Weekly Metaverse #121: Redrawing the world around us with AR
How does your life change when the entire world around you is a canvas?
The Metaverse in the Real World
A couple of tweets about AR and VR caught my eye this week. First up is a waterslide in Germany that has you pop on a VR headset before you ride, so you get the physical sensation of a real waterslide with spectacular VR visuals.
Putting aside the question of how well VR headsets will hold up in that environment, I think it really embodies the idea of the metaverse - an immersive digital experience that blends the real and virtual worlds.
As we move towards the sort of high-quality, lightweight AR glasses (and eventually contacts) that people will wear regularly, I would expect to see a whole lot more of this kind of thing. From a business perspective, itâs great - you can build the physical piece of the experience (the waterslide) once, but through digital overlays you can enable a thousand different experiences for people riding it.
Some forward-thinking amusement parks might even go so far as to âopen sourceâ their rides - provide people with a template, so they can build their own digital overlays and share them with others. Creators who make the most highly-used overlays might get compensated for bringing people into the parks.
Of course, this isnât limited to waterparks - ARâs going to enable people to build experiences everywhere. Think about holiday decorations - your local mall spends a bunch of time and money decorating for Halloween and Christmas, but just imagine what they can do with AR. Witches zipping around on broomsticks, snow falling, elves making toys, all without the time and money needed to put up decorations. These kinds of experiences can give public spaces new life by drawing people in at what is relatively a very low cost.
Next up weâve got a portal gun in AR via Snap Lens Studio. Sadly, you canât walk through the portals, but itâs neat nonetheless.
While the waterslide gives us a taste of what weâll be able to do in public spaces, this is a fun reminder that AR can augment our private spaces, too. When you can add objects around your house, it really opens up endless possibilities for how you can use your space.
Working in your office? Turn your wall into a giant whiteboard. No need to erase when you want to do something different on it, just save each whiteboard overlay and pull it up when you want it. Working out in your home gym? Turn the space around your treadmill into⊠whatever you want. I like to watch basketball while I run on the treadmill, but with AR/VR I can move my treadmill courtside instead of looking at the TV.
And of course the holiday decoration use case will work at home, too - youâll be able to turn the inside of your house into Santaâs workshop. Best of all, when Christmas is over, you wonât have to spend days taking down your elaborate setup, and when Christmas comes the next year, itâll be saved and ready to go.
As AI improves, this will get easier and more fun. Think of what DALL-E can do these days (and if youâre not familiar with DALL-E, read this and then go search Twitter and be amazed: https://qz.com/2176389/the-best-examples-of-dall-e-2s-strange-beautiful-ai-art/), and now imagine a more advanced, AR form of that. All you have to do is say âturn all of my plants into festive holiday plantsâ and youâve now got an AR overlay that turns ferns into poinsettias and all of your trees into colorfully-lit firs.
The combination of AR and AI will eventually let us create the fantastic worlds we all imagined as kids with nothing but a few spoken sentences. I, for one, am excited about that future.
AI in the Metaverse
Virtual Assistants and Digital Humans on Pace to Ace Turing Test With New NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine: This is a meaningful step forwards towards the AI personas that I keep saying will replace a whole lot of jobs.
Education in the Metaverse
University of Tokyo to open Metaverse School of Engineering: Itâll be interesting to see how rapidly getting an education in VR will go mainstream.
Music in the Metaverse - learn to play the piano in this new augmented reality app: Getting a full college education in VR may be a ways out, but training skills like piano in AR and VR is already an option.
Medical simulation platform FundamentalVR raises $20M to help surgeons learn through VR: Great to see startups pushing the medical industry forward.
Religion in the Metaverse
The metaverse is opening up the worldâs holiest sites to virtual pilgrims: Iâm not religious myself, so I wonder about this - how much will religious folks accept virtual versions of religious rituals and sacred places? Also, isnât the point of making a pilgrimage to a holy site that itâs a difficult journey to show your devotion, and doesnât popping on a VR headset kinda ruin that part of it? đ€·
Virtual Influences in the Metaverse
Virtual influencer Miquela is back. This time, brands are metaverse ready: Miquela was created back in 2016 on Instagram, and now sheâs looking like she was ahead of her time.
The religious thing is super weird, but definitely an interesting part of the growing "Metaverse"
check out VR baptisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_88DBmdnNA&t=428s