Three major tech trends will drive the sense of reality forward – Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Neuralink, which is some sort of augmented real reality, a magic reality if you will. All three are certainly interesting and fun, but also drastically different, so it would make a lot of sense to explore their differences and shed a light on the future of these technologies.
Virtual Reality
Even though the concept of virtual reality is nothing new, it got a lot of attention after Mark Zuckerberg decided to focus his conglomerate company Facebook, into a metaverse company, named Meta. For Zuckerberg, the metaverse is the future of the Internet – he even calls it “the embodied internet”. So, the metaverse will be a place, a bunch of places, really, where people would meet and greet, have fun, work, exercise, and do everything that we are already doing and are yet to experience. The metaverse is set in virtual reality. “In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parent's living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunities no matter where you live. You'll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint”, - wrote Zuckerberg back in October 2021.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is a mix of the physical, and virtual realities – it is an enhanced reality if you will. Meta will play a role in the Augmented Reality world, that’s for sure, but there is yet another very important player that must be mentioned – Niantic, the company that created one of the most important video games in history, the Pokémon Go. John Hanke, the founder of Niantic, writes: “As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two million years of human evolution, and as a result, those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them”.
Well, he does not look forward to the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg wants to create. Apart from the purely economic reasons – the two companies are competitors, after all – Hanke has a point: why would people want to live in virtual reality?
The Neuralink
Elon Musk, the founder of the neurotechnology company Neuralink which is mainly focused on deploying brain implants capable of restoring some of the impaired human abilities, is the huge critic of the metaverse and the omnipresent virtual reality. He makes sense of it, too. Well, for starters, Musk argues, metaverse sounds more like marketing than reality – he is right, no doubt about it. For the metaverse to be as omnipresent and as important as Mark Zuckerberg had proposed it to be, it will need at least ten more years. Musk, however, got other ideas too. Virtual reality, in his opinion, is dangerous and not really viable, as people would not want to live in headsets: “It’s gonna ruin your eyesight, right? And now we’ve got TV literally right here (on the face). I’m like what? Is that good for you?”, - said Musk in an interview with the Babylon Bee.
There is, however, another point that is crucial and shall be analyzed in detail: Musk’s Neuralink can stimulate an outside reality, too. There are no headsets, nor additional bulky tech appliances, just the chip. “In the long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully into virtual reality. I think we’re far from disappearing into the metaverse, this sounds just kind of buzzwordy”, - said Musk. What he promises, as exciting or threatening as it might be, closely resembles the “brain in the vat” scenario – a series of thought experiments, in which a brain, separate from all other organs, is stimulated in such a way, that it lives through true human experiences. Well, the philosophic discussion about the authenticity of those experiences is open and alive, but the fact remains: Musk is hinting at such a future.