Notes from Laval Virtual - Europe's largest XR fair

The conference is large and colourful and shows the full breadth of European incursions into virtual worlds and its requisite paraphernalia, with everything from EEG-based VR controllers to increasingly complex haptic solutions to mimic the simple feeling of holding a cup of coffee.

I tried strapping a contraption to my hand that should allow me to feel the fur of a virtual dog. I felt a tingling sensation in my fingertips, but I've petted too many dogs in my life to be easily tricked. Why not let me touch an imagined virtual being whose fractal fur I've never felt before?

On the same theme was a large and janky multidirectional treadmill that allowed the user to walk in virtual worlds, instead of just floating around as usual. Sisyphus must be happy.

Oh, the lengths we'll go to mimic the conditions of the real inside the virtual. I assume part is economical, as most are resigned to the fact that the only economically viable use-case for VR is training, and if you teach someone to mount the wheels on a BMW you need to give them haptic feedback when they bump the car (which I did multiple times - no assembly line for me.)

A particularly effective tool was a mask for immersive scents by i-Oasis, which I wore while exploring a virtual greenhouse; as I came close to a flower, its smell indeed grew stronger, which expanded the perceived spatiality of the experience in ways I've never experienced before. Inside the mask were 10 little vials with different oils, the sense of smell too closely tied to the wet and sticky mess of the molecular world to be fooled by digitally produced waves. Maybe this messiness is what's needed for truly believable virtual worlds.

The visuals of the flowers, however good the scents, could never get near the radiance of blossoming cherry trees dotting the farmland outside the conference center. Of course it's just a demo - but again, let me smell that which doesn't exist, the dithered sweat of strange imagined beings, the scents of 4D crystals, the olfactory landscape of a distant alien planet unlike anything I've experienced on earth.

It feels telling for our time that we have created technology that allows us to invent new worlds, but mainly use it to mimic the real one. The tech is here, we just need the imagination.

A beautiful counterpoint to this is the technology for highly detailed volumetric videos by companies like Gracia and 4D views. Particularly, in Gracia's boxing example I could see the individual hairs tremble as the hits flew in slow motion - an incredible tool for studying messy processes in perfect detail. Combine this with the scent technology and sports got a whole new dimension.

Imagine dance performances recorded in 3D and placed in AR as a permanent artwork on a public square - performance as permanent public art.

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On everyone's tongues, apart from the tariffs, is of course AI, but not always in the celebratory fashion that would be expected from a tech conference, rather with the tone one use to speak about a distant cousin one never thought much of but who ultimately ended up with a far more successful career than oneself. A healthy mix of jealousy, annoyance, and awe. XR used to be cool, but has been on a steady decline since Zuck's claiming of the field, and the rise of a new tech hype that has actual meaningful impact on people’s lives seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the self-esteem of the field.

I understand where this emotion is coming from, but I think it stems from what, for me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what XR is. XR is still put in the box labelled "Technology", when it should be in the box labelled "Media."

During a workshop with the European commission with the purpose of mapping the current regulatory and business obstacles in the field several people voiced the difficulty in convincing clients of the benefits of XR, because they have no experience with the technology and disregard it as a fad. However, as soon as someone tries it they immediately see its potential.

This is something that I feel a lot in my work as well, but I believe the issue is that XR is represented as a tech solution and not a media solution. You don't go to a potential client and say you want to make a film, and then spend 10 minutes talking about what type of camera and lighting you will use on set. You talk about the communication strategy and the content, and then maybe in the last sentence, you mention that it will be a film.

XR is just another media form, an interesting one as it intersects various fields and capabilities in novel ways, but still a media type. Focusing on the tech aspect is putting the cart before the horse.