AR and VR: foreseeing the new gold rush
“and it’s not just about the gold, it’s about the rush, too”.
Small preamble: i receive a call from Francesco Contin, head of Ditedi: “there’s this workshop that asked me for a speaker and i talked about you, what do you think?”. I see the program of “Cloud Art” — this the name of the event — and it’s a bit of intimidating — Antonella Varesano and Giuliana Carbi have put together a huge amount of fascinating international speakers.
So i breathe deeply and even if i am quite confident in my public speaking skills, i write down the whole presentation, with the kind help of my dear Ben Little to make it sound a bit more fluent.
If you ask me: it was an excellent workshop — expect the recording anytime soon — but i ended up just speaking off the cuff like anybody else. Thus said, i’d like to share with you my content. Comments warmly welcome.
“layered territories:
foreseeing the new gold rush”
The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that technological adoption is not an ‘option’ anymore. People of all ages have had to confront the need to use digital devices: and much to everyone’s surprise — they’ve enjoyed it not to mention the unexpected glimpse it’s given them of our shared future. In the short time frame of just the last ten years we’ve begun to see that smartphones are not smart enough anymore to keep up with increasing pace: phones were not devised to be looked at when reading, or even worse, when driving.
We need devices built with human physiology in mind, for everyday usage. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are a starting point, intertwining relevant new layers of information with everyday living. Device-wise, we walk on the shoulder of giants: even if AR glasses might take years to be marketed, we urge all stakeholders to plan the contents and ethics of our new world, starting from now.
what we’ve learned so far
At the Google VR Workshop in London, Tom Small, head of YouTube’s player development team had a “brothers lumiere train” as a background frame and told us “today, we’re at this point”. We built Soulvu, a web-based vr application to create low-cost, three hundred sixty degrees stereoscopic virtual tours, using our own patented hardware mount. For instance, a virtual tour of a 100 sqm house takes as little as 8 minutes to be created. A one thousand euro per month server could hold up to a million tours.
Real estate, museums, art: it’s hard to imagine a sector that will not benefit from this process. Yet we need user generated content and communities to make the tool soar from being a concept to becoming an everyday tool. In this very moment the adoption rate and the market size are growing, but still not booming: our field tests suggest it’s mainly a device problem; cost, intrusiveness, wearability. Rest assured there will be no killer app to get the market started as strong as user generated content.
a fairer future has to start from today on
Soulvu is stepping toward these new digital geographies, and it will take shape and grow as users create with it and live with it. We’re pretty sure that even more wearable Augmented Reality glasses with geolocated information layers will be the next big thing, and we are already experimenting on the software part. But it needs to be planned in terms of readability, visual clutter, User experience, weight, and so on. Even more than this: we need to start planning from now on to build it ‘culturally ready’ for diversity, multiple languages — common and minoritarian too, with free access to vital services granted for anyone.
As far as it might be predictable, gaining access to information shouldn’t be a privilege, not an Amazon-subscription service or a Google-based subscription service.
Access to data will help us shape a better society, yet who would own the content that is actively pushed in front of your eyes owns a part of your reality you are pushed to believe in.
“Look dad, that’s a pear” says the kid with his AR glasses turned on
“No son, that’s an apple tree”
“The glasses say it’s a pear, you’re wrong”
Who will control this?
