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Watch The Talk - TouchDesigner: Bedrock of the Metaverse?

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Files

Download t3i, book.tox and skywave here. The Worldtree client needs some more work.G

Mutek

November of last year I travelled to Tokyo to speak at the Mutek 10 Year TouchDesigner1 event. I went to share my vision of the '''Metaverse''' and how TouchDesigner fit in along with experiments. It could have been cleared, so I’ll elaborate here - in my own style3.

First, the title in meant to stir thoughts. Many of us (myself included) have reservations with that one guy and generally, the vision of virtual avatars and empty vr worlds. And, bedrock? Wouldn’t that be silicon4?

Limits of a Word

I feel the conversation is stiffled as many misattribute the idea and limit themselves with a rigid concept. The term ‘Metaverse’ was coined by Neil Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, where among other things, a linguistic virus wipes its users. In his world, the Metaverse5 is a parallel world we enter to live out our wildest fantasies and live a parallel life. I haven’t read the book in its entirety though the ideas are pervasive in the circles I’ve run in for half a decade now - but it’s not how I think about it6.

I engage with the concept broadly, and believe the word is a placeholder for a future where our relationship with computers and information networks transforms to something we no longer identify with ‘the internet’ as we know it with its pages and addresses. I think we’re in the middle of that transformation, where our recognizable interfaces, ways of interacting with each-other change. My hope is that with new ways of communicating, we might be less lonely and less depressed and that it’s necessary for us as a species to move past the dangers of hyper-surveillance. My theory is that expression of self is a core element of mental health, then there’s a chance that our new interfaces could be a pathway to improving our collective health.

TouchDesigner

TouchDesigner, in its particular place and time, may well be instrumental in the transformation of our interfaces into something new. If the """Metaverse""" is a placeholder for a future state of human-data interaction, then this software which has helped many develop a more refined interaction with data through visual and other intelligences. To me, it’s a stepping stone towards expanded interactive media literacy.

In this view, TouchDesigner could be seen as a ‘centerpoint’ in a conversation between computation and human’s designing interfaces - and not just engineer humans, game designer humans, or technologist humans. TouchDesigner lets designers, artists and other minds have conversations about the way data and humans interact - so much so that you have young people building interfaces with their bodies, evoking augmented appendages.

Connect these spry interfaces together over a network and humans are interacting using their own visual languages in ways they never have before. This is a vision of the future of the internet that excites me.

Links / Sources:

  1. TouchDesigner Tokyo 2025

  2. Fear of Public Speaking, my own acronym. Over-orientation towards the opinions of the crowd.

  3. I work with computers, but am an Artist first. As an artist I’m not overly oriented towards building arguments through formal constructions of references and theory. My approach, since childhood, has been to allow things to emerge from my subconscious, and to work with my visual imagination to see and explore new things. I am a painter that works with my imagination as material to explore the things that are important to me, mostly with computers.

  4. 🥁 Silicon is a chemical element used as the semiconductor material in most modern electronics, including CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and many solar cells. It’s like a rock.

  5. Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson, page 24. Intrestesting to note that in Stephenson’s vision, a universal language is a pathway for an virus and the solution is fragmentation of language. This is similar to my proposal of a ‘polymorphic metaverse’ - though it was not directly inspired by it.

  6. Many CEOs, authors and theorist engage with this rigid idea of the Metaverse as something we will peer through headsets into, before being sucked in. By the time we are compelled to leave our world behind for a virtual, the technology may well be unrecognizable. Can organic material floating on the surface of our eyes be trained to dance to signal and emit light, I hope not.

D. Dude, chill out with the hyperbole.

G. You may be expecting nice polished open-source files here. I’m afraid it’s all very much still in the works, slowly. I’m hoping others will be excited about this and want to contribute. …