Meta Iowa State Fair
When we go to the Iowa State Fair we always go to the Varied Industries Building. It’s a required stop. Some Iowa born-and-raised traditions are sacrosanct, and this is one of them. I’m never particularly in the market for a hot tub or new gutter guards and I’ve never been tempted to buy a new kitchen knife set, but I do enjoy the relief of some air-conditioning mid-day at the fair, and there’s always at least one booth that surprises.
This year it was Meta. Of course, Meta has national and global reach, so it’s no more surprising to find a Meta booth at the Iowa State Fair than it is to find one for US Cellular.
But Meta does have a lesser known connection to the Des Moines area—one of it’s largest server farms is located just outside of Altoona, Iowa where my wife’s family lives. In fact that particular data center will become the company’s largest by 2025.
If you ever drive across Iowa on I-80 and spot Adventureland on the south side of the highway, just look north and you’ll see some of the data centers. They are huge window-less structures. Inside of them resides more of your personal data than you know about yourself.
Meta’s display at the fair invited visitors to try out augmented/virtual reality using Oculus headsets. Meta employees with big smiles invited fair-goers to try out the headset and handgrips.
I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of VR. In the same way I’ve never enjoyed 3-D movies and find them a degradation of the movie experience, I’ve had the same feeling about VR. I just don’t like it that VR headsets cut you off from your normal field of vision.
But I figured heck, I don’t always have the chance to try out this new technology, and since I wrote a book on the ways open-ness to new media can potentially help us form faith in new ways, I better at least give it a go before passing judgment.
You wear the goggles over your eyes, and because Meta is tethered spatially to where you are standing and which way you are facing, you even have to put the goggles on in a precise location. This took a few seconds. Then you put the gloves on, which essentially read the location of your hands and then include buttons for your index finger and your thumb.
Once in the environment, you are standing at a “desk.” On the desk were objects to grab—some blocks, some paper airplanes, a ping pong paddle and ball. Each item on the desk could be grabbed and manipulated using the hand grips. Your visual field was a large area with some targets and a kind of frame (with space running off into the distance) toward which you could launch the objects.
While I was getting acclimated, presumably other fair-goers were having to carefully make their way around me because I had no idea who was close to my position. I was swinging a ping pong paddle and vigorously launching paper airplanes.
I will admit, your brain accepts the virtual reality quite quickly. Within minutes I even made the mistake of trying to “put down” the handgrips I was holding as if the virtual desk in front of me was real. Of course this is why the hand-grips includes tethers around your wrists—just in case you begin to believe the virtual reality with which you are interacting.
Once I’d finished the orientation, a box appeared in front of me with a couple of cartridges. This part was clearly designed by Gen Xers. Only our generation has as a core developmental concept the experience of putting a game cartridge into a console.
You could choose one of two games—dancing or a shooter. The Meta employee whispered discretely that I’d probably like the shooting game better… I’m not sure if she was concerned for the safety of passersby if I danced or her own discomfort if for some reason she had to watch me dance. Either way, I did pick the shooter game, and it was satisfying.
As a real-world reward for trying out their equipment, Meta gave me a pair of sweetcorn pokers. They really did their homework, because if a company that I have many suspicions of is going to win my heart, they could do a lot worse than give me my favorite tool for my favorite summer food. They’re the coolest corncob pokers I’ve ever owned, hands-down.
The Meta station was intriguing on one other level. You could say that the Iowa State Fair is a kind of “augmented reality.” At the very least it’s a constructed environment, temporary, with a different set of rules you learn as you immerse yourself. You can’t really know what the Iowa State Fair is like without visiting the Iowa State Fair, and things in the fair that you think about one way in other contexts take on additional layers of meaning when they are at the fair. Like boiled eggs on a stick.
So Meta’s presence at the Iowa State Fair was a reverse Meta moment, or a Meta-meta moment. It invited me out of the fair and into Meta.
This is probably the main way it failed. I much prefer, if I am going to have to live in a world with technologies that augment reality, technologies that layer rather than replace. Think of William Gibson and Neuromancer where people wear glasses that don’t replace their visual field but add to it.
I still don’t fully understand why Meta (and Mark Zuckerberg) are so committed to the fully immersive virtual reality that replaces this one. I still mostly want nothing to do with it, and believe there are considerable dangers attending it.
Nevertheless, I do now have some sweetcorn pokers and I plan to use them post-haste, even if finding good sweet corn this late in the season is going to be tricky.