We’ve all been talking about the Zoom experience. How it’s slightly off from the in-person experience, in ways that can be disorienting and exhausting. Yet, in the months since COVID-19 changed everything, we’ve also embraced it, as something that’s not just useful, but offers a close substitute to being in the same room with our fellow humans.
The disorientation we can feel reminds me of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that emerged from the field of robotics and was taken up in the worlds of virtual reality and computer graphics. It proposes that as robots, or virtual or computer-animated figures come closer to resembling actual humans, they elicit a sense of uneasiness. In this case it’s the virtual experience of online video interactions that’s close to, but doesn’t quite achieve the comfort level of pre-COVID human interaction.
I haven’t heard any discussions, though, on the uncanny effect of Zoom backgrounds. You’ve probably seen them—shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, or of corner offices with drop-dead, high-rise views. These virtual backgrounds have been around for several years, with video backgrounds appearing more recently. I’m guessing they served two purposes for the mostly corporate intended users of Zoom and related services: first, to add visual zing to presentations, and second, to cover up what might be a participant’s actual, less-than-presentable environment.
What I’ve seen in the sci-fi/fantasy community is an enthusiastic upending of those conventions. I first noticed it at the Nebula Awards, the convention put on by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. The Nebulas was one of the first cons to switch from live to virtual, with a dauntingly short lead time to the late-May event. New SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal rose to the occasion with a “Starship Nebula” theme, and backed it up with a bit of virtual magic: a downloadable porthole template that participants could use as a green screen, allowing them to show a shimmering starscape outside their “cabins.”
with a full complement of virtual portholes showing her proximity to the Galactic core
As the conference went on, I spotted a number of portholes, working as promised. Toastmaster Aydrea Walden sported a double phalanx of portholes during the awards ceremony. But I also saw:
- A participant’s t‑shirt, turned into a window on the vacuum of deep space
- A stuffed dinosaur whose surface rippled with galactic winds
- Floors and walls falling away into nothingness, leaving bookshelves standing by themselves
Nebula nominee Mimi Mondal managed to make her own still Zoom floral background come alive, as she seemingly dissolved and reappeared from a cluster of giant tropical flowers. She explained later that she was playing with the settings, adjusting for the similarity between her skin-tone and the wall behind her. The result was that a bug—the sometimes unstable edge between the foreground subject and the background image on Zoom—turned into a feature, as Mimi’s outline softened and merged with the flowers, while the flowers’ colors pulsed with a shifting brightness.
Sci-fi folks are apparently willing to dive head-first into the Uncanny Valley of Zoom. They show a playfulness toward representations of reality that reflects the baseline of the field—speculating on what-ifs, moving variables around to get a new view. They’re not freaked out by solid objects turning into negative space, or by their own forms being impinged on.
The enduring popularity of cosplay, which grew out of sci-fi Cons, offers another example of this zest for transformation. It also reminds me of one of the earlier online manifestations of personal malleability, the imaginative screen-names you can still see on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but not Facebook.
This doesn’t erase the genuine disorientations of online meeting spaces, or the fact that they can’t fully replace the human experience of sharing a physical space. But it feels like we’re witnessing something that could evolve into a new, hybrid form of online expression—another small, positive development to come out of our very strange and difficult Pandemic year.
Will this playful hacking of the Zoom experience jump into the mainstream? I hope so. Does it have other antecedents that I’ve missed? If you can think of any, let me know.
