Hey all! Let me start with a quick question: Have you seen the movie “Ready Player One”? I’ve seen it, and although I don’t remember too much about the plot since it was not that good for me, I do remember the dystopic future where the movie was set.

A futuristic city with bad weather, a lot of trash, and most people living in poor conditions. The main thing about this movie was that everyone was trying to spend as little as possible in the real world so they could run home fast and enter into the VR world.

At first, it makes sense, who would like to spend time in a stinky and abandoned world like that? But actually, I think another question should go first: why would people leave the world go down like that in the first place?

It doesn’t sound too exciting to me and honestly, I don’t think things will go in that direction. However, a change will probably happen sooner than we think with virtual reality.

What we know so far

You probably already heard some stuff about the existing VR headsets and the so-called Metaverse where Meta (ex-Facebook) is dumping a good portion of its money.

If you haven’t tried a VR experience yet, I highly recommend it, but I’m not talking about that cardboard thing or cheap plastic where you put your cell phone to simulate a headset. If that’s all that you have seen, it doesn’t count.

Up to now, there are a few good headset options that you can try. There’s the Meta Quest, HTC Vive, Valve, Play Station, and a few more. They start at about $400 and you can’t go wrong with any of these options.

I own a Meta Quest 2 that does the job just fine and has been impressive enough to inspire me to write this. However, my honest review is that these devices are great experiences to have a few times, they make a great party trick when you invite people over and they try it for the first time, but eventually, you get bored and it ends up collecting dust in some drawer.

The Metaverse

Don’t get me wrong, the technology is really great. Sometimes is hard to believe how good the precision, interaction, view angles, definition, and latency these things have, but the reality is, I prefer the real world rather than just living in the metaverse.

Going for a coffee with a friend rather than seeing his avatar, traveling instead of getting into a VR street view experience, or going for a hike rather than doing it on a game. The so-called metaverse is really endless and has a lot of potential but the interface is not right.

I don’t think, and honestly, I really hope, people don’t want to stare at a screen and hear from a speaker all the time. I understand that we need to do that sometimes for work, even this blog post is somehow living in the metaverse, but if we start spending our free time like that then we might get totally isolated and have health problems generating a completely awful impact on us and our society.

What I think will happen: Convergence

For me, VR tech is something that will never have more purpose than selling it to a small niche, probably for gamers or some enterprise solutions like the Real Estate industry.

On the other hand, there’s something fairly old but people don’t talk too much about it yet, and that is AR (Augmented Reality). This technology aims at merging the real world with the virtual world.

Imagine walking on the street and instead of taking out phone out to see map directions, we see a big virtual arrow hovering over the street indicating us were to turn, or each time we interact with a person we could see some of their personal information like an advanced CIA agent with links to their social networks, holograms all over the place, or even seeing ads just for us in the city billboards based on out own interests, like Google or Instagram already do on their apps.

Today all of that is possible by using your phone as the interface, you can find several lists of AR apps already available to download. Even some phones like the iPhone include advanced components like the LiDAR sensor which contributes to improve the AR experience.

There are also some solutions from Microsoft and Meta but those are more in the prototype spectrum, since they are not widely available and they are very expensive. However, we are closer than we think on replacing out phone as the interface with some high tech light glasses that we will be able to wear all day as regular prescription ones, and for a fair price.

In fact, on the 5th of June, there’s going to be an Apple event where they are expected to announce some AR glasses just like the ones we are describing for the consumer segment.

This will be the most reasonable evolution from today's VR and what I think will prevail. I do see millions of people using this new device as we use iPhones today, exploring the real world with some cool virtual additions rather than being at home, getting fat and blind by looking at a screen 1-inch apart from your eyes every day.

Final thoughts

Now you should be a little more informed about this new virtual world we are merging with, and that’s only talking about VR and AR isolated from the rest of the recent tech advancements!

Imagine you could integrate ChatGPT in a seamless way into these glasses and have an advanced AI with you all day interacting with the real world…

Let’s keep fantasizing.

Cheers!