there’s no exit
In 2015, NASA sealed a crew of six into a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa for a twelve-month Mars simulation — no going outside without a suit, and a twenty-two-minute communication delay in each direction, the actual light-lag to Mars. Jacki Morie built the thing that went in with them: a virtual world called Ansible. Six people in a dome for a year need an exit that isn’t the airlock. She designed it.
Ansible wasn’t a game. It was thirty-seven regions — a beach boardwalk, a river at twilight with fireflies, a re-creation of Mars’s Gale Crater from real NASA data — and a hub called FamCom, where the crew and their families left each other messages they’d find the next day, matching the real asynchrony of a Mars mission. The HI-SEAS IV crew reported missing Earth less than a previous crew, and made it through the full year. But the most telling detail is what they actually used a virtual world for when they already had a real volcano outside: getting away — not from Earth, but from each other. Private time, not escapism, was the actual product.
Morie has spent over three decades building immersive worlds, and her design principle, stated almost in passing, is the thesis of the whole conversation: agency and atmosphere trump realism. The graphics never mattered as much as whether a person could choose to notice a firefly — “it’s not so much, does this look like Earth. It’s how does it make me feel.” That principle runs from her mid-2000s Memory Stairs — immersive rooms tracing a life from before birth, complete with a mother’s real perfume — to her blunt case that VR’s churn of dead headsets and shuttered worlds is erasing the field’s own history. The conversation closes on the overview effect, and her belief that good designed experience can hand almost anyone a smaller version of it.
In this conversation
- Ansible inside HI-SEAS IV — the virtual world NASA sent on a year-long Mars simulation, and what the crew really used it for
- “Agency and atmosphere trump realism” — why 2015-era graphics didn’t matter, and what does
- The Memory Stairs — an embryonic chamber with two heartbeats, a crib with a real mother’s perfume, and memories from before memory
- Why years of VR art becoming unplayable is “a travesty” — and who is rebuilding the field’s lost landmarks
- What AI changes for artists and what it can’t — “history is what makes us who we are”
THE GUEST
Jacki Morie
Artist and researcher with more than three decades at the intersection of VR, art, and the psychology of extreme environments. Built Ansible, the virtual world NASA sent with the HI-SEAS IV crew on their year-long Mars simulation, while at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Creator of multisensory landmarks from the Memory Stairs to pioneering scent-enabled VR.
THE HOST
Howard A. Rose
VR and digital-health pioneer, TEDMED and TEDx speaker, writing at the frontier of what it means to be human.