I was presenting at a teleconference earlier this week for OneWorld. It’s a great organisation, and all my fellow teleconferencers were from non-profits, so I felt like there was a sympathetic audience on the other end of the line for my presentation of highlights from NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference.

But really, I had no clue whether they were sympathetic or not.

As I was presenting, everyone else’s line was muted, so my words went completely, disturbingly uninterrupted. Not even a hushed cough or a shifting of buttocks on a chair to be heard. And, of course, there was no visual feedback. Were these quiet folk nodding? Sneering? Snoring? Cheering me on? Or wishing I’d finish? Were they, indeed, quiet at all? There was no way to tell.

Teleconferencing is a silent, squirming ordeal for presenters.  It’s not quite so bad when everyone’s an active participant, or there’s an accompanying web-based component, or some other way to provide interaction. But for a straightforward talk, it’s downright nasty.

The best part of making any presentation is feeling the mood of the audience and responding to that mood. You can start off flat and still win them over if you use the visual cues, eye contact, subtle shifting of attention to help you remould your talk to fit the room. Fat chance of that when you’re speaking in the teleconferencing cone of silence.

Web 3.0: Goodbye teleconferences? 

After my bit was over in the teleconference, the host invited questions. I’d been talking about web 2.0 sites and services and someone asked: “What do you think Web 3.0 will bring us?”

There are lots of different ideas about this. Tim Berners-Lee thinks web 3.0 will bring us the semantic web, an Internet in which computers understand the information stored on them and act as truly intelligent agents. Self-aware sites, if you will. Others talk about an intersection of small applications all working together, regardless of whether they’re on your computer, a phone or another device. Something far more sophisticated and seamless than the digital handshaking that goes on now with web 2.0 apps and services. Others think the driving technology behind web 3.0 will be improved hardware and greater bandwidth, and applications which benefit from these hardware advances.

Perhaps it was in response to the eerie quiet in which I had just presented, but I picked on the latter; the hardware-driven advances. I said web 3.0 would be the death of the teleconference. After all, there’s no reason why, with the faster connections and more powerful graphics processing coming down the pipeline, videoconferencing shouldn’t replace teleconferencing almost entirely - at least in countries with big, fat Internet pipes and generous data plans, like the US. If I can conference on Skype with my far-flung family now, then surely web 3.0 will deliver ubitquitous video interactions.

Of course, web 3.0 should herald much more than merely the death of teleconferencing. Seth Godin has an interesting take on web 4.0 and it sounds good to me. But only if I no longer have to teleconference. Without that advance, web 3 or web 4 will both be failures.

Second Life makes me sick. Literally. When I enter its 3D environment, my brain can’t believe what my eyes are seeing and, within seconds, I start to feel woozy. By the end of 10 minutes, I have the start of a nasty headache. If I stay longer than that, the vertigo when I finally return to the real world is enough to knock me off my chair.

You see, I suffer from simulator sickness, a type of motion sickness induced by 3D virtual environments.

I’m not alone as a sufferer. Studies indicate that up to 60 percent of fighter pilots suffer from at least one symptom of simulation sickness when training on simulators, and these are people who’ve been handpicked for resistance to such a reaction. There haven’t been many studies of the broader population, but some research points to 80 percent of the population being affected to some degree. For some of the sufferers, the symptoms are mild: a little dizziness after playing a 3D game for a couple of hours; a touch of nausea; eyestrain. For others, like me, the effects can be dramatic and longlasting.

Traditional wisdom has been that simulator sickness strikes when the visual motor cues you receive don’t jibe with the physical motor cues. The folk over at the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITLab), think that may not be the case. They suggest that it’s not the conflicting motion cues that are the problem, but rather the conflicting stationary cues. Our brains search for consistent stationary objects in a scene to provide stability; when those objects (known as ‘rest frames’) are absent or changing, things can get scrambled in your head.

A new class of disabled

The computing world is increasingly first-person, 3D. Take a look at the top 50 games. Check out the popularity of 3D online worlds, such as Second Life. Surf the research sites of Microsoft and other software developers. 3D environments abound. In games, 3D designs dominate almost to the exclusion of other, less immersive interfaces.

Now, if suffering from simulator sickness meant nothing more than being excluded from playing Myst or Halo, it’d be a shame, but certainly not calamitous. The trouble is, that’s just the start.

Take Second Life. It’s partly a game, yes. It’s also an experiment in where the web is heading. That’s why companies are setting up shop within the virtual world; it’s why some organisations hold meetings and training sessions there. And you can bet that as our hardware gets more powerful and the software more refined, online 3D environments will start appearing with increasing regularity.

The same thing is happening with operating systems and general applications. Wander over to Microsoft Research – one of the most interesting parts of the Microsoft site, by the way – and you’ll find a bunch of projects based on 3D manipulation and technologies.

Those games developers who show any awareness of simulator sickness tend to shunt the problem aside. It’s too much work to find a solution and, after all, “no-one’s making them play the game”.

But what happens when it’s not a game? What happens when your company announces it’s holding staff meetings in Second World from now on? Or when Microsoft or Apple release an immersive operating system? Then it’s no longer a matter of “tough luck, you can’t play”; it becomes a matter of disability. If the limited research so far is correct about the number of people likely to be affected, the ranks of the virtually disabled will be huge.

Locked out

All up, I spent about 25 hours in Second Life. I knew it was too long but I felt I had to do it because I’d been commissioned to write an article about the online world for Australian PC User.

After a 20-minute stint in Second Life, I’d feel sick. But 20 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to explore the world, so I’d dive back in for longer to do more research. Even though I broke those 25 hours of virtual experience into smaller chunks, by the time I’d completed my article I had experienced severe nausea, headaches, eyestrain, disorientation, and dizziness which didn’t dissipate entirely for almost a month. Second Life is a fascinating place, but I won’t be returning. I just hope I won’t be locked out of more and more of the digital landscape. I hope you won’t be, either.