Thanks to an almost inconceivable rate of progress in the virtual and augmented reality industries, technology once consigned to the fictional realm of Star Wars is now a fundamental of today’s reality. BDJ spoke with Steve Raymond, CEO of California-based 8i, about the VR and AR fields and where they are headed. We discussed the industry’s potential, and the ways in which we could achieve a “true” virtual reality.
Can VR and AR really “humanize” or could they simply continue to gamify our interactions with the world and people around us? After all, if the human element is so important to content, then surely face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable.
Another key issue to consider is how much narrower these technologies could make our interactions with others if we keep them within these mediums? For example, a lot of the best equipment is expensive – so how accessible will it be to the whole world at large? If we restrict our reality to VR or AR it could limit our social awareness and maybe make different kinds of people less visible to us.
One of the advantages of virtual reality is that it humanizes our technological interactions; immersed inside the machine, we communicate within it, rather than from the outside. Technology is no longer a barrier between people, but rather a gateway.
The augmented, virtual, and mixed reality company 8i is working on human holograms. Its primary claim is that its technology provides “a scalable way to create 3D holograms of real people, and distribute those holograms to as many people as possible by making them accessible on any device or platform.”
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Source: The Next Web