Award-winning creator Lucas Rizzotto is running an exciting social VR experiment – a beautifully crafted immersive world inhabited by people’s most personal thoughts and wishes in his new project, Where Thoughts Go.
The Garage is a big proponent of exploring and experimenting in the augmented, virtual, and mixed reality spaces. With our futuristic new Reality Room open to employees in seven different Garage locations, we’ve attracted a few luminaries who wanted to see the space. One of them is Lucas Rizzotto, digital experiences designer, artist, musician, and technologist.
Mike Pell, Principal Design Lead for The Garage, sat down recently with Lucas in the Reality Room to experience first-hand and talk about his soon to be released project, Where Thoughts Go – a uniquely introspective, interactive, and community-based virtual reality world where you just might discover something of yourself in the audio reflections of others.
Mike: Tell me about your new project, Lucas.
Lucas: Where Thoughts Go is an emotional, immersive social network. It’s also a bunch of other things. Still figuring out exactly what to call it, but it makes people cry.
Mike: Why did you create Where Thoughts Go?
Lucas: I think that the internet is too much of a cold place right now. It connects people to information well, but it doesn’t connect people to people – our humanity gets abstracted away in our online interactions, and this is mainly because preserving it was never a priority for the vast majority of technologists.
My priorities are to connect people emotionally through technology, and through those connections enable people to become a more thoughtful, intelligent and healthier versions of themselves. Replace addiction loops with growth loops. Create software that’s designed to be transformative, touching and magical.
Our value metrics don’t come from how many minutes we steal from you a day, but from how much we have positively impacted your life after you finish a session. That makes both the internet and the Earth a better, more human, kinder place to live in.
I made Where Thoughts Go because I love storytelling, technology and art. I kept working on it because I wanted to have that kind of impact.
Mike: How did you arrive at this warm and inviting format for probing some very personal aspects of people’s lives?
Lucas: Humans understand the world through stories, so the whole app is structured like a series of narratives. The questions the story asks in the beginning are lighthearted, become more serious and profound as the narrative unfolds. There are twists, turns, surprises and climaxes, and all of these are used to design your own personal hero’s journey: your own character arc. You walk in as one person, you go through this experience and then you walk out changed. More self-aware. More understanding of the world’s emotions.
Mike: I did feel like I was in complete control of my experience throughout. Was that aspect a specific design goal for you going in?
Lucas: I’m a huge advocate of agency. You always have full control over the pace of the experience and the order of which you tackle things. You can say whatever you want. You can listen to every single message and only move forward after you’ve explored every single person in the room. Where Thoughts Go is a story about humanity, and we want the world to tell it as they see fit. We just create the foundation for it.
But I’ll admit that designing narratives for VR isn’t especially easy, especially if you come from a more traditional filmmaking background. In film, we have full control over what people see and how it’s framed. But in VR, it’s important that the user always has control and that everything around you remains physical & interactive in some way shape or form – if not, there should be a narrative reason for it.
And in Where Thoughts Go, you have full control. But that also means you have full responsibility over the story and your impact in it.
Mike: You ask people to experience this alone in the room. Why?
Lucas: This is an introspective journey. Where Thoughts Go asks you some very personal questions and the only way to be truly honest with yourself is by not feeling observed. This is one of the key reasons why it’s an anonymous piece: but also why you must experience it alone to feel its effects.
Mike: Why did you choose to rely on the voices of real people?
Lucas: A lot of storytellers have told me that they’re waiting for AI to create emotionally complex characters in immersive narrative. I think it’s much more interesting to tap into the already existing emotional complexity of people and bring their stories into the light.
Thankfully, it worked. People’s personal stories are beautiful, unexpected and complex beyond belief. There’s no way I could have written them. It’s so much more meaningful and so much more valuable to the listener because it’s all true.
Mike: Where would you like to see this project go?
Lucas: There’s a lot we’re working on, but I really want to develop this project so it becomes an ever-growing parallel Universe of emotional exchanges, self-development and growth. I want this to become a little corner of the internet where you can be a person, a place where you can connect with people at a human level, completely absent of bias. A social media company. A health company. An educational company. All at once.
And the educational aspect is worth mentioning too. There’s not a lot of products that teach you how to grow emotionally. We have self-help books, but how do you acquire emotional intelligence in the world? Perhaps there’s an opportunity here for us to create a product that actively improves the emotional intelligence of our community.
Mike: Will this be a significant revelation for some people?
Lucas: Yes. This won’t impact everyone in the same way, but it’ll stay with some and never let go. This is an experience that exposes the emotional complexities of the world and gives you a platform to be self-reflective. Our hope is that after you walk out of the experience you’ll never be looking at people on the street in the same way.
Mike: This really is an outstanding piece of work, Lucas. It’s creative, it’s artistic, it’s technically very good. Best of luck with your experiment!
Lucas: Thank you! I do hope it works. It has no right to work in this world, but if it does, it’s going to be incredibly meaningful.
Find out more about Where Thoughts Go and other projects at http://lucasrizzotto.com/ and follow on Twitter @_LucasRizzotto
