’s a lot of things I think that happen when we look at individual devices, that make it really difficult for us to create truly cross-channel immersive experiences.
Larry:
Yeah. As you’re talking, I’m realizing that we think of this as new. But things like weather alerts or location-specific guidance, we’ve been doing that in apps and other places for years. And then things like Pokemon Go or applications like that, I guess that’s an augmented reality kind of thing. If you think about one of those experiences at once, it’s not clear the connection between them. What is the thing that links all this? You said it’s like… I forget how you put it. But it’s linking it to the physical world. Is that the main thing or are there other connectors that tie these experiences together?
Preston:
I like to think of it as a difference between how we experience web content and how we experience immersive content. And the simplest way to define that is, how do you change the content that you view on a website? Well, you’re going to click a link, or you’re going to change the location that you’re in?
Preston:
And that’s really the way that immersive content works as well. I talk a lot in the book about the analog of what we think of as hyperlinks on the web, or of what we think of as little affordances that are buttons, for example, on mobile apps. These are equivalent to the acts of movement that we undertake in the world around us. And those acts of movement could be changes in our position, changes in where we are in the world, or where we are in a room, or where we are in a virtual headset’s landscape. Or it could be a change of orientation. We could be swiveling our head around, we could be looking up and down, we could be turning around, but staying in the same spot.
Preston:
Because if you think about it, the thing that really distinguishes immersive content and all the things that fall under that umbrella, so if you think about digital signage, for example. Well, if you take a few steps forward or if you turn around, you’re going to see a different digital sign. You’re going to see a different kind of wayfinding experience in that content that’s written for that particular building or physical space, in the same way that you’re going to experience different kinds of content and different kinds of environments when you’re interacting with a virtual world. So augmented reality is kind of a really interesting balanced kind of fulcrum of this notion because I define in the book, that I wrote two different types of immersive content.
Preston:
First is embedded immersive content, and this is the kind of content that you might receive as a text message, that’s really limited to your device but still has some tether to the physical world around us. This could be an AMBER Alert text message, a weather warning. Where it’s not really clear how you would get this information fed to you on a website that’s that personalized, short of obviously you providing that information to that website.
Preston:
But it comes to you automatically because it is based on where you are in the physical world. Somebody who is 100 miles away is not going to get the same information as you on this microcopy that lands on onto your phone.
Preston:
And this is a really important kind of notion, right? Because if we think about the difference between embedded immersive content and environmental immersive content, which is content that we experience in the world around us as if it was a figment of the world around us. That’s a very, very different scenario, and a lot of different problems get introduced.
Preston:
And augmented reality is very interesting because we have the ability to experience our physical world through the camera of the device that we’re using, or through goggles or what have you. And then we’re interpolating these things into it that become part of our environment. That’s a very, very different notion from let’s say receiving a text message that’s based on our location in the world. But both of those are still immersive content.
Now, one thing that I like to note in the book is that one of the challenges that we face right now as designers is that in reality, and I do really believe this, the technology should be secondary. It should be immaterial. We shouldn’t really care that much about the differences between virtual reality, and digital signage, and beacon technologies, and geolocation, and all of this, because all of them fall under the same umbrella of spatial or immersive content.
Preston:
But we do still have that distinction, because we can’t just summon these holograms of content that we put into the world around us. We don’t have to have headsets or any sort of glasses to see those, or perceive those sorts of elements.
Preston:
So we do still have this very, very kind of, I would say almost not as useful distinction for the time being, between device-bound content where we have to experience it on our smartphones, or our tablets, and then environmental content that we experience through a headset or eventually in the future, hopefully holographic overlays of content that appear in the world around us without us having to do anything like put on a goofy-looking headset.
Larry:
Yeah. Hey, a couple things you mentioned in there. This is a little bit of a sidetrack I think, but I think it’s going to be relevant. Part of this because it’s physical, there are different kinds of user interfaces that we’re probably dealing with here. I’m just trying to imagine and picture how many of these kinds of experiences involve something like gesture controllers, or haptic interfaces, or things like that. How common is that? How does that fit in? Again, it comes right back to technology, which you said wasn’t important, but I’m still curious about it.
Preston:
Sure, sure. Absolutely. And I think it is important to cover technology. So I do cover all the technology in my book. But I do preface it by saying, “As designers, we shouldn’t really be thinking in this level of minutia.”
Preston:
It is important for us to understand. But when we design these experiences, we should not be designing specifically for those devices, because that does a disservice to eventually allowing our users to operate across all of these different devices at once.
Preston:
But when I think about immersion and immersive technology, I think of it as a spectrum. If you think about the least immersive things that we have there are smartphones, right? And you mentioned Pokemon Go earlier, Larry. That’s a great kind of example of immersive content that’s limited to a device, that is very much something that you hold in your hand, and then it doesn’t really take over much of the world. It’s a very small portal into some other world, or some other content, or some other experience.
Preston:
But what we’re really talking about when we think about the sense of immersion that a lot of people have today, and I think it’s a very understandable definition. We’re thinking about the headsets that take over that 360 degree worldview, that allow us to experience very, very fully that world, without us ever needing to have to deal with an outside world.
Preston:
If you think about the movie Ready Player One for example, if you think about some of the big VR launches that have happened, something as simple as Google Glasses, which doesn’t exist anymore. Or some of the VR headsets that exist now, Oculus for example. That’s really the other end of the spectrum that we’re talking about. But the key thing to understand here as well is obviously there’s a lot of immersion tech that exists, that has to do with haptics, and gestures, and so on and so forth.
Preston:
What I talk about a lot in my book is the notion of locomotion, because obviously movements, changes of position, orientation are at the root of what makes up how we interact with immersive content. Well, how do you move in a virtual world when you’re sitting in your room, and you can’t bust down walls?
Preston:
Well, there are different techniques, different approaches to do that. One that was very popular earlier but hasn’t really taken off, but it was still depicted in the movie Ready Player One, is what’s called a multi-directional treadmill, I believe is the name. I might have that wrong. It’s correct in my book. But this multi-directional treadmill allows you basically to move around as if you are in a world that has no walls, no barriers, no traffic, no limits, and allows you to change position without actually changing position in the real world.
Preston:
However, that’s kind of lost popularity. I think a lot of it is because obviously, it’s pretty dangerous. If you fall, it can kind of injure you. Also, they’re very expensive. They’re very hard to manufacture as well.
Preston:
So what’s really taken off nowadays is more gestural or controller-based locomotion or controller-based interactions. Which are essentially, if you look at the Oculus, for example, if you look at some of the newer VR headsets that are out there, you really see two handheld controllers that are meant to allow you to move around this world, and change both your position, and your orientation, and how you’re looking at the world.
Preston:
Now, these things are great because they’re like video game controllers. You move around, you can kind of steer it. It’s kind of like having a jet pack. But of course, the issue is that a lot of these interfaces might not be accessible for people who are in the disabled community and want to be able to interact with the experiences in different ways.
Preston:
One of the things that I think is really challenging about some of these technologies is that they’re designed very much for the average user in mind. And one thing that’s very ironic actually about the Oculus documentation for developers is it mentions that we should never be designing for just the average user. We should always be thinking about edge cases, about disabled users, about accessibility needs, and all of that, in ways that go well beyond I think what the current world of immersion is capable of right now.
Preston:
In web, for example, we’ve had decades now of discussion about accessibility and about how to make the web better for disabled people. And it’s been kind of easy in some regards, because we don’t need to deal with quite as large of a problem space in some ways as immersive technologists do when it comes to accessibility.
Preston:
But needless to say, the devices that we’re talking about are AR, VR glasses, headsets. We’re talking about smartphones that turn into AR/VR headsets. We’re talking about tablets that can have an AR interface contained therein. That’s part of the camera of the device. But we also are talking about text messages that come down to your smartphone, or your tablet, or your laptop.
Preston:
This is why I try to really steer clear of focusing on just one aspect of immersive technology, because what I’ve found is in looking at a lot of the literature, that narrows the focus almost to the extent that as a designer, you kind of feel a little limited. You feel like, “Okay, so if I’m designing for an XR headset or an Oculus, then can I not design a holistic experience that’s a little bit more than just the headset?” Can I do something similar for my smartphone, for example?
Preston:
And I think you are seeing that a lot more these days, a lot more of that thought process emerge where people are saying, “Well hey, we should be thinking about this from the standpoint of space around us as opposed to the way that we perceive space. Let’s think about this starting from the very deep notion, the atomic notion of how users experience space, and want to interact with space, in the same way that they interact with their interfaces that are bound to devices.”
Larry:
Yeah. As you’re talking about that, it makes me think about the platform you’re operating on. So much of current stuff, just thinking of all the content design people I know and what they’re doing, it’s almost always around a platform or maybe two or three platforms. You’re designing content for a webpage and a mobile app, and that’s pretty much it. Maybe a couple different mobile apps, maybe one or two other things. And those are pretty mature platforms that have all their usability stuff, and conventional development patterns, and design patterns, if not codified, at least understood.
Larry:
You’ve talked about so many different possible environments. I guess maybe the way to phrase this, is a skill that all content designers should have? Or is it something that we’ll find that people who specialize in platform-specific design issues? What do you think?
Preston:
So what I will say is that my book will be of benefit to either case. If you’re somebody who doesn’t know anything about immersive technologies, wants to learn a little bit more about it, wants to learn about some of these spatial techniques and strategies to design content, I think it’s very useful. And if you’re somebody also who already has been tasked with creating let’s say content or copy for VR experience, I think it’ll also be very useful for you as well.
Preston:
But needless to say, I think one of the things that’s really important for content designers, especially today, is to consider how we design content and how we handle content for experiences that go beyond the simple screen.
Preston:
And we see this already, right? We’ve seen this with voice, for example, with chatbots, with ChatGPT. We know that a lot of the things that we do as designers now need to go into different environments that we’ve never thought of before.
Preston:
And the physical environment is sort of that final frontier. It’s that last stage of content design, in my opinion, where we’re really beginning to interact with some of the deepest and most underlying historic ideas of architecture and of design.
Preston:
We’ve come full circle in some ways. Because when I thought about a lot of the things that I wrote in this book, I actually quote quite a few books on architecture, quite a few books on urban planning, because that’s really the essential, original form of design, is the built environment, the world around us, the physical world around us. The buildings that we spend time in, the transportation hubs that we commute through. And in some ways, we’re just kind of bringing together that circle to the point where we’re now interacting directly with those folks. Now, one thing I know that you mentioned earlier is content designers today who are working on these sorts of teams.
Preston:
What I’ve noticed in the content design industry today is that a lot of us are still focused on writing content for web and mobile. A lot of us are still focused on designing content for these very, what I would call niche… Even though web and mobile are anything but niche obviously.
Preston:
But in the grand scheme of things, they are a little niche, right? Because you can’t carry around a computer with you all the time and open it up in the middle of your commute. Some people do that.
Preston:
But I think one of the things that’s really important is for content designers who want to be able to move in and out of this world. Because the other thing I’ve noticed about the content design industry right now, especially when it comes to immersive content, is that platform specificity.
Preston:
A lot of folks are only writing content, for example, for Oculus Rift, or are only writing content for VR headset, or are only writing content for digital signage, and touchscreen kiosks, and information kiosks. But it really does a disservice to the design world, because we are limiting ourselves by focusing on a single technology.
Preston:
And my hope is with this more generalist approach to immersive content, immersive design, we can think really well as content designers about where to move next, and as content strategists about how we can wash away some of these barriers in ways that not just improve the way that our users experience our environments physically and spatially. Not only the bottom line of our companies as we dip our toes more and more into extended reality, and digital signage, and so on and so forth. But also benefits our careers as content designers and content strategists, because now we’re not limited to, let’s say, being a web content designer, or being a mobile content designer, or being an app content designer, or voice content designer, or VR content designer.
Preston:
I really do think that we are ripe in the content design industry for a sea change in how we perceive content design, as being something that isn’t really just about writing for one device, isn’t really just about writing for a website, but is really about designing content for everything in between and every single device under the sun.
Larry:
Yeah. You mentioned earlier, you mentioned a couple times earlier omnichannel strategy. And that’s kind of what you’re talking about here is that I guess you could make the case, there’s probably a case to be made for a platform-specific focus. But probably a better case to be made for being able to write or to create content that works across channels. Is that accurate to say?
Preston:
You know my MO, Larry. You know that I’m very passionate about single sourcing content. And I think especially now that we’re seeing a lot of headwinds in the content design world, in the tech world, I think it’s never been more important to universalize a lot of the content that we have and prevent these silos.
Preston:
I talked about this in my previous book as well, back in 2021, Voice Content and Usability. About how when we write for these different experiences, we really want to try to endeavor to keep these silos as limited as possible. Try to keep them away from making our content become a little bit more fragmented, become a little bit more hard to handle, hard to manage.
Preston:
Because I think one of the things that we’ll see with immersive content is that even more so in some ways than voice content, I think immersive content and conversational content… Immersive content is going to have to dovetail and be in sync with web content and mobile content. And this is a good example of, I think one of the challenges that we face, and an example of precisely the kind of intersection between channels that we have to think about.
Preston:
We’ve heard, for example, a lot of folks talk about the interaction Cliff. And I talk about this a lot in my book Immersive Content as well. One of the things that we have to really think about is let’s take the case of a typical subway passenger, or a train passenger ,or an airport passenger, somebody who’s about to fly out of an airport.
Preston:
Well, chances are that we’re going to be consulting not just our devices for information about delays or information about things like departure times. We’re also going to be consulting the world around us, because all of the screens might be more up to date in an airport or in a train station. Some of the information kiosks, for example, in the subway system might be more informative.
Preston:
So this constant bouncing around leads us to think a lot more about, I think a cohesive content strategy that allows for us to make design decisions that might actually overtake or step on the territory of some of these other channels.
Preston:
For example, I think about my subway commute, when I used to go into the office on the New York City subway. Well, there were times when I would go on the MTA website, the New York Transit Authority website on my phone. And I would look up information there, but then I would immediately thereafter consult something that was on the platform.
Preston:
And the level of cohesion between those two user experiences was sometimes very low, was sometimes not very good. And this is why I think that it’s important for us to think about how we can wash away some of these arbitrary distinctions, because the territoriality of saying that, “I only do web content design. I only do immersive content design or digital signage content design.” It’s not going to serve us very well when we have to be able to work together in ways that avoid those interaction cliffs between those individual channels.
Preston:
And this is the reason why I think that it’s important for us as content designers to develop skills that are straddling multiple channels, that go across different areas of expertise that we already have, even if the demand isn’t quite there yet. Because of the fact that web content design, frankly, is a misnomer. It shouldn’t exist as a limitation for us.
Larry:
Yeah, and as you talk about that, I’m just reminded there’s a whole need for a new level of orchestration too, that comes with this. That’s a whole other conversation to have. And I know we’re coming up close to time Preston, and these conversations always go way so fast. But I want to make sure if there’s anything last before we wrap up, anything that you want to make sure we talk about before we close.
Preston:
Sure. Yeah. There’s two things I think that are really interesting, and obviously I talk about this quite a bit in my book, and I highly encourage you all… By the way, just to make a quick note, you can order the book right now. And it’s a phenomenal way to share a gift with somebody, or to share a gift with your team.
Preston:
The last two things I want to cover though relate to equity and inclusion within the immersive space. I dedicate a whole chapter in my book to the concept of immersive accessibility, immersive equity, and so on and so forth.
Preston:
And I want to approach this from two different angles. The first obviously is that I think just like what we did with a lot of other tech trends, many of us, especially larger companies, are jumping into these immersive technologies without giving a lot of thought to how people are going to be able to interact with them.
Preston:
And what’s really lucky and really fortunate is that nowadays a lot of these companies have developed accessibility guidelines, have developed pages of documentation on inclusion for their developers and for their designers, that really focus on how to create equitable experiences for those who are historically oppressed or have disabilities.
Preston:
So one thing I highly encourage everyone to do is, especially in this realm where we’re still in very early days. For example, the Worldwide Web Consortium has only just started convening and drafting recommendations for immersive accessibility standards. We have to approach this with the same kind of focus and the same kind of emphasis that we do web accessibility and mobile accessibility. Of course, you can find out much more about that in my book. But the other thing I want to mention as well is we’ve heard a lot of heated discussion, and a lot of excitement and momentum about the metaverse, right? And we haven’t really talked about that much in this podcast so far.
Preston:
But I want to harken back to what I said in our episode about Voice Content and Usability, which is that anytime you begin to attach an identity as somebody, anytime you begin to attach an identity to a chatbot, for example, a voice bot, that raises a lot of questions about how you are interfacing with the notions of identity and inclusion in the real world.
Preston:
And I think this is especially true when you think about the fact that in the metaverse, especially in let’s say Mark Zuckerberg’s notion of the metaverse, or some of the new AI avatars that are coming out in the metaverse, one of the big challenges is we’re now ascribing notions of human identity to an avatar in the metaverse, an avatar in a virtual world, that might not necessarily bear much resemblance to reality.
Preston:
And I think one very good example of this is I share in my book an anecdote from my colleague and friends, Molly Bloom, who is a wheelchair user. And she talks at length, and I highly encourage everyone to read this section of the book, because she does a very good job of sharing how disconcerting and how disrespectful it is to see a metaverse startup in this exhibit hall at South by Southwest create an avatar for her for the metaverse, where she’s not a wheelchair user. And it’s this notion of erasing certain aspects of identity.
Preston:
And it’s not just something as simple as getting rid of a facial scar, or getting rid of, let’s say, a blemish on the skin. Which is I think a lot of the reasons why people find things like Second Life so appealing, why people find the ability to change their identity is so appealing. And there’s very, very real benefits to it too.
Preston:
If you think about the fact, for example, that a lot of trans people are unable to actually come out in society, but they can adopt their true gender identities within the context of Second Life or in the context of the metaverse. There are real tangible benefits to allowing people to express their identities on these platforms.
Preston:
But when you begin to erase, or wash away, or disable some of these identities that are very, very important to people, and are core to the essence of who they are, that’s where things get really, really interesting. And I don’t want to be in a world where we have a very poor notion of the richness of who we are as people in our physical environments.
Preston:
For example, having accessible pathways and accessible ramps in physical spaces is so important. And if we think that just having everyone become able-bodied, having everyone erase their own disabilities in a virtual world is a way to solve that problem, it’s actually going to intensify that problem. Because a lot of people are going to go into that virtual world, and have a very different sense of what disability means from seeing it in the real world.
Preston:
So I don’t want to talk too much about this because there is a lot in my book, and I quote a lot of folks like Molly Bloom, disability experts, accessibility experts, who talk at length and who discuss at length why it is that this avatar building in the metaverse is so dangerous and so risky.
Preston:
And I think it’s very important for us to recognize that the metaverse is not ready. Let alone the fact that of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse didn’t have legs for the longest time on the avatars. That’s not even scratching the surface of the problem space that we have now uncovered by allowing us to develop avatars in the metaverse.
Preston:
It’s very interesting because in the book, I really steer clear of the discussion of avatars and that discussion. Because in my opinion, when we think about the world around us and how we interact with it, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense for us to completely externalize ourselves from the user that we embody.
Preston:
I think that it really makes sense for us to honor the identity of the user, honor who they are, and make sure to kind of start there, before we begin to think about whether or not avatars make sense in a future metaverse that might exist in the future, but also might serve to erase some of the richness of our identities.
Preston:
So I talk a lot about both these things. Both the accessibility of immersive technologies, and the problematic and very challenging notions of the metaverse, and avatars, and so on and so forth. It’s not just what we see in Hollywood with Ready Player One or some of these VR movies. It goes very, very deep into some of the notions of how we are as a society, how we treat historically oppressed minorities in society, how we perceive them, and how we want to allow for those sorts of biases to creep in, in unexpected ways, within the context of immersive content as well.
Larry:
I love that. Ending an episode which is really about virtual reality with, “No, let’s keep actual reality in mind, and appreciate, and enjoy, and honor, and express the actual variety, and diversity, and loveliness of humanity.” That’s a great note to end on.
Larry:
Hey, one last thing, Preston, before we wrap up. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch to follow you online or connect?
Preston:
Yeah, thanks Larry. So the best way to be in touch with me is to go to my website, preston.so. So you can use the contact form, that’s preston.so/contact. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, preston.so/newsletter. I’m no longer on Twitter, and I didn’t really have time to create a Mastodon, so you can find me on LinkedIn.
Preston:
And by the way, if you want more insights about immersive content, about things that I’m working on in that space, you can go to my LinkedIn and my website, and you’ll see a lot of really great resources in writing about immersive content.
Preston:
I’ve written several blog posts that deal with things like storyboarding, which is something that is much more important than immersive content than it is for other types of content. I talk a lot about exactly what you’ll find in this book. And you can also find a full preview of the book on my website preston.so as well.
Larry:
Sweet. Thanks so much, Preston. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Preston:
Thanks for having me again, Larry. And I hope to come back again soon.
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