Preface
For those who know me, my love for consumer technology and the impact it has on daily life is no secret! This request from a colleague to share something close to me reinvigorated my passion to blog after a lengthy hiatus. I’ve made this blog post as short as possible for an easy read through; the photos are clickable, and the tech references are hyperlinked as well.
This year was a landmark year in Virtual Consumer Tech – with the launch of the premium Apple Vision Pro and the relatively & reasonably priced Meta Quest 3 brought about what I would bet is the foundation for large scale and widespread virtual reality devices. If there is one thumb rule of mine that has stood the test of time, it is that digital technology that first proliferates gaming and is a success soon moves to consumer tech world and then also to the business tech world.
Hence my excitement for this technology to exponentially spread – for personal and business reasons.
What the future holds?
This where we get to my favorite part, speculation. As a person with vested interest on this topic, the possible use cases of the future are as follows:
- Virtual calls with someone in another country as if they are sitting next to you.
- Would work with a merge of projects such as Google’s Project Starline combined with the above headsets.
- Another level of virtual gaming where you play paint ball (for example) against friends across great distances and feel the hits.
- Would work with a merge of VR suits such as the TeslaSuit combined with the above headsets.
- The entertainment use case is a music concert we can all be virtually present at as if actually there.
- Would need more immersive reality that Apple Vision Pro’s headset can provide and future iterations of it.
- Similarly, the business use case would be a technology or business conference that we can be present as across the seas without moving out of the home or office.
What’s stopping us from doing it today?
There are a lot of the pieces of the tech puzzle that stops us from doing the above. Some of them are as below:
- Though we have the benchmark now in virtual reality headsets (the Apple Vision Pro) we do not have a reliable tech stack that can record and broadcast 3D environments from source to display in low latency, we still rely on 3D visualization in 2D (like high resolution TV’s). Something like this requires a lot of processing of visual data that isn’t yet automated for it to look 3D.
- We have successfully managed to transmit visuals with high fidelity, but we have not yet managed to do the same for smells and feels – which is a long way off and is required for full immersion. If this happens by recreating the sensations or via tricking the brain to feel as if we are sensing is a whole other question: technical as well as ethical. Ethical as fiddling with brain waves is still something far away from proven. Companies such as Neuralink have proven this.
Without speculating too much more, which I could and would like to do for days on end, the key question to be asked is around which use cases provide enough perceived value to get funding as innovations.
For the near term on the other hand, there is a need for focus on Form Factor and on the Virtual and Mixed reality use cases of today that will be worked on for this decade. For example, I really liked the Playstation’s focus on gaming and quality by focusing on the headset for Playstation VR2 and offloading the processing via the connection to the console itself. I also really hope and wish Google puts their foot on the gears to review the Google Glass Project.
Should it be a pair of googles or a pair of glasses like sunglasses? The best walk through of this thought is better explained by one of my favorite YouTube ‘Tech Content Creators and Reviewers” MKBHD.
There’s so much to look forward to and this gets me excited for the future on this front!
@robinbmac 