Wait! What? Really?
Techno Talk
Max the Magnificent
I first read Ready Player One deep in the mists of time we used to call 2011 (which is now 13
years ago – give me strength!). At that time, the technology depicted in this tale was the stuff of
science fiction, but we are getting closer day-by-day.
W
hen the combination of
artificial intelligence (AI) and
mixed reality (MR) comes to
fruition, it will change the way we interface with our systems, the world,
and each other.
Keep it real!
As John Lennon famously noted,
‘Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.’ In fact, there are multiple flavors
of reality. At one end of the reality spectrum we have the real world, which
we might call ‘physical reality’ (PR).
At the other end we have virtual reality (VR) in which everything we see is
computer generated.
Most people these days are familiar
with the term augmented reality (AR).
Many believe this to involve only a
visual view of the real world superimposed with text or graphics. More
generally, and quoting myself, we
might say that AR refers to ‘an interactive experience in which objects that
reside in the real world are enhanced
by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple
sensory modalities, including visual,
auditory, haptic, somatosensory [relating to a sensation such as pressure or
warmth], and olfactory.’
The conceptual opposite to AR is diminished reality (DR), which involves
diminishing or removing information
or stimuli from the real world. One
example would be if you were at a
cocktail party and your DR-enabled
system faded down all the voices except that of the person with whom
you are conversing. Another would
be to change most of your view of the
world into grayscale, leaving only the
portion of interest in colour. Think
of a Where’s Waldo image. It would
be a lot easier to spot the little rascal
if he was the only portion of the picture in colour. Similarly, if you were
looking for your friends in an environment containing thousands of other
people – like an open-air concert, for
example – it would be advantageous
if your AI+AR+DR headset presented everything but your friends in
black-and-white.
8
And then there’s augmented virtuality (AV) in which a predominantly
virtual environment is augmented with
real-world objects or people. Because
all this is a bit of a mouthful, we use
the term mixed reality (MR) to embrace
AR, DR, VR and AV. Don’t get me started
on hyper reality (HR), but feel free to
search for ‘Hyper Reality’ on YouTube.
More cheese, Gromit?
I was first exposed to VR in the form of
military systems 20+ years ago. At that
time, I thought a consumer-level experience of any significance was years
away in my future. So, you can only
imagine my surprise and delight when
the Oculus Rift VR headset launched
in 2016. Suffice it to say I was at the
front of the queue for one of those bodacious beauties.
Of course, being tethered to a large
computer and having to use external
sensors was a bit of a downer, which
is why I traded my Oculus Rift for an
Oculus Quest (now Meta Quest) VR
headset as soon as it came out in 2019.
More recently, I splashed the cash for a
Meta Quest 3 MR headset, which was
released in October 2023. This little
scamp is sitting on my desk singing its
siren song as I pen these words.
There are myriad mixed reality applications available for the Quest 3.
One of my favorites involves Wallace
and Gromit. Assume you are standing
in the middle of your family room. The
headset has forward-looking colour cameras whose video streams are presented
on the displays that reside in front of
your eyes. As a result, you see the same
thing you would if you took the headset off… apart from the virtual electric
toaster in front of you and the virtual
jam-dispensing, steampunk-looking gun
in your hand. When a slice of toast is
ejected from your toaster, you attempt
to hit it with a blob of jam fired from
your gun. If you miss, the jam carries
on its trajectory until it hits (and sticks
to) the ceiling or wall. Brilliant!
The noblest of fruits
The current state-of-the-art in consumer MR is the recently introduced
Apple Vision Pro. (It’s tempting to
speculate that Henry David Thoreau
was channeling the future when he
proclaimed, ‘Surely the apple is the
noblest of fruits.’)
When people are first exposed to
Vision Pro publicity shots, they often assume that this device features
a transparent visor because it looks
like you can see the wearer’s eyes.
In reality (no pun intended), the visor is opaque. This feature – which
is called EyeSight – starts with a 3D
facial scan of the person wearing the
headset. In addition to other tasks,
four eye-tracking cameras inside the
headset are used to control where the
virtual eyes are looking on the outward-facing display.
I would love to own a Vision Pro,
but it’s way outside my price range.
A Quest 3 headset costs around £400
in the UK. By comparison, a Vision
Pro will lighten your wallet by a hefty
£3,500 give-or-take (Eeek!).
Wait! What? Really?
It’s probably fair to say that most people
might be a tad embarrassed to be out and
about – perambulating through town or
strolling round a supermarket, for example – sporting a Quest 3 or Vision Pro
style headset. Having said this, no one
would care if everyone else was doing
the same thing. Hopefully, it won’t be
long before we have display technologies like those being developed by Kura
(www.kura.tech), which look like regular glasses but sport 50,000,000 MR
pixels per eye.
I have just seen something else
that has me quivering in excitement.
This comes to us from Zinn Labs
(www.zinnlabs.com). It’s a set of glasses frames (no lenses) equipped with a
forward-looking camera that sees what
you see and eye trackers that can determine what you are looking at. If you
visit Zinn’s website, you can see these
glasses connected wirelessly to ChatGPT.
All you do is look at something, ask a
question about it, and let the ChatGPTgenerated answer tickle your lugholes.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again
– the future is closer than we think!
Practical Electronics | April | 2024
