Escaping the PhysicalTranscending Visual Barriers to Success

In a podcast by Second Life CEO, Philip Rosedale commented that Virtual Worlds have a higher density of usage in areas of bad weather & good band width. Cold, dark days in Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest encourage the Digerati to escape into virtual environments consisting of sunny seaside plazas filled with fountains and flowers while networking with an international community of creative technical leaders. Time zones are transcended. There are events scheduled round-the-clock and round-the-world, with translation software in place to minimize language barriers.

In Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, characters use a 3-D immersive digital environment to escape a depressing physical existence in a futuristic depiction of what is currently the Western United States. Mr. Ng, a Vietnam helicopter crash victim escapes his paraplegic body in a virtual re-creation of a French Indochinese plantation, complete with rice paddies, while running Ng Securities. A pizza delivery boy (calling himself the "deliverator") escapes his mundane job as a nobody, to become a warrior Prince of the cybernetic Underworld in the Metaverse.

Adolescent patients undergoing solid organ (kidney, lung, and heart) transplant procedures at Children’s Hospital Boston are able to escape some of the limitations of their physical bodies through "identity construction environments," a term coined by Marina Umaschi Bers during her doctoral thesis work in 2001. Bers created Zora, a three-dimensional virtual world, as part of her doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab, providing tools for children to create, chat, navigate, and inhabit a virtual city. Young people were able to communicate with other patients, nurses or doctors with a greater feeling of privacy. With avatars often in the form of cartoon characters with fictional names, many patients reported that they were able to distract themselves from the dialysis, enjoying virtual mobility with more anonymity to discuss embarrassing concerns. Bers received a 2005 National Science Foundation Career Award and five-year grant for her work on virtual communities of learning and care.

Visual Barriers to Success

What we look like does undoubtedly have an impact on how successful we are in life. Some determining factors include:
Height
Kristie M. Engemann and Michael T. Owyang discuss the effects that visual appearances have within the business world in their article "So Much for That Merit Raise: The Link between Wages and Appearance" April of 2005. "In a recent book, journalist Malcolm Gladwell reported the results of his survey of about one-half of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. He found that the average CEO is approximately 3 inches taller than the average American man, who stands 5-foot-9."
Economists Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite and Dan Silverman found that for white men in the United States of the same height, the one who was taller at 16 would most likely earn the higher wage.
Weight
Economists Susan Averett and Sanders Korenman studied the effects of weight on wages. They found that women who were obese earned 17 percent lower wages. A typical white woman weighing 64 pounds more than average, earns about 9 percent less.
Beauty
Hamermesh and Biddle found a person with below-average looks tended to earn 9 percent less per hour, and an above-average person tended to earn 5 percent more per hour than an average-looking person.
Race
Although we enact laws in an attempt to eliminate discrimination on the grounds of race in employment, education housing and the provision of goods and services, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission cite examples of case studies where laws have not solved the problems.
In fact, in 2004, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received more than 27,000 complaints of racial discrimination, settled nearly 3,000 cases, and levied more than $61 million in fines, according to the most recent statistics available.
Age
The brilliant teenager is passed over for being too young while the experienced applicant is thought to have too few years left. Companies claim to want experience, yet they don’t want someone who is old enough to have had that experience. Timothy Leary's mantra of the 60's of "Don’t trust anyone over 30" is just as limiting as those who become so set in their ways that they will not open to new ideas.

What will happen when we transcend these physical barriers?

Edward Castronova (Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University) discusses Synthetic Economies and the Social Question in a July 2005 paper. He sees a future where mental abilities will dominate over physical attributes as predictors of wealth. With avatar-based educational opportunities and business relationships, the sources of these unfair inequalities of age, race, height, race, and beauty are removed.

I’m curious. When given a choice, I wonder how many will choose to embrace the uniqueness of their physical attributes in order to connect with other individuals with similar backgrounds and experiences? And how many will choose to create new bodies that they feel more accurately reflect who they are on the inside?
How will these technology advancements impact our society?

Moving from Exploring Outer Space to Inner Space Potentiality

With the penetration of Outer Space a reality, writers of the 1960s and 1970s turned to the possibilities of exploring Inner Space, focusing on psychological and spiritual scenarios to seduce us into other worlds. This brand of intellectual, metaphysical science fiction plotlines made all things seem possible.

It was an era of staving off aging with meditation, thinking thin with self-hypnosis and achieving prosperity by drawing pictures in your mind. Hypnotists made big money claiming they could change your habits and self-help book sales soared.

However, documented stories of achievements possible through the untapped powers of the human mind did little to alleviate the immediate constraints placed upon adolescents undergoing chemotherapy or war victims missing arms and legs. Visuals play such an important part in communication. It is difficult to get past the ravages of illness or the deformities resulting from violence. It is hard to transcend physical limitations of appearance to reveal the inherent beauty of the soul.

Today, I see the technological science fiction merging with the intellectual, metaphysical science fiction to create a world where we can indeed create our own reality. In massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), like the popular Second Life, I can "Explore an ever-changing 3D landscape. Meet new and exciting people. Create a masterpiece - or an empire," Linden Labs homepage promises me.

I choose my size, shape, sex and the color of my skin. There are sliders to adjust the length of my nose, the cleft of my chin, the spacing between my eyes and a myriad of other details. I can be young or old, thin or fat, or black or white. I can even be green or blue, a monster, an alien, a bunny rabbit or a cartoon character.

How will identity and personality be challenged by these new possibilities to leave the body? How will the relationship between the real and the virtual and between body and mind, be affected by immersion into Virtual Environments? Do some environments encourage escape from the physical world more than others?

From Science Fiction to Virtual Reality

In 1869, science fiction writer Jules Verne in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, theorizes about the possibilities of diving - without reliance on surface-supplied air. With his unique mix of scientific fact and fiction, Verne is remembered for his uncanny ability to predict inventions such as airplanes, submarines, television, guided missiles, space satellites, space shuttles, and scuba gear.

In 1929, the scientific accuracy in the launching of a rocket in Fritz Lang's last silent movie “Woman In The Moon” is absolutely astonishing. Lang depicts a trip to the moon 40 years before it actually happened. To this day we mimic the counting down to zero to launch a rocket from this film.

In 1946, when portable two-way communication seemed like an impossibly futuristic device, Dick Tracy captured the imaginations of young fans with his wristwatch radio. Star Trek was decades ahead of its time with tasers and communicators.

Author Neal Stephenson recently created an online 3D Metaverse in his 1993 published novel “Snow Crash”, where technology blurs the lines between virtual and reality with the inter-weaving of physical and digital characters and plots. It is rumored that this science fiction novel was one of the inspirations for the development of “Second Life”, a 3D Virtual World where people meet to socialize, shop, attend educational classes, do business, and even engage in political campaigning.

History appears to reinforce the belief that if we can envision it, we can create it. How do we want our world to look tomorrow? What are you envisioning today?