The Billion Dollar elephant in the VR room: Google’s Pokemon Go. Is it AR? Does it matter?
Over a thousand people gathered in Boston’s wintry rain to ruminate over the future of Augmented Reality at the MIT Media Lab’s first “AR in Action” Conference, January 17–18. The conference, loosely organized but well curated by the former Media Lab innovator, John Werner, allowed presenters with different perspectives on the emerging field to share their thoughts with an enthusiastic crowd of professionals midwifing this emerging field. The atmosphere was optimistic, buoyant, and expectant. Everyone there, as many pointed out, has a stake in the success of AR.
Pattie Maes of the Media Lab was a spectacular lead off hitter. Well known for her compelling TED talks, she gave a mesmerizing big picture presentation on the state of modern life: living simultaneously, imperfectly and superficially in the real and digital worlds, multitasking, continually interrupting ourselves by checking our smart phones 100+ times a day. Tech has become part of us, she said, but the form is all wrong. Yet we all know there is no going back. Instead, we need to make our integration with technology more seamless. In the short term, our technology is making us less mindful and attentive, but in the long term it will make us much, much better. Better learners, better workers, better able to reach our potential. We will become augmented. Cyborgs. Many of the Media Lab’s forward thinking projects seek to accomplish this with wearables, biometric scent dispensers, and even tattoos. I always thought VR meditation was utter new age bullshit, but when Maes showed how we can use brainwaves to levitate and move objects in a 3D digital world, I shed my cynical disbelief.
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We are augmenting and evolving ourselves.
Juan Enriquez, self described “optimistic curmudgeon, author, life sciences VC, synthetic bio, futurist” amplified some of the themes Maes introduced. He worried that we have replaced natural selection with unnatural selection, but exalted in the possibility that by reordering genomes we can augment and therefore evolve ourselves, without the random interference of nature.
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Robert Scoble, dramatic, insightful, and entertaining, dished Apple’s most secret plans for AR.
Lovable futurist and the VR world’s favorite consultant, Robert Scoble, looking rumpled after taking the red eye from CA (and leaving his laptop on the plane) took the stage wearing his Hololens (a creative flourish) and presented convincing evidence that Apple will introduce a significant AR product this year, possibly creating an industry changing “big bang”. Tim Merrill of Digi-Capital agreed. “It’s all about what the guys at the top of the pyramid do”.
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PTC’s demo showed how AR can make low skilled workers into high skilled ones.
PTC CEO Jim Heppleman then got real. He took a sleepy IT company and turned it into an AR Enterprise powerhouse, helping over one thousand companies transform their workforce with AR.
Amber Case, Harvard Fellow and author of “Calm Technology + An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology”, studies the impact of technology on how we live. Reggie Watts called her “one of the greatest people on the planet”. She made a case for minimal disruption. “A good tool is invisible,” she said.
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Reggie Watts: Wilson tennis balls are coming to AR. They also taste great.
Reggie Watts received star billing but turned in a rare, lackluster appearance. Many of us expected him in person, but instead here he was on Skype, ready to be interviewed, and clearly surprised that everyone, including the organizers, expected him to perform. Ooops. One the spot, he improvised.
“MIT is just one building, right? There’s a guy there, with a freeze ray pointing to the ground, saying “I’ve invented cold fusion!” He added, “Also, I hear they have some bad ass robots”. After a modest inside joke about the Hololens’ field of view (“It’s like you’re a knight”), Watts signed off after just fifteen minutes (he was scheduled to speak for an hour). Awkward. It’s too bad, as Reggie’s recent performances in the social VR world AltSpaceVR have cemented his cred as a pioneering VR entertainer.
The demos outside the conference’s three lecture halls were just plain fun. One, in particular, caught my eye, H0loTats, from Balti Virtual (of Baltimore, natch 😉 Balti makes its dough working on AR marketing promotions for giant ad agencies, but it’s homegrown product for kids, HoloTats, showed the potential AR has to create experiential marketing.
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Source: Virtual Reality Pop