New Vision

Games aren't the only things that better devices will bring. Chapter 4, Vision Two – Virtual Worlds Appear, provides details on Technology, Media, and Telecommunications, another of our seven industry verticals to be disrupted. We start out by detailing the different kinds of devices that are available to bring a spectrum of Spatial Computing capabilities to your face, from Virtual and Augmented Reality headsets to lightweight smart information glasses, and even contact lenses with displays so small that it will be very hard to tell that your friend is wearing one.

There are pretty profound trade-offs made as manufacturers bring devices to the market. VR headsets emphasize immersion, or the feeling you get when you see something beautiful wrapped all around you. Augmented Reality headsets focus on the virtual layer that they reveal on top of the real world. Often it's amazing and magical, albeit usually with less of that "I'm in a dark movie theater with a huge screen" feeling. Then there are a few other devices that focus mostly on being lightweight, bringing navigation and notification-style functionality. Our guide isn't designed to be comprehensive, but rather to you to understand the market choices that both businesses and consumers will have to soon make.

While cataloging the device categories, we also show some of the new entertainment capabilities that soon will come, which will be captured with new arrays of volumetric and light-field cameras. We visited several such studios and delivered you into a new entertainment world, one where you can walk around in, and interact with, objects and the virtual beings inside.

These new media and entertainment experiences are arriving with a bundle of novel technologies, from AR Clouds, which contain both 3D scans of the real world and tons of virtual things that could be placed on top, to complete metaverses where users can do everything from build new fun cities to play new kinds of games with their friends. In enterprises, they are already building a form of an AR Cloud, called a "Digital Twin," which is changing a lot about how employees are trained, work together, and manage new kinds of factories.

We have visited the world's top manufacturing plants, and in many of them, we see new kinds of work being done with lots of robots that didn't exist just a few years ago, with workers walking around wearing new devices on their faces helping them learn or perform various jobs. In Chapter 5, Vision Three – Augmented Manufacturing, you'll learn about how Spatial Computing is changing how factories are even designed. Increasingly, these factory floors are using robots. The robots are different than they used to be, too. The older ones used to be kept in cages designed to keep humans away. Those can still be found welding, or like in Ford's Detroit factory, putting windshields into trucks. Newer robots work outside cages and sometimes, can even touch humans. These types of robots are called "cobots" because they cohabit with humans and can greatly assist workers.

In the upcoming years, humans will both be trained to work with these new robots using new VR and AR technologies as well as train the robots themselves in new headsets with new user interfaces that let humans virtually control factory floors. As these new Spatial Computing technologies are increasingly used on factory floors, they bring new capabilities, from virtual interfaces to physical machines and new productivity enhancers. For instance, in many of these systems, workers can leave videos, 3D drawings, and other scans, and other notes for workers on the next shift to see. "Hey Joe, the cutting machine is starting to misbehave. I ordered a new motor for it so you can fix it when the line is down at 2 p.m."