Melbourne, AUSTRALIA: Kellie Shaw (R) inspects one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous designs which is recognised as the ancestor to the modern helicopter and is part of an exhibition featuring 50 models of 15th century inventions by Da Vinci, in Melbourne 04 July 2006. This craft is made of linen, reeds and iron thread and would have been operated by four men rotating a shaft. The exhibition focuses on four themes: mechanical, military, hydraulic and flying machines with each model built according to Da Vinci’s drawing and are crafted from materials available in 15th century Italy. AFP PHOTO/William WEST (Photo credit should read WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images)
Artists deal in both the possible and impossible. Many, especially science fiction writers, play somewhere in the middle. They write about technologies that don’t yet exist. Or they assume the possibilities of technologies far ahead of their time.
Da Vinci’s sketches, writings, and musings were at times centuries ahead of possibility. It’s not an overstatement to say we can attribute the entire aerospace industry to his vision. Da Vinci began a tradition of futurism in art and science and made a strong statement about the relevance of the relationship of imagination, art, and science. It is the ability to conceive and share a vision, to make the invisible visible, and therefore possible.
This art of futurism has been practiced by novelists, who two hundred years ago created the science fiction genre, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. It is no accident that science fiction is every technology geek’s favorite genre. When a geek’s imagination gets combined with their knowledge of technology, science fiction can, and has, become science fact. Thanks to megahits like Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Avatar, The Terminator, The Matrix, and Guardians of the Galaxy, science fiction is well entrenched in popular culture. Through each representation of virtual reality and augmented reality in the past, writers and artists inspired technologists and entrepreneurs to create new things.
Some companies today attribute their success and core technologies to the inspiration of science fiction. Dreamscape Immersive, The Void, Zero Latency, VRstudios and others are using free roam VR to create experiences very much like the Star Trek holodeck, created to relieve the relentless monotony of space travel. VR Games like Lone Echo pit two teams against one another in a zero gravity arena, influenced in no smart part by Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game.
The influences of popular culture on AR and VR run deep and will continue to do so. Philip Rosedale, Founder of the massive virtual world Second Life and the recently opened High Fidelity VR metaverse, said he was so inspired by the movie The Matrix, he stepped down from his role as CTO of Real Networks to start Second Life. “I said ‘I’m going to make that, but it’s not going to look like that,” Rosedale recalled in a recent interview.
Snowcrash: Welcome to The Metaverse
The term Metaverse was coined well before it was popularized by Neal Stephenson in his seminal 1992 novel Snowcrash. The word “metaverse” combines the prefix “meta” (meaning “beyond”) with “universe”, here referring to an infinite number of interconnected virtual or digital spaces. Stephenson’s book was more than just prescient, which is why he’s been called “the tech Nostradomus”. Snowcrash has influenced thought leaders and inventors for twenty-five years, including Jeff Bezos, Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev and Magic Leap founder Romy Abramovitz, who hired Stevenson as a Futurist.
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Avatar
In James Cameron’s Avatar, a crippled marine is sent to the planet Pandora where humans are mining a precious metal known as Unobtainium, which is apparently valuable, but extremely difficult to obtain. To do so, they must destroy the habitat of the native species, the Na’Vi. As a means to communicate and understand these natives, scientists have created “Avatars”. These avatars are biological copies of a Na’Vi that human pilots can jack into and use to meet and greet the aliens on their own terms. The presumed Bluetooth type connection between the puppeteer and the avatar is never explained.
Jake Sully lays in a pod and has his mind uploaded into the Avatar’s body, in which he can walk again. The avatar body has working legs. His physical body does not. When we are in VR, we are piloting a virtual body in virtual space. The only difference between the marine piloting the Na’vi, and you being a ghostbuster at The Void, is the headset.
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The Terminator
The Terminator (1984) is a robot controlled by extraordinary artificial intelligence. This AI can do everything we hope to someday with an AR headset. It does real time facial and object recognition. It is contextually and geospacially aware. It does translation and displays branching dialog choice. And it learns. It adapts. It acquires and terminates targets. In short, you do not want this thing chasing you. The Terminator is sent back in time to track down Sarah Connor before she can give birth to John Connor, who will lead the rebellion against the robot masters.
When the Terminator first arrives in the past, he finds his way to a biker bar. We see from his perspective what appears to be an augmented reality display. The display scans the environment in search for tools, displaying information on vehicle models as well as environmental computations and statistics. With a quick glance around the room, the AR display sizes up a few humans, finding one of appropriate size. Upon picking this human for his body size, the terminator kindly asks for his clothes and motorcycle, which the AR display knows the man has via his boots. The man, a fan of the clothes on his back, responds defensively. After a decisive barfight, the Terminator walks out fully clothed, hopping on the correct bike with the keys he just obtained. Thanks to the initial environmental scan when he walked in, he knows which bike the keys belong to. That is one vision of what AR and AI can do together.
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Source: Forbes