[From Wired]
[Image: Sergey Galyonkin/Flickr]
The War for Our Digital Future: Virtual Reality vs. Integral Reality
By Dan Ostrower, CEO of the innovation and design consultancy Altitude
08.29.14
Like most people I spend much of the day digitally connected, gazing at screens that make my life and work more interesting and productive. Yet for all the positives that connectivity provides us there’s also a downside lurking in those glowing pixels. They’re just not real. So as we extend our Internet time, we risk getting sucked into an isolated virtual reality that lacks the richness, emotional relevance and real experiences engendered by the analog world.
Facebook made a big bet on the virtual reality vision of the future with its recent $2 billion acquisition of Occulus RV, developer of the powerful new virtual reality headset Rift. Rift directly stimulates parts of the brain’s visual cortex, immersing users in an engineered hyper-reality. Great for gamers, to be sure, but Facebook’s ultimate goal is for this technology to become the next big computing platform after smartphones and tablets, for applications in schools, healthcare and entertainment. In this troubling scenario, the only reality we might experience will be artificial simulations inside helmets or goggles that prevent us from touching, seeing, feeling or interacting with a real person or object.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative digital future taking shape that I call Integral Reality, which combines the best of the digital and analog worlds. Integral Reality intertwines the wonders of the digital within the physicality of real things. With digital components embedded and invisible within objects, Integral Reality won’t separate us from the real world but instead promises to create emotionally engaging experiences with it.
This is already happening with the first wave of connected smart home appliances, like thermostats and air-conditioners, and wearable technologies that monitor health or physical activities. Consumers are getting their first taste of how unobtrusive sensors and aggregated data and connectivity between the physical and the digital can make their lives more comfortable, convenient and secure. At Altitude, the innovation and design consultancy where I work, we’ve completed several such projects including Under Armour’s performance monitoring for extreme athletes, a wearables platform for WIMM Labs, and even a concept project for a digitally connected home bar.
But there’s still much to explore. Integral Reality will become even more compelling as technology advances, allowing designers to place digital and interactive elements in many more products in ways that will enhance the already rich analog world. Here are some emerging areas of opportunity:
Reality Games
Mobile games that get players away from their screens and into reality. Ingress from Google, for instance, pits players in a war for control of Earth, but it shifts the battleground from the glowing rectangle in our hands to the world outside – to parks, public art works, historical landmarks, buildings and other real places players must actually visit to win. It’s a digital game that jumps from the glowing rectangle and encourages you to discover real people and places in your community. I can imagine applying this approach in museums and schools, where the digital and physical come together to help us learn.
New Interfaces
The primary interface between the digital and the physical world today is still the flat, unchanging shape of the screen. But slowly, as digital information is overlaid on the physical (e.g. augmented reality) or translated into physical sensation (e.g. haptic feedback), that border is getting blurrier and the physical constraints are giving way to flexible, shape-shifting interfaces that include senses like smell and touch. As this evolves, interfaces will migrate away from our handheld devices to hard surfaces like walls, countertops or even products themselves, making it possible to access information through gestures or spoken commands. Our portal to the digital world will be filtered through a physical experience. And vice-versa, our physical world will be augmented by seamless digital information. New concepts in this area are emerging every day and will continue to evolve. Imagine picking up a book to see reviews from your friends overlaid on the first page or working in a desk chair that cues you to get your next appointment or stand up and take a walk.
Driverless Cars
Now that you’re not driving anymore, what will you do on the journey? Self-drive cars will free us from stress, road rage and the trauma of parallel parking. Which means the physical design of the car itself can be completely re-imagined for far greater human interaction and connection between passengers and the outside world. Imagine windows becoming interactive portals that map the journey, identify the passing sights and interpret the landscape as we cruise along. We can work, play, watch movies or just talk with one another. Or perhaps, the technology behind driverless cars can even be used to create the ultimate driving experience. Backed up by the ultimate in safety systems, we could actually experience the thrill of driving like an Indy 500 racer without worrying about crashing.
These examples make up a radically different vision of the future than a Rift-like virtual reality, which will take us down the path of living within a sealed screen entirely cut off from the physical world. The pleasure of analog experiences, like holding a real camera and hearing the reassuring click of the shutter, or savoring the sights, sounds and subtle textures of nature while taking a walk in the countryside, would be lost. With Integral Reality we can have both, as digital technology enhances physical objects and gets us closer to the real world and real people.