As a reader of this column, I suspect you know I am releasing a new AR-enabled book, Convergence, How The World Will Be Painted With Data, on March 12 at the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin. For the next four weeks, I'll be sharing excerpts from the book like this one, by Paramount Pictures' resident futurist and serial entrepreneur Ted Schilowitz.
We’ve been going to movies for a century now and still don’t call the experience virtual, even though a film can transport us to new worlds. Films offer a temporary escape from reality and are an enjoyable pastime. But, the average American adult attends only 5 movies a year. While we love losing ourselves to motion pictures, we aren’t spending every waking moment with a bucket of popcorn in the movie theater.
Extended reality and its flavors—augmented, mixed and virtual reality—are all exciting new mediums primed to change the world. VR, like its movie theater ancestors, offers us an escape from reality, while MR is poised to change our daily lives, and soon.
We enjoy the fantasy of movies in a movie theater some of the time, but we like watching TV pretty much all the time. It turns out humans like to multi-task significantly more than they like to single-task. They want to be grounded in reality while dabbling in storytelling magic. Whether it’s productivity, social connectivity, entertainment or the latest news, humans like MR storytelling whenever they can access it.
Nearly everyone carries a box connected to an endless stream of storytelling magic. This mini-TV, a smartphone, lets us do more of what we already enjoy: watching TV all the time. Whether on a 1-inch smartwatch, a 5.2-inch smartphone display, the newest 50-inch paper-thin TV, or a jumbotron at an arena, we watch as fantasies play out in front of our eyes and ears, only semi-grounded in the reality around us. It is somehow easy to become lost in a 5.2-inch display, though we could easily look up and away at any time.
Think about the things we used to do pre-smartphone era. We used to send mail that we wrote on paper and sent physically; now we do an on-screen-version called email. We used to look at physical paper maps; now we use the screen-version called Google Maps or Waze. We used to send small physical notes to each other; now we send the digital-version called texting or Snapchat or WhatsApp or WeChat. We used to shoot pictures and movies with chemical formulations and physical mediums, distribute them with paper prints and plastic film; now we simply do a screen-version with our small handheld digital cameras and screens.
The screen we use the most isn’t the biggest, it’s actually one of the smallest. It needs to fit into our pocket or purse. It’s portable. It travels with us—a portal into our MR universe. It’s a multi-tasking phenomenon.
Audio also lends well to our desire to multitask. Little white earbuds and big bold clamshells cover our ears, feeding us music and story, while we drive, walk and move through reality. The average North American adult consumes content for around 11 hours a day.
Our smartphones have become so powerful and useful that we use them for almost everything. The question is: what’s the next evolution of the magic box? Will it cover our eyes and pull us into an artificial world? Will it provide storytelling magic like our smartphones, just in a more evolved and useful form? At some point, will it make a bit more sense to “wear our screen” rather than “hold our screen?” Many of the world’s largest, most powerful technology companies are betting that the 5.2-inch handheld screen will not be the ultimate MR interface. Once they’re logical and fast enough, once they’re smarter than our smartphones, we will move to a new platform, tossing the smartphone into the same drawer as the flip phone of yesteryear.
The XR revolution must provide both MR and fully occluded VR experiences. When we want a full escape from reality, a flip of a switch is all we’ll need. But most of the time we’ll be in MR, where we can multitask with access to everything, in its real-world context.
While we can experience almost anything in VR, the future will be MR. No longer will our little TVs be limited to tiny rectangles we hold all day long. They will evolve and the physical size of the device will not be the limiting factor to the magic it provides.
