Weekly Metaverse #127: Digitize everything!
Tools for scanning and digitizing the physical world are advancing by leaps and bounds.
If the metaverse is to bring together the physical and digital worlds, information needs to flow both directions - from the physical world into the digital and vice versa. That’s why it’s so exciting to see some rapid advancement of tools that can quickly and easily turn people and places digital without any specialized hardware.
For example:
We’ve talked about ways in which this kind of mapping can be immediately useful - everything from IKEA using it to let you try furniture out at home to digital twins of industrial and manufacturing facilities to companies like YUPIX enabling digital real estate tours.
The faster and easier mapping gets, the more value we can get from digital replicas of physical spaces. It also works the other way - good maps of the physical world mean better AR overlays on top of it.
Speaking of which, Niantic is bringing Lightship VPS, its world-mapping technology, to the browser. That’ll make it easier for developers to build AR experiences and will help people consume AR via the web. The latter is a valuable step in the popularization of AR, since the vast majority of people aren’t going to have any kind of AR glasses in the immediate future. There’s a flywheel to be had - the more people use it, the more value they (and consequently investors) will see in it, which in turn will cause more demand and thus more development. Niantic really brought the idea of AR to the masses with Pokémon Go, and it’s good to see them continuing to lead with an eye on how to make it approachable to the end user.
We’ve also talked about the intersection of AR and AI here before, and Shopify has combined AR with a bit of Stable Diffusion for a fun demo of what the two might do together to create the next generation of e-commerce experience:
You might not love corn wallpaper, but it’s not tough to imagine how this combination might work together in more practical ways. I mentioned the IKEA example above - they do a great job with allowing you to use AR to decorate a room, but you still have to go through the process of picking out pieces of furniture and arranging them. Sprinkle a little AI in there, answer a few questions about your aesthetic preferences, and IKEA can arrange a full set of furniture and decor for you. If you like what you see, order it all in one click, and a couple of workers will come to your house, build it all, and arrange it exactly as the AI designed.
Is digitizing your house not interesting enough for you? Well, maybe this one will be worth your while:
Digitizing the human body really does have the potential to save lives. Perfect digital replicas of our organs are better for training than the plastic models you might have seen in your doctor’s office, and they’re easier to come by than real organs used for dissection. With sufficient advances in haptics, it will likely one day be possible that surgeons can train in a VR experience that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
And of course every human body is different, so scanning patients and their organs means that surgeons can go into surgery with a specific understanding of what they’re going to encounter, rather than just a general idea of how the surgery should go. Better information means fewer surprises, shorter surgeries, and fewer complications, and all of those things mean better patient outcomes.
Okay, one last example of some very recent work on bringing the physical world into the digital - Meta has used AI to developing a very impressive way of bringing the motion and position of the human body into VR, using only the position of the controllers and headset:
This really shows the power of AI in digitizing the world. There are plenty of companies taking a variety of approaches to bringing people into VR in this way, but the vast majority of them involve some kind of hardware - either cameras or sensors. By achieving these results with just software and existing hardware, Meta has leapfrogged hardware-based approaches and can offer the same functionality at a lower price.
We’re only at the early stages of the metaverse - this is all still basic infrastructure for what’s to come. Every development here will be built upon and improved, until we take it for granted that the physical world and the digital world are fundamentally linked.
News About the Metaverse
NVIDIA’s GTC keynote is worth a watch:
Chinese university sets up metaverse major, names department after metaverse: China’s making sure its citizens are ready to ensure its position as a leader in the metaverse.
Pico to Launch Horizon Worlds Metaverse Competitor in 2023: And speaking of China’s position in the metaverse, Pico is the clear leader there, though still substantially behind Meta when it comes to hardware sales.
AR Rides Without 3D Glasses At Disney Theme Parks Could Soon Be A Reality: Disney is a company that knows all about creating magical experiences, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they’ll do with AR.
Alibaba Brings Luxury Shopping Into the Metaverse: Nobody’s quite mastered metaverse shopping, but Alibaba’s certainly in a good position to do so.
This app uses AR, ‘3D sound’ and a camera to guide blind people around big cities: A reminder that AR isn’t just a neat tool for fun experiences.