"You know, the world we evolved in was never seen as a flat projection, it was always "360".
Well, at least it was always seen in 360 for all of our forebears who retained the binocular vision we inherited from our ape cousins.
I mean, we doubtless had ancestors who lost an eye to a pointed stick in some tribal conflict, or to the claw of a saber toothed cat or cave bear. But even they would keep swinging their heads around to see what was behind them -- the more so after such a trauma, and they still perceived the world in 360.
It wasn't until windows were invented that we started seeing the world as an image behind a flat plane ( by windows I mean the kind we used to stare wistfully out of during a boring math class, wishing to get out into the playground, not the computer operating system's screen you now stare into to watch youtube videos during this generation's boring math class) -- ah, how quickly we forget...
This whole two dimensional way of looking at the world really started when school teachers forced us to stay seated in our chairs and tried to get us to focus on a flat blackboard on a wall at the front of a classroom. Teachers had long before abandoned the out-door "school in a grove or trees" concept that Plato used in his Academy, and instead forced us to sit chained in Plato's Cave, gaze fixed only on distorted two dimensional shadows that hid the truth from our eyes, since we couldn't turn around to see their real causes.
Stuck in our seats in that early version of lock-down, our glances out the window revealed a fixed perspective that might as well have been a photograph or movie screen, while the tepid graphs and graphics the teacher made us watch were lacking in every sort of "depth" you could imagine -- and most of us couldn't imagine anything after a while.
And so is it any wonder that most of us have been paralyzed in the face of climate change and others can't even see it happening all around them?
I'm not going to blame the artists who would stare through plates of glass while covering one eye to fix THEIR perpective for this mess, because THEY were trying to create greater depth THROUGH perspective -- by drawing converging lines on a flat but transparent plane, artists gave us the illusion of 3D despite the limitations of a 2D medium, and invited us to imagine a world with 360 degrees of freedom, even when their works were fixed in print in a flat paged picture book.
Books weren't the limitation -- despite their left-to-right, top down scan restrictions, their narrative linearity was more than compensated for by their ability to pack entire worlds into one's pocket, through the magical codecs that literacy employed (a codec is a compression/decompression algorithm). As long as no authority figure, no priest or teacher, forced the reader to read books letter by letter and line by line, and plod pedantically through chapter by chapter, as long as nobody discouraged the reader from going backwards and rereading and leaping forward and looking in the back of the book for the answers or the spoilers, books could be liberating -- we could CHOOSE to go on the journey of penned by the author, and pause to expand and expound upon it in our imaginations and in our book clubs. In fact, books were so powerful in evoking 360 experiences that shortly after the printing press made them universally available they were often decried as unhealthy for children, much as we do video games today, blamed for encouraging mental sloth and unrealistic expectations through their "flights of fancy" -- the term, alluding to the flying journeys around the world they could conjure in the minds eye says it all, and books were even banned because of their ability to widen horizons in politically dangerous ways.
The "scourge" of free thinking was enhanced through comic books, whose panels offered enough degrees of freedom as to collectively offer even more than 360, or multiples of 360, so of course schools had to ban those.
Pop up books, which popped up sometime in in the 13th century among medieval scholars, became a real "thing" in 1775 with the publication of Thomas Malton, the elders " A Compleat Treatise on Perspective in Theory and Practice, on the Principles of Dr. Brook Taylor". Wiki tells us, " A Compleat Treatise on Perspective is the earliest known commercially produced pop-up book since it contains three-dimensional paper mechanisms. The pop-ups are activated by pulling string and form geometric shapes used to aid the reader in understanding the concept of perspective."
The desire to get back to 360 has been with us a long time, and whenever the technology permitted and the authorities allowed it, societies moved closer and closer to a full surround-sight and surround sound experience. Unfortunately, schools have been among the most resistent to the restitution of our natural 360 sensibilities with their fetishistic attachement to "text", linearity and flat black and white boards and screens.
Today, with the global Covid 19 pandemic forcing all of us around the world into a highly restrictive on-line landscape of flat screens showing unreadable text and those same static images and graphs and late 20th century snooze-inducing power point presentations that we suffered through in school classrooms, one might wonder if we've made any progress at all, particularly as the "human component" of most online education consists of the flatly rendered badly lit faces of our instructors and peers, appearing without arms and legs aor bodies, talking AT US without gesticulation or the joy of gesture.
No wonder so many parents would rather risk their children's lives sending them back into the prison of the classroom, where you can at least read other's body language and still throw spitballs through real 3D space,. Better risk a virus than have them labor in the online concentration camp of flat-out flatness seems to be the consensus in at least the states where people see "red".
But some of us have a different plan for getting through the pandemic, one that will carry us beyond the virus threat into a world far more natural and compelling than anything we've had since schooling was invented.
This lecture, as you can see, has been created in 360, using the Insta360 OneR camera, and it changes the game completely, re-activating atavistic neural pathways that our ancestors relied on when hunting and gathering. As you can see, in 360, I can only SUGGEST where you look and what you focus on -- I can't control your gaze. Sure, most of the time I would like you to pay attention to and look at ME, but that too is a vestige of the stultifying historical legacy of teaching by the "sage on the stage".
ACTUALLY, when done right, the teacher, the narrator, shouldn't be the subject of your focus at all -- because -- well, hey look over there, behind you! Those goats and cows eating the Chaya leaves and moringa -- they are what I want you to be looking at when I lecture on silvopastoral systems and why they are superior to grass pasture grazing, especially in terms of carbon drawdown and climate change mitigation.
In 360 we DEPRIVILIGE the teacher and ask, you, the learner, to engage with the world again -- a world that is far more interesting than we are, a world in which the SUBJECT MATTER is what matters, not so much what I have to say about it.
No wonder so few teachers have embraced this technology, right?
So let's journey into the applications of 360 technologies, from 360 cameras to the embedding of content into the brave old 360 world through AR and the embedding of the 360 captures into multidimensional space through VR. And let us apply those technologies, techniques and insights toward a much more HOLISTIC study of climate change, a phenomenon happening in real time on a 360 degree sphere called the planet Earth. To solve the climate change problem we CAN'T afford to think in linear two dimensional ways, and so the way we structure this course MUST now reflect the real world we live in. Our fate -- whether we live or die in this changing world -- depends on looking at it the right ways. Notice I said right WAYS. Plural. In this module I hope to demonstrate to you that there are many ways to solve this challenge, and it starts by thinking and seeing IN 360."
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