Imagining a Better World
By: Elijah Claude
Tags: Future Of Work, Virtual Reality, Extended Reality, Augmented Reality, Edtech

Imagining a Better World

Welcome back to the next generation of XR series! So far, we’ve talked about the ideal VR hardware, the importance of XR rather than just VR, and pro-consumer business models…

Now it’s time for the really fun stuff… Content!

What will the next generation of this technology actually look like? What will people be interacting with inside the hardware? Why would they even bother with hardware?

I believe the core of next gen XR will be the actual content we are interacting with. In fact, if the content is good enough, the hardware won’t matter as much. Much of XR can and will be realized through immersive, device-agnostic experiences.

TLDR;

Extended reality will become mainstream when we have content that is:

A metaverse experience (virtual environments for every usecase)

Cross-platform experiences (interoperability across devices)

Truly social (virtual avatars that allow for more natural socialization)

Experiences that bring real life functionality into the virtual world

Experimenting with civilizations (worldbuilding)

Imagine a world…

Where you wake up into an environment customized for your personal success, as you have defined it. Where you rise to the rhythm of your desired audio-visual landscape. Where your morning routine is laid out before you in a way that makes it easy to get into flow.

Where instead of you being controlled by your emotions, assumptions of other people, or expectations of reality, you can control them. Imagine being able to clearly see what is impacting your moods; what foods, people, or events are causing the negative stress in your life, and how much.

Where your life is no longer in the dark-ages. Just like humans hundreds of years ago had no way of knowing how their loved ones (much less strangers) are doing if they moved out of town before we invented writing and phones and internet; imagine being able to keep track of your loved one’s (and society’s) mental health or personal goals that they’ve shared with you.

Where you can actually see how the laws, taxes, and regulations in your government are impacting the world. Then being able to vote based on real data and real results rather than assumptions and ambiguous rhetoric.

Where the very idea of politics is realigned around actual data. Where it’s less about grandstanding and empty talk and more about seeing results and creating empathy.

Where government itself is more a system of decision-making rather than an organization full of people searching for power.

Imagine a more delightful future…

But what does any of this have to do with XR?

Everything.

XR stands for eXtended Reality for a reason… because it is a way for us to expand our everyday lives further than we previously thought possible.

XR allows us to expand our reality into the land of our imaginations more effectively than ever before.

This is why so many companies are spending billions of dollars to try and figure it out (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sony, AT&T, Epic, Adobe, Snap, Qualcomm, universities, national governments, etc).

VR/AR is not merely a new gadget or some new form of entertainment, it is the next societal paradigm shift.

This may sound like an overstatement to some people.

It’s not.

This may seem like I’m decades ahead of myself.

I’m not.

(@me about it) 😜

Just like how the internet was forever changed by the decisions made in the 90s and early 2000s, the fate of this next era of computing will be determined by what we do today. In these next few years.

One cannot overstate the impact of the internet… of computers. And once again, XR is the next giant leap in computing.

How will people access this ‘extended reality’? Who will have access? What will they be able to do? What *wont* they be able to do? How will privacy and security be handled? What will be done with all the ‘big data’ that will no doubt be generated even more exponentially than today?

These questions and so much more will begin to be answered, directly or indirectly, in the next few years. (And addressed in future articles;)

By imagining the experience we want to have now, we can better and more clearly determine how to get there…. and how to avoid the things we don’t want to happen.

Imagine a virtual school system

COVID-19 has forced us to reconsider how our schooling system works, from kindergarten to college. We cannot go back to the way things were.

We cannot roll out VR/AR headsets as haphazardly as we’ve been rolling out the use of laptops and tablets at school… Where only some kids can even afford to buy reliable devices, and the other half have to hope their school can shell out enough cheap loaner computers so they can struggle to turn in their meaningless homework…

We cannot continue peddling compulsory schooling built to create a homogeneous culture… with assembly-line systems and overworked, underpaid teachers. It’s a terrible system for teaching the next generation of resourceful, resilient, curious, and creative freethinkers. Our school system does not create a habit of living impactful, fulfilling lives.

Alan Watts was incredibly insightful!

Imagine if you could go to school in an academy designed to get you excited to learn through inspired architecture and powerful tools, rather than dreary buildings, desks, and irrelevant materials that bore us all to death.

Where art, science, math, history, philosophy, language, etc are all interactive modules designed to truly educate (ie draw out interests) rather than just trying to forcefeed useless facts…

Where we could learn from the best teachers and through quality apprenticeships, working on real-life projects, rather than irrelevant tests and quizzes and teachers who hate their job…

Where school is designed to be a life-long institution that anyone can go back to at anytime, rather than a poor stand-in for babysitting.

These are all ideas that is possible in today’s reality. But XR can make it happen faster, more reliably, and more affordably.

With XR, we can make all of this possible through budget-friendly, scalable systems. We can test, experiment, and build all of this out with real data. We can scale the reach of the best teachers from and to anywhere in the world. We can than deliver solutions throughout urban cities, suburbia, rural towns, and even remote locations just about anywhere on (or beyond) the Earth.

With XR, we can turn education into a system that is always relevant, accessible, affordable, and qualitative.

That is my dream… my vision.. for the next generation of XR.

But I know I can get idealistic. 😛 So let me paint a more vivid picture for you.

Re-imagining remote — What if…

Today, our idea of ‘remote’ is having to get on a zoom call. -_-

But what if we could remotely be present through a virtual location instead?

What if remote learning meant going to a 3D school on one’s phone or computer browser, like you were playing the Sims or Animal Crossing? You’d have a virtual avatar, virtual classmates, virtual teachers, on a virtual campus. Just like in an actual game, you can socialize through fun challenges. Because it’s a completely virtual environment, you can customize your learning experience.

It makes no sense to go to a virtual classroom where you have to sit down and listen to somebody lecture for an hour. Instead, most classes would be more like a session of The Magic School Bus. Even when something did need to be communicated through a lecture, that lecture could have engaging visuals, interactive hand-outs, and immersive content.

There could be captions for those that can’t learn by audio-only!

There could be animations for those that don’t care for wordy lectures!

There can even be actually fun educational games!

— <Mass Adoption PSA> —

As you may have realized, this can all be done with today’s technology that half the population of the world already has access to. You don’t need expensive devices for XR. I love AR and VR headsets… but in the next 10 years or so, those devices will (probably) not become mainstream. Even smartphones took 20+ years to become popular. Though there has been VR and AR research for decades, the Oculus DK1 is closer to the RIM (Blackberry) than the iPhone.

Some people may consider the Oculus Quest to be VR’s iPhone… but you can kiss innovation goodbye if no ‘Android’ equivalent is created to compete. Thus why I am describing the overall experience, rather than just the headsets, to make clear where the mainstream focus will/should probably be. The next generation of XR needs to utilize 3D, immersive spaces that are accessible through common devices. Using headsets will simply make those immersive experiences more natural and engaging. We need to focus on creating virtual environments.

The jump to XR is going to be a bigger jump than smartphones, as it converges much of the innovations with machine learning, computer vision, graphics cards, high-resolution screens, ray tracing, high frame-rate processing, 5G connection, haptics, brain-computer interfaces, as well as quantum processing (for the inevitable simulations) all into one field. Therefore, we need to create the infrastructure for an entirely new internet: a metaverse. Virtual environments are the first step towards the OASIS.

The first minute and a half explains the dream pretty well.

— </end PSA> —

To continue, these virtual environments can greatly benefit our work as well. Remote work would be completely redefined. Companies could have entire office spaces in virtual worlds rather than physical. They could solve the problems of using only Zoom or Slack; of not being able to have quick, spontaneous meetings, creative jam sessions, and socialization all with this virtual environment concept.

Imagine booting up your phone or computer to go into a virtual office where you can see your coworkers in their own virtual office spaces.

You have a ‘digital twin’, a virtual but realistic version of yourself or real-world objects, that you can use to simulate realistic interactions in the virtual world.

You can talk with people more naturally than text or video, no matter where they are.

You can collaborate quickly and easily without hassling to setup a meeting room.

You can work directly with the thing you are trying to build, test, or design in more ways than we can currently imagine.

Just like the internet allowed us to be more productive and have totally new types of businesses that we never thought possible, XR will create far more of that technological magic.

With a virtual office, you can customize your desk, your view, your communications, and how you do your work.

You could start, scale, and run a business with FAR less overhead if you no longer have to purchase physical office space and a litany of collaboration tools.

The fun doesn’t stop there!

Sure these virtual spaces could be supplied through third party vendors, making them expensive and unwieldy… OR, we as a society can create standards and open source tools that allow anyone to create custom virtual environments more easily than you can create a custom website.

For only FREE.99 (plus shipping and handling) we can also create virtual environments for our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches, our townhalls, our nonprofit community centers, our state governments, our country governments, and even the world… Virtual environments for everyone!!!!1!!?1

😂😂😂

But seriously, we can create virtual spaces that are catered to the unique goals and constraints we set forth for each level of community.

The dream of extended reality is the potential for spatial computing, where content is designed to be more immersive, personalized, and interactive.

If we can create more content that falls along these lines, than there will be a natural and inevitable push to figure out the hard problems with AR and VR headsets. If our everyday experiences with content become immersive through 2D screens, we will indubitably yearn to remove those screens through virtual and augmented reality.

—

I wrote another two thousand words worth of insights about exactly what we can do with virtual environments, but I like to keep these articles around a 10-minute read. But that means that this series doesn’t have to end here!

I am going to continue this series and delve deep into what kind of future we can build with XR. I want to cover risks and dangers as well as hopes and dreams. I want to showcase some ideas with user-centric designs and interactive prototypes. I want to inspire people to think about how they can empower their lives by expanding their reality.

Be on the lookout for these next few articles!