Rumors of Rumors

Speaking at Università Degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that not too long from today, people will wonder how they led a life without augmented reality, stressing the "profound" impact it will have on the not so distant future.

At the university, Cook was awarded an Honorary Degree in Innovation and International Management and also sat down for a Q&A session with students. Responding to a question from a student on what future technologies excite him the most, Cook pointed to artificial intelligence, calling it a "fundamental, horizontal technology that will touch everything in our lives," ranging from innovations in the Apple Watch to "many other things" Apple is working on.

Cook, more importantly, stressed his excitement for augmented reality. Cook suggested that augmented reality's impact on the world will be as profound as the internet itself, saying people will wonder how they led a life without it. As he was speaking on augmented reality, the live stream of the Q&A session abruptly cut, so Cook's full comment on the subject is not publicly known.  READ MORE...

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is an experience where designers enhance parts of users’ physical world with computer-generated input. Designers create inputs—ranging from sound to video, to graphics to GPS overlays and more—in digital content which responds in real time to changes in the user’s environment, typically movement.

Augmented reality has science-fiction roots dating to 1901. However, Thomas Caudell described the term as a technology only in 1990 while designing to help Boeing workers visualize intricate aircraft systems. A major advance came in 1992 with Louis Rosenberg’s complex Virtual Fixtures AR system for the US Air Force. 

AR releases followed in the consumer world, most notably the ARQuake game (2000) and the design tool ARToolkit (2009). The 2010s witnessed a technological explosion—for example, with Microsoft’s HoloLens in 2015—that stretched beyond AR in the classical sense, while AR software itself became increasingly sophisticated, popular and affordable.

Under the umbrella term extended reality (XR), AR differs from virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR). Some confusion exists, notably between AR and MR. Especially amid the 2020s’ technology boom, considerable debate continues about what each term covers. 

In user experience (UX) design, you have:

• AR—You design for digital elements to appear over real-world views, sometimes with limited interactivity between them, often via smartphones. Examples include Apple’s ARKit and Android’s ARCore (developer kits), the Pokémon Go game.
• VR—You design immersive experiences that isolate users from the real world, typically via headset devices. Examples include PSVR for gaming, Oculus and Google Cardboard, where users can explore, e.g., Stonehenge using headset-mounted smartphones.
• MR—You design to combine AR and VR elements so digital objects can interact with the real world; therefore, you design elements that are anchored to a real environment. Examples include Magic Leap and HoloLens, which users can use, e.g., to learn more directly how to fix items.      READ MORE...

The Metaverse

Silicon Valley has been anticipating virtual reality for more than three decades, and keeps running into the same problem: people mostly like actual reality

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. 

In 1998, he also famously claimed, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” 

I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. 

So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse won’t happen.

The “metaverse,” for those who don’t know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. 

The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others can’t. 

Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.  READ MORE