Presentation - Virtual Reality SIG 31 August 1993 (I walk up to the presentation area, brown paper bag in my hand...) Hi, I'm Mark Pesce; "Digital Hoodlum", Cyberqueer, researcher, writer, and entrepreneur. I'd like to take you on a little flight of fancy - so fasten your seatbelts, suspend your disbelief, and come on an excursion into the near future... It's October 1997, and I've just come back from "The Good Guys", where I just burnt up about $2000.00 on my VISA. But look at what I've got... (I reach into the bag, and pull out a MiniCD player) First, for just $500.00, I've got myself the third- generation 3DO multimedia "playstation". True color, real-time video texture mapping, and all that stuff. Keeps on getting smaller, doesn't it? (Pull out the safety glasses) This was the expensive item - a Sega HMD. Let me tell you something about its design: it was a collaboration between several companies you might be familiar with: Redmond Productions Incorporated, or RPI, as they're more familiarly known, contributed the design of the head-mount and multi-megapixel displays, Ono-Sendai contributed a high-accuracy orientation detector, Sega handled the manufacturing and distribution. Quite pricey, over a thousand dollars, but worth every penny.... One more thing I should mention - this head- mount is quite intelligent. Turns out that part of the design was contributed by a company in Palo Alto called Biocontrol. The rim of this head- mount is lined with myoelectric and electroencephalic sensors. This head-mount can read the muscle movements in my face and eyes, and even read my brain waves - to some degree. It knows where my foveal centers are, and my 3DO knows to render those in high resolution. Quite slick, and, for the price, worth every penny. (Pull out the CD entitled "Thelemic Sex Magick") Of course, I'm going to need some software - and this fits the bill nicely. Comes in one of four basic flavors - male/female, female/male, male/male and female/female. With a full suite of configurations for various dominance and submissive options, body type preferences, and a variety of stimulation parameters. This cost me another eighty bucks. And finally, what I've really been waiting for.... (Pull out the dildo, look at it, saying) Actually, these are getting rather old hat. After the first dildonic device appeared two years ago, there was quite a frenzy for them, in certain circles. I never tried one, because one of my friends told me the software sucked, (well, perhaps that's the wrong word to use) and that I should wait until the second generation of products came down the pike. That's typical - never buy the first revision of anything. Like Windows NT.... (I pop the disc into the player, pop the head- mount on, and idly play with the dildo...) I want to talk about this disc some more - it's got some very special software on it, and it's been selling like hotcakes - in fact, it may be driving sales of the 3DO, rather than the other way around. Sort of like 1-2-3 and the old IBM PC... This disc is the product of a joint American/Indian development agreement - you know the story; some marketing types in Santa Clara, a horde of cheap PhDs. in Calcutta cutting code for $25,000 a year and loving it. And this disc is designed specifically to work with this head-mount. This software cares about my foveal centers and brain waves... About two years ago, two doctoral candidates at Loma Linda University Research Center were performing research on the physiological analogs to certain states of "heightened" consciousness. To do this they got some experts, perhaps one should say "adepts", in these various capabilities. Yogis, Shamans and the like paraded through the lab, got wired and recorded while they performed their shtick, and, after all of the data was collected, these researchers used a supercomputer for feature extraction from the recorded data. Their results were very interesting, and pointed to the existence of a well defined electroencephalic "signature" for most of these states. Hardly surprising, but, for the first time, these signatures were identified. They published this work early in 1996, in Nature, and so it fell into the hands of some Silicon Valley marketing types. Clinical researchers began to explore applications of this recovered knowledge, now "respectable" because it had been put into a scientific framework. But these marketing types said, "Hey! Maybe we can use this for something...something fun!" Among the more interesting "adepts" who participated in the scientific study were a pair of experts in the intricacies of Tantric Yoga. Tantric Yoga comes in two forms; "white", and, for lack of a better terminology, "sexual". White Tantric Yoga involves prolonged meditations and motions which are used to raise the "kundalini" energy in an individual. This body of knowledge contains extremely useful techniques for stress management, relaxation, and so forth. The other form of Tantric Yoga has a strong sexual component. This was the type practiced by the adepts who visited Loma Linda, and, during the study, they maintained a state of high sexual excitation for twenty hours. They could have gone longer (and had before), but they'd filled up the researchers' disk storage. All of it. So the article in Nature dutifully reported the signature associated with this state of consciousness. That was the one which interested the marketing types in Santa Clara. They passed it along to their Ph.D. sweatshop in Calcutta, with a little Post-It note attached, saying, "Can we do this?" All of this ended up in the hands of the senior programmer, who began a detailed analysis of the problem. With alpha versions of the new Sega head-mount, he began a detailed investigation of the phenomena associated with this brainwave signature, and the phenomena which could create it. He had no shortage of volunteers to use for his tests. It took fifteen months of twelve hour days, but, in the end he'd developed an algorithm, based primarily in a software neural network, which would induce this brainwave state in about 73% of his test subjects. He felt that was good enough. The marketing types bitched, but finally let up, after the product was received very favorably in beta testing. It was released at the end of September in 1997, and had only been on the market about two weeks when I bought it. Of course, I didn't know any of this when I bought the software - I'd just heard about it on the net. So, let's get the software started - (Pop CD into player, pop head-mount on, play with dildo some more...) Here we go - I am one of the 73% that this algorithm works for. Essentially, there's some real-time processing of my brainwaves going on, which is being fed into the neural net, which then weights its outputs to the software. In so doing, it gradually trains the inputs to the head-mount in such a way that I start producing the brainwave signature associated with the ecstatic state. This is a very creative example of a feedback loop. One of the more interesting aspects of sexual Tantric Yoga is that it avoids the normal bounding condition of human sexuality, that is, orgasm, by holding it off, and channeling the sexual energies differently. It is possible, then, to enter a very high level of sexual excitation, and remain there for as long as desired. My first question: Will I ever want to turn this machine off? My brain wants pleasure, wants to avoid pain. We've known this since Freud and Maslow and Skinner. At this point, the absence of pleasure might be construed as pain. My brain is changing, electrically, chemically, physically, as I interact with this device; different neural pathways are being setup, others are being torn down. Since this is a "natural" phenomenon, its unlikely that I will acclimate to it; it's not a drug, but rather, a change in my entire neurophysiology. My next question: Have I become addicted to the software? If I do manage to turn it off, which at this point is uncertain, how long will I be able to go before I need to return to that blissful state of being? Will I be able to function, unaugmented, on my "normal" plane of existence? Or have I become an "elad", that is, an electrical addict, as described by Michael Chricton in "The Terminal Man"? My final question: How hard would it be to do this? I've outlined an example, and, admittedly, it relies on a few things we don't yet understand completely, but none of this is magick, just well applied science. If not 1997, when? Sooner? These are the kind of questions we're confronting - they're neither moral nor ethical considerations. We're creating powerful mind-altering substances. Tantric Yoga and other esoteric disciplines are taught slowly, imparted together with a body of knowledge which is primarily cautionary. Thus, when these states are achieved through unaugmented means, the individual can mediate the experience positively, without becoming bound do it. But we will shortly be able to short-circuit this process, provide the essence of the experience to people neither trained nor ready to receive it. What are we doing? That's all I have to say, and all I have to ask. Thank you.