You’re meeting me in my crazy laboratory,” says the man speaking to me over Skype – exactly the sort you’d expect to be an inventor, dreaming up things most people have never considered, in his “cave” of components and wires. “My kids say I could use all this to build a space shuttle.”
The man is Nolan Bushnell, best known as the creator of the Atari games console, the device that laid the foundations for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries. Having gone on to establish a number of successful technology businesses, Bushnell is now turning his hand to virtual reality – and plans to take the medium to the next level with Modal, a system which uses standing sensors, combined with a full body-tracking suit and VR headset. It’s designed to focus on commercial installations, with the technology, developed for the higher end of the VR market.
“We’re focusing strictly on what I call commercial capability. That means the systems need to be very robust,” says Bushnell, who at this point has to excuse himself to respond to a half-built robot that’s interrupting our conversation.
“We can put 10 people into the same VR construct,” he says, once he has quietened the robot. “We can track users over an area the size of a football field and we can set up and tear down in 10 to 15 minutes. Put all those things together and it means we can do industrial training, create laser tag installations and entertainment constructs.”
“We’re doing really good foundational code so it will be easy for software creators to put their software on top of it,” he says. “We’re going to create an app store. We want to be the nexus, the centre of gravity for all the commercial uses of VR. If you’re a police training company, for example, and want to do something in VR – we’re your guy, we’re the platform.”
Mass appeal
The key to the technology’s success, says Bushnell, will be if it can appeal to all customers, not just enthusiasts. He’s planning the same approach he took when developing the first games for Atari.
“Any time you have a new technology, start out really simple. There are some standard gameplay mechanics that are good places to start. For example, we remade Pong in VR, with the player acting as the bat – there’s nothing simpler.”
With virtual and augmented reality a relatively new medium –at least to the mainstream – Bushnell believes that understanding it as a concept will also be key to its success or failure.
“We’re trying to understand VR as a new kind of movie,” he says. “With a movie, the director controls the point of view. But what happens when the viewer can wander around and choose their own standing point? They become like a ghost in the scene that’s being played out, choosing where they stand. Is that fun? Is that interesting? We’re trying to work that out.”
VR, of course, raises some challenges and these obstacles will rear their heads sooner rather than later.
“The downside of anything new is the rule of unintended consequences – there’s always going to be a ‘gotcha’ somewhere down the line,” he says. “What if someone falls over in a VR construct – who’s liable?”
Bushnell compares the situation to when a child runs, falls and injures himself in a Chuck E Cheese, the American arcade-style FEC chain he founded in the late 1970s.
“Sometimes parents think we’re responsible and occasionally they sue. Those things are part of the business risk of doing what you’re doing. People are much more unpredictable than technology.”
An inventor by passion, not just profession, Bushnell has an eye on what’s coming next, with some radical predictions for the not-too-distant future.
“In 10 years, I think it’s going to be normal for people to have some kind of a brain implant,” he says. “You’ll be able to augment memory, communicate with others and things like that. This will be done by combining wetware, not just hardware.”
Chiefly a term drawn from science fiction, wetware uses a model for artificial systems based on biochemical processes. The technology would create messages manifested through chemical and electrical influences that spread across the body, based on the idea that human brain cells act as computer systems. According to Bushnell, as wetware technology is developed, it will advance quickly.
“Once you start having those interfaces into your brain and into your nervous system then hijacking that for entertainment is going to be easy,” he says. “Thirty years from now I think it’s going to be possible to jack into the system – like in The Matrix.”
