Augmented & Virtual Reality: The Beginning or the End?
Monday and Sunday share their takes of the future with AR and VR technology—the Metaverse, Apple Vision Pro, and so on.
Partially inspired by this post.
SUNDAY: The idea of the Metaverse, a Virtual Reality world, can be the start of some very dystopian ideas of the future. I remember talking with Monday or someone about the possibilities for it to go haywire and awful like…well, other types of media. I’m not sure what exactly happened, or if my feeling is right, but it feels like it just…fizzled. Be it by lack of interest or bad execution, the metaverse isn’t a big thing.
Now, I’m not saying that Ready Player One isn’t still our future. It could be. But I think the metaverse isn’t the more disturbing-yet-full-of-good-potential immediate future for us. Virtual reality isn’t.
But augmented reality is.
We have to look at the Apple Vision Pro for that. The Apple Vision Pro isn’t creating a new crumby reality for us—rather, it is enhancing and adjusting our reality. This is far more appealing and looks far better executed than the metaverse. The possibilities are greater with it for good…but also for evil. There are probably numerous YouTube videos that discuss how things could get dystopian and freaky fast with it, one of which I’ve watched and recommend, so I’m not going to talk about their thoughts.
Instead, I’m going to flag an important revelation I had with all these visual technologies: Blind people aren’t going to be able to get anything out of it nor be included in it. Deaf people might also have a problematic relationship to it as well. Probably could make an argument for other disabled groups being unable to effectively use it (or use it and be exploited by it).
Where does that lead us in the future….well, I think the future isn’t going to be so homogenous because we are not homogenous. We can’t all be exploited and turned into cattle with the same blanket thing. So…the dystopian future will be more sophisticated in its…awfulness.
If it’s dystopian. Maybe augmented reality will just help us be better—give us easier ways to connect to each other and to ourselves. Maybe. We can hope.
MONDAY:
My take is that virtual reality, or augmented reality, have a lot of potential to be life changing in a good way, but they probably won't be, considering that they're going to be used mainly by corporations to increase profits and governments to increase control. The internet is a good parallel of this. In technical terms, it's great for increased communication and opportunities. In pragmatic terms, though, governments use it to algorithmically control their populations points of view, and by corporations to cynically profit off people. In the long, it may be ultimately beneficial, but it's very easy to see how it could go bad, too. I'm generally of the mind that it will go bad. How bad really depends on a lot of factors we can't easily see right now. But if absolute power corrupts absolutely, I don't see any reason to be optimistic.