Design Fiction: Hapticore VR

An exercise in design fiction, creating fictional products and objects for a speculative world. A mega-corporation creates a VR headset, and an autonomous collective pushes back.

This was an exercise in Design Fiction inspired by the The 2023 Work Kit of Design Fiction by the Near Future Laboratory. This was created in collaboration with my amazing wife Lauren where we drew cards from the deck and came up with ideas of what this near future object might be. What we came up with was a VR headset made by a mega-corporation where users could have virtual protests and pay a subscription fee to send their issues directly to corporate lobbyists. On the flip side of that protest piece, I wanted to make a zine protesting the VR headset itself made by an autonomous collective that hack the VR headsets and uses them for training for when they deal with riot police at actual protests and demonstrations.

I wanted to be sure to make that balance of realism. What a company might release that’s in reality some really sinister shit, and the eventual pushback from people who see a glimmer of hope in the cracks.

Background

We drew four cards, an archetype (instruction manual), an object (A VR headset), an attribute (mesmerizing), and an action (protest).

How do these things combine together to create an instruction manual for a VR headset that is mesmerizing and connected to protests?

We landed on a fictional company creating a VR headset directed towards protesters, made by a mega-corporation called Hapticore that wants to get people to protest online, instead of in reality.

The corporate logo and their new "protest" VR headset

Following the trend of pay-to-play microtransactions and cryptocurrency grifting, you can subscribe to a premium membership that will add your virtual protest slogans to an NFT and directly send it to Hapticore corporate lobbyists who will argue for your protest in front of government representatives.

The Hapticore Protest & Resistance headset is specially made to mimic protest conditions, with haptic feedback to really feel like you’re in the action (It literally feels like you are being hit with rubber bullets, tear-gassed, maced, etc) so people stop actually protesting, and they start protesting in the safe confines at home. While also still feeling like they accomplished their goal.

Following their typical polished corporate look I created a fictional quickstart guide that you might find in the headsets packaging.

The Pushback: Autonomous Collectives hack the headsets to train for real protests

At the bottom of the “Be Heard By Protesting!” section of the quickstart guide I included “states” where the NFT feature was banned. I wanted to think about what the US might look like in the near future with most of the west being liberated and connected together by a federation of communes, groups, revolutionaries, and radicals who created the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation. I could imagine an autonomous Oregon coast, where the rest of east Oregon got invaded by Idaho which was now a Christian Nationalist nation. This is following some real-world current news out of that area and I wanted to illustrate that. Puerto Rico becomes a state in the US (being Puerto Rican myself this would be like Idaho taking over Oregon and I am someone who wants Puerto Rican liberation). And West Nebraska is added as a temporary buffer zone between the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation, the now fascistic federal government, and the neo nazi/Christian Nationalist “Holy State of Justice” which comprised of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah.

Seeing Hapticore and their CEOs connection to state and local police department training, the Rocky Mountain Autonomous Federation created a hacked firmware version that could allow a user to boot their headsets into an admin mode and gain access to more features. They took control of an old website the company ignored when they fired most of their IT staff, and because Hapticore runs all of their tech on a write-only blockchain they can’t stop the federation from creating their own servers to allow free transactions on the headsets.

I created a zine made by the federation that explains how to hack the headsets and use them to train activists, journalists, community defense members, and anyone in the federation and globally, to train against AI riot police before actually protesting.

The corporate logo

The federation’s response

Click here if you want to see the zine as a magazine view / in an easy to read format

Zine Images are below: