AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform
Kevin Kelly (tweet):
Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.
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The mirrorworld—a term first popularized by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter—will reflect not just what something looks like but its context, meaning, and function. We will interact with it, manipulate it, and experience it like we do the real world.
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The mirrorworld will raise major privacy concerns. It will, after all, contain a billion eyes glancing at every point, converging into one continuous view. The mirrorworld will create so much data, big data, from its legions of eyes and other sensors, that we can’t imagine its scale right now. To make this spatial realm work—to synchronize the virtual twins of all places and all things with the real places and things, while rendering it visible to millions—will require tracking people and things to a degree that can only be called a total surveillance state.
I still don’t really understand how this will work or what Apple thinks its role is going to be.
Previously:
Update (2019-03-08): Antti Oulasvirta:
Rant: Nine reasons why I don’t believe in current VR/AR technology.
HoloLens, Magic Leap, and Oculus: Mind-blowing videos, and the market is estimated to explode to $200 billion by 2025 (Statista). So what’s wrong?
HCI research tells why we haven’t seen a killer app yet[…]
Update (2019-03-22): Lauren Goode:
Almost every single time I get a demo of a phone or tablet that supports AR apps the product manager says look you can use it to place virtual furniture before you buy and I am thinking, my dude, how many sofas per year do you think we all buy
