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“It is augmented reality that is driving our future,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said at the beginning of the company’s first-ever investor day.
“AR is the next major shift in computing,” Spiegel predicted, but we’ll need a decade before it fully materializes. Do Facebook and Apple have thoughts?
Mark Zuckerberg mostly agrees, as he predicted last year that we’ll get “breakthrough” AR glasses this decade.
Tim Cook thinks AR “will pervade our entire lives,” and at this point, Apple’s top secret mixed-reality ambitions are really not-so-secret.
Right now, nearly everyone who interacts with AR does so through a phone. We won’t know the winning horse(s) in smart glasses for a while.
What we do know
Qualcomm’s XR chipset will power many next-gen AR and VR devices. Yesterday, the chipmaker dropped its reference design, a hardware blueprint for companies that want to build AR glasses based on the XR1 and other available technologies.
Qualcomm’s prototype is a glimpse into AR’s near future, and the glasses pack powerful technology. But they must be wired to a phone, computer, or puck. “And for that reason, I’m out.”—the average consumer
AR hardware still has many technical constraints, from power management to processing power.
Current price points and form factors appeal to commercial buyers. But beyond early adopters, a consumer market has yet to take shape.
In fully virtual land
This week’s big VR headline comes courtesy of Sony. The PlayStation 5 will get its own VR system, the company said yesterday.
What Sony’s promising: More immersive VR, a higher res-headset, new tracking capabilities, and next-gen controllers with additional inputs.
When: Sony will send out developer kits soon, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan told WaPo, but the company hasn’t landed on a launch date. So...not 2021.
Easter egg: The glasses will have “future-proof technology,” Sony SVP Hideaki Nishino flexed.
Big picture: Depending on who you ask, VR is either AR’s competitor or a technological bridge to it. AR hardware will eventually be a bigger consumer market, but capable VR products are available right now or close on the horizon.
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- Smartphone sales have dropped for the last two years straight, and all the big tech players are casting around for the next big thing.
- They seem to have settled upon augmented reality -- a face-worn computer or glasses that superimposes computer-generated objects on the real world.
- Apple’s plans have started to leak, and everybody’s waiting to see if it can revolutionize AR like it did with smartphones.
The tech industry’s next bet is a series of technologies usually called augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality. The vision usually involves some kind of computer worn in front of the user’s eyes.
Users will still be able to see most of the real world in front of them — unlike virtual reality, which completely immerses the user in a computer-generated fantasyland, augmented reality layers computer-generated text and images on top of reality.
Industry watchers and participants think that Apple has a good chance to validate and revolutionize AR like it did with smartphones. Apple has been prototyping headsets for years.
But Apple’s not the only company working on these products. All the big tech players — Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon — are in the game as well.
Futurists and screenwriters have conjured blue-sky visions of what could happen with advanced computer glasses — one episode of the dystopian anthology “Black Mirror” explored a world where people could “block” certain people out of their view. More positive visions imagine having important information coming directly into your view, exactly when you want it.
Today, the most common use cases are much more mundane, including smartphone-based games and apps like Pokemon Go or Apple’s Ruler app, which use the phone’s screen and camera rather than relying on glasses or another set of screens sitting on your face. The few companies who are actively producing AR glasses are mostly focused on work scenarios, like manufacturing and medicine.
Of course, considering what all of this means for the future of innovations in Educational Technologies, means learning more about what is being developed to bring AR and MR (Mixed Realty) applications and solutions into our lives.
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A Google Earth-type representation of the planet.
Every green dot is a radio station.
Select any dot to listen in.
It’s like cultural teleportation.
You could spend hours with this:
radio.garden
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Saving and Protecting Passwords
This is usually the moment where you might wonder if you know the passwords for all the accounts you own. Especially for those that automatically log in because you intentionally set it up like that. We need to store passwords and data for many accounts, such as orders for our cable operators, credit card information, copies of personal documents, access data for certain devices, and more. So how do you keep all these passwords safe and make them readily available when you need them?
Digital Skills Group
As a general rule of human civilization, we’ve lived where we work. More than 90 percent of Americans drive to work, and their average commute is about 27 minutes. This tether between home and office is the basis of urban economics. But remote work weakens it; in many cases, it severs the link entirely, replacing spatial proximity with cloud-based connectivity. What knock-on changes will this new industrial revolution bring?
The best argument against the remote-work experiment having a durable impact on our lives beyond the pandemic is an appeal to human inertia: For decades, the internet was a thing and remote work wasn’t, and after the pandemic, it’ll just feel like 2019 again.
But the impediment to widespread remote work in 2019 and before wasn’t technological. It was social. According to the economist David Autor, remote work suffered from a “telephone problem.” Seven decades after the first telephone was patented in the 1860s, fewer than half of Americans owned one. Behavior dragged behind technology, because most families had no use for a telecom machine as long as none of their friends also owned one. In network theory, this is known as Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a communications network rises exponentially with the number of its users.
The same has been true of remote work. In 2018, it was weird and rude to ask a boss to move a meeting to Skype, or to tell a business partner to fire up a Zoom link because you can’t make lunch. The teleconference tech existed, but it was considered an ersatz substitute for the normal course of business.
“The most important outcome of the pandemic wasn’t that it taught you how to use Zoom, but rather that it forced everybody else to use Zoom,” Autor told me. "We all leapfrogged over the coordination problem at the exact same time.” Meetings, business lunches, work trips—all these things will still happen in the after world. But nobody will forget the lesson we were all just forced to learn: Telecommunications doesn’t have to be the perfect substitute for in-person meetings, as long as it’s mostly good enough. For the most part, remote work just works.
{Source: The Atlantic, Feb. 1, 2021 ]
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Have you checked out the PRIVACY Topic in the Discussion Forum?
(see: incubator.org/applications/discussions/privacy)
To explain to children, parents/carers and educators about their privacy and data online, the LSE Department of Media and Communications (LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science) has produced a toolkit of fun info, quizzes and videos - all curated by young people:
http://myprivacy.uk
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