VR has a very practical aspect; it’s exactly the right tool to get stuck into the kinds of problems that we’re simply at the wrong scale to be able to observe or solve.

One early example of this emerged from a marriage of virtual reality and the nanoscale. Over at the University of North Carolina they’d already prototyped the ‘Nanomanipulator’ — using a combination of atomic force microscopy, virtual reality, and haptic feedback to produce a system that allowed people to “feel” the surfaces of atoms and materials.

UNC’s Nanomanipulator allowed you to run your fingers over atoms!

It’s still one of the most amazing devices I’ve ever seen — it’s still an outstanding example of how to use virtual reality to give us a view into a scale that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

So when a friend told me about nano-one — a group of physicists and programmers out of the University of California at San Diego, I got very excited. They’re busily crafting a title for the Vive which allows you to do atomic-scale assembly inside VR.

Just as you’d do in the classroom, you use the stick-and-ball model to assemble molecules from individual atoms. A great way to teach chemistry — particularly organic chemistry.

But that’s just the beginning. Almost every Wikipedia page describing a chemical compound has a structural image of that molecule. We need to be able to go ‘click’ on that image, and immediately pop into a fully immersive exploration of that molecule.

And that’s where WebVR comes in.

WebGL brought high-performance computer graphics to the browser. WebVR adds another set of Javascript interfaces that turn any HMD into a browser.

There’s nothing particularly hard about WebVR — but it does need to be supported in the browser. Right now that means you need a special build of a browser to do WebVR.

But that won’t long be the case. WebVR is a key component in Google’s Daydream VR project to turn every high-end Android smartphone into a fully capable VR system, so Google Chrome on both desktop and mobile is rapidly being extended to incorporate WebVR capabilities.

By this time next year WebVR will be on hundreds of millions of desktops, and hundreds of millions more smartphones.

At that point it’s no longer a question of access, but a question of content. WebVR asks us to revisit the project of the Web, with new eyes.

So now we need to ask ourselves a bigger question than what comes next — we need to ask ourselves why.

Here’s my thinking:

The Web is for the sharing of knowledge.

VR is for the sharing of experience.

A hundred years of Constructivism, from Piaget to Papert (Vale, Seymour!) to Resnick has demonstrated beyond argument that kids learn best when they can explore for themselves, conduct experiments, make hypotheses, test them, make mistakes, make revisions, and make experience their guide into an embodied knowledge.

It’s this idea that “knowing is doing and doing, knowing” that we got from Maturana & Varela in The Tree of Knowledge. With VR — and specifically, with WebVR — we have a new capacity for putting this idea into practice.

Make no mistake, VR is as big a deal as the Web. Perhaps even bigger. This means there’s a huge task before us — we need to build all of the frameworks for experiential learning that are suddenly possible.

We’re starting from nearly zero. One of the big and very pleasant differences this time around is the existence of tools like Unity, that make the creation of immersive virtual worlds much, much easier. But so much more is needed.

There are no really great tools for authoring in WebVR — and that’s hardly surprising, given it’s brand new. But we need something that’s the equivalent of Canva for WebVR, so that people can easily drag-and-drop some elements together to create an experience that is, if not perfect, at least good enough.

We need a new generation of tools. And of course the people who create those tools will need to eat and pay their mortgages while they make these tools.

In other words, we need a functioning ecosystem if we want a sustainable WebVR. It won’t be enough to have Google creating a browser while leaving everything else to the whims of the community. The community will burn out.

Instead, we need to give WebVR — and VR more generally — a focus in the real, in solving real problems.

The Atlantic published an article titled “The Age of Entanglement”, linking the recent shutdown of Delta Airlines — seemingly because of a software glitch — with Edsger Dijkstra’s 1988 warning that humanity was becoming overwhelmed with ‘conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before’.

Welcome to 2016: Everywhere we look we’ve constructed networked systems of such complexity that even testing their resilience and capacity to cope with random failures has been tossed into the ‘too hard’ bin.

Why? In part it’s because we have no good tools for modeling complexity — because it’s just too complex.

This is where VR (and AR and mixed reality, these distinctions are neither important nor meaningful) can provide incredible value.

One example of what this can be found in a VR title that could be the most influential of the current generation — not so much for what it is, as for what it represents.

SoundStage is a drag-and-drop electronic music studio simulator. Recommended.

SoundStage provides a full studio for the electronic musician — via virtual simulation. Just as an electronic musician would work in the real world, you take various devices — waveform generators, sequencers, triggers, and so forth — ‘patching’ them together using virtual patch cables, running one output into another input, on and on until you get to a virtual speaker, which translates all of that into a sound.

While I’m a bit overwhelmed by SoundStage — I don’t have much experience with any of those bits of kit — my friends who make electronic music dive right in, creating hugely complex patches of equipment, creating sounds that would be almost impossible to recreate in the real world — because SoundStage gives them access to a lot more equipment than they could fit into their studios.

What if, instead of bits of electronic musicians kit, these modules represented bits of business process? Could we patch the pieces together and find within them a better understanding of the operations of the organisation? Could we even work to improve it? Can this kind of simulation be that tool we need to manage the deep conceptual hierarchies?

Visicalc made both the Apple ][ and the spreadsheet must have tools.

These simulations could easily become something that’s as fundamental to the operation of modern business as the spreadsheet was forty years ago. We think nothing of spreadsheets today, but as a business planning tool, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s spreadsheets allowed businesses become much more flexible and responsive organisations. Spreadsheets changed business.

Simulation has the same potential. And it’s not going to be dragging process blocks around on a screen. People will be diving in, embodied within the simulation, and moving things around — physically. It’s that kind of embodied experience where the real learning happens, where the real insights are gained, where the real progress is made.

Complex systems with complex interactions are exactly the kind work VR is made for.

We’re on the cusp of what we’ll soon be calling ‘The Age of Simulation’, when many of the deep problems of business find their way into models and tools that allow them to be rearranged as easily as cells on a spreadsheet. And where the business process goes, business follows.

This is the opportunity opening up before us, and there’s more in it than we had imagined even just six months ago. We have one percent of the tools we’re going to need to make it all successful, but we can use business process simulation and innovation as the engine to drive the development of the rest of those tools, because businesses will save money and make money using those tools.

It may just be — this time around — VR can pay its own way.