By Ashoke Agarrwal
The Screen Age dawned with the spread of TV. Today, it has reached its apex with the ubiquity of the smartphone.
There are now indications that over the next decade, a new age will dawn that lessens humankind’s obsession with the screen.
I have always considered augmented reality more potent than virtual reality and could not fathom Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse. A week ago, Zuckerberg revealed a use case for virtual reality technology that made immediate commercial sense in his interview with Lex Friedman.
The interview itself was perhaps the first public demo of a powerful new technology that Meta has developed – Pixel Codec Avatars (PiCA): “a deep generative model of 3D human faces that achieves state of the art reconstruction performance while being computationally efficient and adaptive to rendering conditions during execution”. Behind the technical jargon is a hot new metaverse experience that led a usually stone-faced gnome like Lex Friedman to drool.
PiCA is poised to take over the online meeting space at the high end, pending software and hardware developments.
Beyond PiCA, the interview revealed a shift in Zuckerberg’s attitude that will make Meta more of an Augmented Reality (AR) player than a Virtual Reality (VR) player.
Zuckerberg speaks about thinking of AR as a shift in how people experience everyday reality in contrast to VR or the Metaverse, which is about people living in a separate reality.
Zuckerberg now sees an AR world as one that adds a 4th dimension to the 3-D world of time and space we live in – the AR-driven digital dimension – not as static or moving texts and images on a screen – but as an integral part of the lived reality – an integral part that instead of detracting us from our surroundings, immerses us deeper in it.
Zuckerberg thinks that with advances in AI, IoT, and PiCA technology, we could be, in a decade or so, living in a world where two people wearing Quest 2030, a spectacle light VR set, can play table tennis on a holographic table with holographic paddles and ball! When the game is over the table, the paddles and ball return to the digital world, leaving the real-world 3D space accessible to the next visitor from the digital dimension.
The failure of Google Glass in the consumer world was because it was just an uncomfortable shifting of the screen from a handheld to a lens in front of our eyes.
AR is now in its second generation, where leaps in bandwidth and computing power combined with innovations like PiCA will allow for wearable headsets that are as comfortable for all-day use as spectacles and which project digital 3D objects into real 3D space that one can interact with through voice, gesture, and other digital 3D things.
That will be a whole new paradigm in experiencing reality.
When it takes hold, it will be the screen’s death. A paradigm that will add a new sense organ to us humans – the Third Eye- bringing into our lives a fourth digital but actual dimension to our old-world three-dimensional reality. The Screen Age brought us distraction and shallowness of thought- almost a collapsing of our world into 2D. What will the Era of the Third Eye get us? It is difficult to predict, but the magnitude of change in the human experience will be almost metaphysical.
Why do I feel the Third Eye is fluttering, heralding the not-too-distant dawning of the Era of the Third Eye? Besides the revelations in the Zuckerberg interview, another rumour said that Sam Altman of Open AI and the legendary designer Jony Ive (of iPhone fame) plan to collaborate on an AI hardware device. I bet a million dollars that it will be a Third Eye design if they come up with one.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, we used to drool over the Dick Tracy watch that did all sorts of things and fantasise about what devices advertised as X-Ray glasses would do for us. Over the next decade or so, the world will likely be flooded with Third Eye devices, a combination of a powerful wrist computer and lightweight, normal-looking eyeglasses, delivering an almost godlike dimension to everyday reality.
