Exploring Future Reality

Introduction

I confess — the title for this report was appropriated. In a blog post in August 2015, NYU computer scientist Ken Perlin wrote that he found himself struggling with the terms ‘Augmented Reality’ and ‘Virtual Reality’. Like many he imagines a future in which the distinction is no longer necessary. The phrase he suggests instead is “future reality,” to describe a research agenda agnostic to any one set of technologies.

This summer NYC Media Lab commissioned Matthew MacVey, a Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, to write a report on augmented and virtual reality, and he struggled with how to deal with this distinction as well. Perlin’s post came at just the right time — we call this report Exploring Future Reality.

But this report is not written for experts like Ken Perlin, Steven Feiner or others quoted here — if you’ve been to SIGGRAPH, there is likely nothing new here for you. Instead, it is tuned to a different constituency — those in the media industry who are now beginning to consider how to experiment with augmented and virtual reality, using tools for the capture, creation, distribution and consumption of new experiences that seem to improve by the month. The report tries to detail the main technical challenges and opportunities for media makers, and how to set up a good experiment. And, it attempts to summarize what is known about the market opportunity in the near term.

Many questions remain: which technologies will win, what companies will dominate the space, how soon consumers will seek out these experiences in large numbers. But what is clear to anyone who has had a chance to experience these media is that we are undoubtedly at the beginning of something, and it is time for those in industry to be deliberate in the exploration of what is possible.

“So our experiments center on putting people into experiences together — using technology that is now expensive, but that will at some point in the future become cheap and widely available — and asking questions about social interaction, play, learning, culture,” Perlin wrote. “All those messy but wonderful things that any communication technology is really all about, be it a stone tablet or a smartphone.” Exact trajectories are difficult to determine, but the general direction is clear- future reality is drawing nigh.

Justin Hendrix
Executive Director, NYC Media Lab
December 2015

Exploring Future Reality is a report brought to you by NYC Media Lab. Download a PDF of the full report here.
Click here to read the first article in this ten part series.
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