Street View lets me publish my 360 pictures in their correct location on Planet Earth within a framework of billions of other people’s media that doesn’t scroll away into the past and become irrelevant. It feels more like a cooperative undertaking, even though it all goes though corporate servers that we could lose at any time on short notice. When you can add your own images to Google’s unimaginable database, Street View feels different. When all you have is Street View, you can’t go to the back yard where you played with your first puppy. I have been to amazing places all over the world but a little suburb of Rochester, New York is where I went first when I could go there in VR because it’s where I first remember being anywhere at all. I would be willing to bet that > 95% of all Wander users go to their childhood home the first time they use the app. It’s just not always clear how or why.įinding my uploaded pictures in the Wander app over the next few days, for instance, had me scratching my head a lot, but somehow I found them and that right there is the exciting part.Įxciting because it was a challenge and I did it, but a longer-lasting exciting too because I now have the power to bring anyone with a VR headset to this place with me at any time. I say, ‘opaque,’ rather than ‘black’ because nothing gets out of a Black Hole (except undifferentiated Hawking radiation) but stuff definitely gets out of Google. My upload needs to become one with the growing Opaque Hole that is Google. Publishing is an anti-climax because, at least at this point, there’s a wait. The Street View app finds faces to blur and blurs them. KNAPSACK ON MY BACK CODEI had to crack the Google Street View code to publish my pictures. I didn’t have to take a long bus ride that was hard on my back. I finally got back thirty months later in Wander. I was there to record and then show the VR content later at fundraisers, where supporters would feel present at the events, and that is just what happened until everything changed and there were no more events because of Covid. We were also there to watch their traditional Thon drummers play during the New Year’s festivities. We’d come to show them traditional Khmer instruments people hadn’t seen for two generations. It took a twelve hour ride on the Khmer Magic Music Bus to get there, but we got there. I was there with friends, artists, musicians from Cambodian Living Arts. Then, it was an experience completely outside my normal life, challenging physically with 100 degree heat and 100% humidity all day every day, a semi-old white guy making 360 media in a remote part of Cambodia. So it’s no surprise that being back inside the same Temple just up the dirt road from the teeny village of Preap Preous, in the Wander VR app, feels about as exciting now as being there in 2019.Ī different kind of exciting, for different reasons. Societyīeing in Uddar Meanchey Province close to the Thai border during Khmer New Year in 2019 feels about as real now as my favorite made-up worlds in VR. It was a time when I was beginning to learn to wander, and in some of these stories, taken mostly from real-life adventures, we wandered well off the path. You can stop virtually anywhere to get out of the car, stretch your legs, and occasionally wander on foot.The stories reflect the adventures and misadventures of two Scouts and their Scoutmaster in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when life and Scouting were simpler. It is amazing what you can really see at 45 m.p.h. What else could anyone need for a nice day hike?As a middle-aged adult, I continued my wandering, usually following Scouts who were learning the first steps of being successful wanderers.As an older adult, I continue wandering, preferring to take the small red and blue roads on a map instead of the Interstates and major federal and state routes. In my pocket was a jackknife and a compass. Clipped to my belt was a flashlight (batteries of uncertain charge), a match safe (unknown quantity of strike-anywhere matches), and a first aid kit. Over my shoulder I slung a canteen of water or bug juice and a cook kit. All I needed was a knapsack on my back to carry the essentials for the adventure: a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, some flour in a plastic bag, a change of socks, an extra shirt, a Vittle Kit, a can opener, and a bottle of bug repellent. When I joined Boy Scouts, I began my life as a wanderer.
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