I really didn’t have a ton of thoughts from this session. The only thing that really stood out was Steve Jobs presenting the IPhone for the first time. This was one of the biggest steps for touch screen technology and the crowd reflected that with their cheers. Actually something that interested me quite a lot was the unified optimism about this new tech. I think the reason for that was because the world hadn’t seen the dangers of a new tech like this. Nowadays if you presented a social tech that was meant to be widely used it would be met with a lot more hesitance and I think that’s good. Meta is working on AR glasses that are paired with a wrist controller. Based on how you move your hand you can control the AR display on your glasses. An example they showed is overlay of text messages that you can twist your wrist to browse through. I’m not sure how you would type a reply yet though. They also showed that you could take pictures by making a different hand gesture. I’m not sure how this will go down with privacy laws but its obvious Facebook has never cared about that.
Okay so I just went back to re-read the article and found this.
“The glasses will come with a “neural interface” band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow.”
So there is the answer to how you would reply to messages.
Here is a link to this article, it’s very interesting and I highly recommend taking a look.
This is Meta’s AR/VR hardware roadmap for the next four years – The Verge
The article ends with
“Meta is planning to rely on its existing business model of advertising to help it make money off these future devices. Himel said the company thinks it can make a higher average revenue per user than what it makes currently in social media, thanks to a combination of selling virtual goods, optional add-on’s like cloud backups, and AR ads.
“We should be able to run a very good ads business,” he said. “I think it’s easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent.”
“If we’re hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business,” he said. “A business unlike anything we’ve seen on mobile phones before.””
This is really sad to me and I worry for the future of this tech. VR/AR have so much potential to better understand each other and further the connections humans share. But instead companies are looking at it as a tool of manipulation to encourage people to buy. Maybe this is just what you have to do as a big company to keep the investors happy but damn it is sad. Jaron Lanier talks about an alternative future that is far too complex to explain here. I just wanted state that as some think that this advertised manipulation is the only way, it is not. I will put my energy into tech for good and I hope someday I can make a lasting impact. It’s too bad UAL is such a waste of money and time. The people and content are so basic that I was beginning to think VR was basic as well. If it wasn’t for people like Margaret and Lauren, I would have given up on this field entirely. I worry for all future students that wont reach their full potential due to this class. Not everyone will get a chance to meet Lauren and Margaret.