Techno-optimism: immersive technologies

Many people implicitly believe that anything natural is better than anything created by humans, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Cooking on wood is much worse than cooking on an electric stove. Walking long distances is much worse than taking a car, train or plane. Sending an email is much better than having a courier memorize a message and travel to the intended receiver of the message.

The human senses are another illustrative example. Because we can see a limited amount of light frequencies, we easily fall into the trap that that’s all there is. The same is true for our hearing, sense of smell and touch. Rationally, however, we all know that there are frequencies of light and sound that we simply can’t see or hear. And that there are things that we don’t notice, like radio waves.

The limitations of humans aren’t restricted to our senses, but also our information processing capabilities are constrained. We need powerful techniques for visualization and dimensionality reduction to be able to comprehend a problem, a data set or a design. Many of the challenges the companies I work with experience are caused by experts focusing on one aspect of a product or solution while ignoring other interdependent aspects that cause their assumptions to no longer hold.

During the last decades, an increasingly powerful set of technologies has evolved that allow us to enrich or replace our physical reality with other, computer-generated ones. Ranging from augmented, extended and virtual reality to direct computer-brain interfaces, the common denominator tends to be to create a mapping from a dimension too complex to grasp or outside our immediate cognitive abilities to a set of inputs to our senses that we are able to comprehend.

Although there are many ways in which we accomplish this, virtual and augmented reality solutions are the typical ones today. VR replaces our environment with a virtually generated one that allows us to interact with a reality that either doesn’t exist in the real world or where the reality isn’t in our immediate vicinity. Of course, computer games are a great example and I’ve spent quite a few hours in Skyrim VR playing the game in a way that was simply much better than the earlier versions I played. Also, quite a few solutions for autonomous driving have started to incorporate a remote driver for the small number of solutions where the system can’t figure things out by itself. The remote driver enters a virtual reality where he or she can control the vehicle remotely.

Augmented reality offers solutions to extend our immediate environment with information that we normally wouldn’t have access to. Pokemon Go was a wonderful example of how computer games can use AR. In specialized domains, the often ridiculed Google Glass (worn by Glassholes, according to some) proved to be a great tool for overlaying what, for instance, a mechanic would see while maintaining or fixing a machine. Many companies are working on solutions that merge the physical and virtual worlds and provide an integrated interface to humans.

The technology furthest out likely concerns direct brain-computer interfaces. As usual, technologies like this are first used for people with severe limitations such as quadriplegics. Last year, Neuralink implanted such an interface in Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed. Similar to other technologies that provide significant benefits, we can expect that over time, entirely healthy humans will opt for such procedures, assuming the downside risks are minimal and the upside sufficiently significant.

Although many think of gaming as the primary application area, immersive technologies are used to complement, augment and improve human abilities in more and more fields. In the medical space, solutions exist for overlaying X-ray imaging over the area where an operation is taking place. Also, remote operations using a robot are leaving the experimental phase and the first commercial systems are available.

A second application area is the construction industry where virtual and augmented reality are used both to show decision-makers the impact of a new building in a particular environment and during design to ensure that the designs by the different disciplines don’t collide with each other. It’s quite typical that during the construction phase of a building, builders detect a conflict in the design where, for instance, water lines and electricity cables are supposed to be installed in the same place.

Using virtual reality is increasingly commonplace in the engineering of systems including mechanical, electronic and software parts as it allows for all the disciplines to bring together their respective designs in a holistic one to ensure that things come together as they should.

Of course, one of the application areas is the Metaverse, initially popularized in one of my favorite science fiction books, “Snow crash” by Neal Stephenson. The idea of a VR space where our avatars can meet as if we were meeting in the real world is a long-standing dream that has been tried and failed. I think we all remember Second Life receiving lots of funding and attention and in recent years, Meta has been trying the same. Even if it proves to be difficult to find the killer app for these technologies – eg Apple Vision isn’t the breakout success some hoped for – we’re going to get this right at some point.

The quality of immersive technologies is constantly improving and the application areas and use cases continue to grow. These technologies allow us to complement our limited senses and information-processing capabilities. They allow us to design faster, troubleshoot faster, act remotely and, with the help of AI, enable use cases we can’t even think of today. Imagine the possibility of instantly being present somewhere else or receiving all the relevant information while entering a new location. To end with a quote by Chris Milk: “If you just look at the medium and what it’s doing, we’re basically broadcasting human senses to your consciousness. We’re duplicating perception.”