The time to learn 3D, Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies is now!
Probably everyone wished at some point to have the power of foresight and to buy Bitcoin in 2013 or be someone like Jeff Bezos from Amazon and see e-commerce boom right at its start. As for my generation, we were too young when computing was rapidly growing and didn’t have a chance to create our own Google, Facebook, Amazon or PayPal. However, I believe this kind of opportunity is opening up in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) space, the technologies which are based on 3D geometry and processing of output of video cameras. I hope you will be sharing my belief after reading this article too.
The biggest problem in life is limited time. If we all were immortal, we wouldn’t have to worry about what college to go to or whatever career path to chose or even what girl to date, because you would still have time to do everything. In this life, however, we need to choose and each of our choices has opportunity cost. When deciding to learn one thing or another, one need to ask oneself why not learn another thing or just enjoy more time with family and friends or doing favorite hobby.
As a result, I need to convince you that AR/VR technology is amazing and will be worth the time/money you will put into it. In order to do so, I will define a criteria for a technology worth learning and then will explain why extended reality (XR) technology satisfy it.
The criterion
First of all, the technology you learn must be interesting. Everything in life is a gamble and any decision involves risk, and it is better to risk doing something you generally enjoy doing. This would not only increase chances of success, but would still leave you fulfilled even if your startup doesn’t raise a billion dollars, but only couple of millions:)
Secondly, the technology you want to learn must be accessible, i.e. it must be something that is possible for you to do (ruling out, for example, nuclear fusion technology) and wouldn’t take your entire lifetime to learn.
Finally, you also want to earn some money and recognition, introducing two more criteria: low competition and high value. The explanation is simple, you want to get a thicker share of a large pie, not a big share of a small pie or a tiny share of a large pie.
Let’s explain in more detail what each of these four aspects mean, and I will try to explain on down-to-earth example of how a successful start-up called Facebook satisfied it and how XR technology satisfies it now.
Interesting
I think making a website is to some extentan art form and ability to share messages between different people at different ends of the world is something that should be able to excite. Anyone watching “Social Network” movie would know that would-be Facebook started as a fun project, so I think Mark Zuckerberg at the time was learning Internet technology not only because of money motive, but also because the technology was generally interesting.
AR/VR
With AR/VR technology what you can do is only limited by your imagination. You can essentially build your own virtual world and get as close as possible to living in it, as vision and hearing are fully integrated with the virtual environment. In the future, when humanity learns to connect brains to computers, it will be possible to create experiences similar to living in a Matrix. While this kind of possibility may scare you, I am just trying to point out how much one can do with the technology. Apart from creating virtual worlds, 3D technology also allows reconstruction of real-world objects in virtual space, making virtual experiences more realistic.
3D technology opens up frontiers to new art forms, which never existed before. While top movies already use variety of 3D visual effects, the equipment they use is very expensive and requires lots of expert knowledge. Imagine what would happen if the AR technology becomes more accessible, how much it would change the way the advertisements and average TV programs work! 3D effects in advertisement and TV programs, gamification of sport programs, games becoming more realistic — all these trends are under way now, but they may be not very noticeable yet. And you can participate in these trends, the tools are already there and available to you almost for free.
Accessible
The open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack was widely-used among programers at early noughties and the tools were free. While it may appear that it is quite a lot of things to learn, Zuckerberg was able to make a website when he was in his second year of undergraduate studies, so I will presume that the technology did not require 10 years to master. The websites at the time were not very sophisticated and thus the barriers to entry were very low.
While today making an average website is much easier than 15 years before, to make something that stands out is much harder and requires a lot of very specialist knowledge of Javascript, PHP, Python or Ruby. As a result, the web-technology today may not be the best option to pursue, for the reason explained in “Low Competition” part. However, I really advise you to learn how to build an average website — getting message across is one skill one should master, and you would be surprised in how many situations it may be useful. And more importantly, it only takes few days to build basic understanding.
AR/VR
That 3D technology is accessible is the hardest and the most important thing to convince you about. In order to do that, I want to make a list of things and skills you need to have to finish a project in XR space and how much it would cost you to obtain them. When making such a comprehensive list I realized that it would occupy most of the blog post, and thus I moved it to a different post.
If you are interested in finding out what it takes to build your own XR project visit this link. To summarize, the main tools are freely available and open-source, yet many of the developments which made the technology accessible only happened just now. Markets have not yet time to react. If you take my word for it — keep reading.
Assuming you have a computer, overall it should take equivalent of 3–4 months working full-time and around 100 dollars to get familiar and confident enough to be able to complete a project. For me it took around a year to get the necessary background and complete a demo for the project I was working on, while doing a full-time job in an investment bank. My only relevant background was general knowledge of Python and machine learning.
Low Competition
The social network scene was very fragmented and Facebook attacked the niche which was completely void — social network websites for students. Making a stand-out website was not that hard to make at the time, the level of competition was much lower. There were not that many frameworks available and there were no advanced tools like React or Angular.js. Yet, there was enough to build a website like Facebook, something that competitors overlooked.
AR/VR
Many of the developments which made the technology accessible only happened just now, the markets have not yet time to react. As a result, there are not many successful projects in the market, but they are in process of being developed (trust me, I did some research!). Also check-out this video about how recent developments in deep learning are changing the 3D modelling space. Hurry up and take your chance!
High Value
I am not sure what was Mark Zuckerberg`s perception of value of the project he was working on in early 2000s, but in hindsight I can say that there was a lot of value there!
AR/VR
3D geometry and modelling is a general-purpose tool and can be used in variety of industries, particularly advertisement industry, gaming, cinematography and television. It also can be used in high-precision industries for training purposes to simulate real-life situations. This kind of technology may be particularly useful for training surgeons and fire-fighters or other emergency-situation workers.
I am not going to make up a number, but if you think that AR effects and VR simulations will add around 10% value to the industries I mentioned, can you guess how big the market is? The technology is already widely used in cinematography, but the equipment required is very expensive. The advances in deep learning will allow to relax the equipment requierments. Also, as I said before, the use cases of the technology is only limited by your imagination!
Final remark
And so I explained a criteria for a good technology to learn and why AR/VR technology in my opinion satisfies the criteria. Did I manage to convince you that AR/VR space is interesting, possible to learn and is worth learning? If so, you may want to start following my blog and wait for more posts about my path to mastery of the art, which may inspire your own journey.
Good luck on any path you decide to choose!
