Pervasive Change – Shopping, Healthcare, and Finance

The products that Joe makes will eventually be found in retail stores, many of which will be quite different than the ones that Sears ran decades ago. Walk into an Amazon Go store and look at the ceiling. You'll see hundreds of cameras and sensors aimed back at you, watching and categorizing every move you make. In the Go store, they charge you for the products you take without you having to talk to a checkout clerk or pull out a credit card, or really do anything other than walk out of the store. In Chapter 6, Vision Four – Robot Consumers, we detail these changes, along with others that make retail stores, even traditional ones, more efficient and better for both consumers and sales for producers, and useful new Augmented Reality technologies that make shopping at home much easier.

As we were finishing up this book, Apple announced a new iPad with a 3D sensor, and it demonstrated why people should buy one of these new iPads by showing off one of these futuristic shop-at-home experiences where the person holding the tablet could drop chairs and other items into their real home to see how they fit. The changes, though, don't stop at the shopping experience. Behind the scenes, these technologies are making things more efficient, helping logistics companies pick and pack products faster and getting them to stores faster and with fewer losses, and we detail how Spatial Computing is making a difference there.

Similar changes are underway in healthcare. They are so profound that Dr. Brennan Spiegel, Director of Health Research at Cedars-Sinai, says that we should expect a new kind of healthcare worker: "The Virtualist." This new kind of practitioner will perform several roles: help patients prevent disease, help doctors deliver a new form of healthcare, and help the nurses, doctors, and other staff perform their jobs more efficiently using new Spatial Computing technology. For instance, let's say you need surgery. Well, a new surgery team at Cleveland Clinic is already using Microsoft HoloLens 2 headsets to see inside you, thanks to images from scanners being visualized inside the surgeon's headgear. We discuss, in Chapter 7, Vision Five – Virtual Healthcare, how its system guides the surgeon to the right spot to cut out a patient's cancerous tumor.

That's just a tiny piece of what's happening in healthcare due to Spatial Computing technology. On another wing of the hospital, doctors are using VR to address mental illnesses and ailments from PTSD to dementia, with more applications on the way. At the University of Washington, they discovered it often is much better at treating pain than using opiates, which are much more dangerous, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year due to addiction. In other places, nurses noticed that patients going through tough procedures preceding childbirth felt a lot less pain, too, if they were watching a 360-video experience during the process. Other doctors even found ways to enhance athletes' perception. These brain tricks and virtual remedies have the capacity to significantly change healthcare. Pfizer's head of innovation told us that she views Augmented and Virtual Reality as the future of medicine.

How does all this work? Largely on data. New predictive systems will watch your health by having sensors look into your eyes, watch your vascular system, or blood streams, and sense other things, too, maybe to the point where they see that you are eating too much sugar or smoking too many cigarettes. One could even warn your doctor that you aren't taking your medicine or performing the exercises that she prescribed. Are we ready for new tough conversations with our doctors? Remember, in this future, maybe your doctor is a virtual being from whom you don't mind hearing the harsh truth. One of the studies we found showed that patients actually are much more honest about their mental health problems when talking with a virtual being, or in a chat that's run by Artificial Intelligence.

These AIs won't just be helping us keep our health on track, either. Similar systems might let us know about market changes that we need to pay attention to or, like banks already do when they notice that buying behavior is out of bounds, warn you about other things. The financial industry is generally a relatively conservative one, so adoption of Spatial Computing technologies there is contingent upon demonstrated and clear utility, and they must be additive to the bottom line. Currently, there is very little Spatial Computing that is being actively used there; however, the possibilities are very promising. In Chapter 8, Vision Six – Virtual Trading and Banking, we cover the future uses for Spatial Computing in the financial industry.

In this chapter, we review the functional areas where we think Spatial Computing will have its greatest impact, including 3D data visualization, virtual trading, ATM security and facial payment machines, and virtual branch functionality and customer service.

Someday soon, we may never go into a physical bank again due to these changes, but could the same happen with our schools? Already, teachers are using Augmented and Virtual Reality to teach all sorts of lessons, from chemistry experiments to math visualizations, to even virtual dissections of real-looking animals.