Mark Zuckerberg would like you to believe the future of human society belongs in virtual reality, and while this is an incredibly controversial statement, there are a lot of great functionalities that are part of the “Metaverse”. The Meta Quest Pro headset has the ability to render monitors in augmented reality rather than having to have them physically there, which I think is an amazing utilisation of AR. While it may seem to be one of the smaller additions to the ever-growing capabilities of the Metaverse, the productivity this could add without having to have actual monitors is incredible. I also think this is great as it is one of the AR projects of the Metaverse, rather than fully VR. I think VR and AR technologies should strive towards AR, as adding an extra layer to the real world is much better than fully disconnecting from it.
My biggest concern currently with the Metaverse and VR, in general, is that Meta is currently buying up all small VR and AR start-ups, and one company controlling what is supposedly the future of our society would be catastrophic. The upside to this is that Meta is not a trusted company, so the public will hopefully be sceptical and critical of them controlling the future. Overall, I think that AR utility is the future, but a future where full VR utilisation is the norm for everyday life is tantamount to dystopia.
The Future Interfaces Group is an interdisciplinary research lab within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Their work involves creating new interface technologies which could be used to evolve interaction design. A lot of the technology produced by FIG utilises sensory technology to build tracking maps which allow for screen-less touch-based interactions. I think their work is truly incredible and really excites me. There are so many projects from FIG that look like they’re straight out of sci-fi and the fact that this is nearly reality is phenomenal. One project which particularly took my interest was Surface Site, which utilises a spinning camera on smart speakers to scan the surroundings to add the ability for the speaker to see where items and people are. I think this would massively increase the usability of smart speakers as allows any surface to become an interface that can be used to add gesture controls to smart speakers. Whenever I have used a smart speaker, it has always felt unnatural to say “skip track” etc, so the ability to swipe the surface quickly would allow for much more natural interaction. All the FIG projects are incredible and I’ve struggled to get them out of my mind because they are just so innovative, and I could see this being the future of interfaces.
<aside> 📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLWdvpg8BMg
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Looking forward to the future of interaction design has been really interesting and has got me really excited for the future. I just think it will be incredible when the types of interfaces we see in sci-fi moving become normal reality and the fact we are nearly there is incredible