Today our team discussed about our interest areas around the project’s topic: Mixed Reality. Firstly, we casually talked about personal interests in general and some opportunities identified from the design brief. After thrown out, random ideas were clustered into affinitive categories. These categories are…
- Buying experiences: Retail has been considered one of a great opportunity where new technologies can be applied and tested out, such as Amazon go. We might be able to reconsider brick-and-mortar/online store, payment method, testing products, and so on through the lense of mixed reality.
- Leisure: Currently VR/AR focus on entertainment in particular gaming. Mixed reality might facilitate leisure activities including hobbies, sports, vacation, and travel.
- Communication: From wired telephon to styke for Hololense, communication have been evolved according to technology advancement. What will be the next form of communication and storytelling? How would the way we are using social media now be changed with mixed reality? Would language barrier have something to do with it?
- Cities: May infrastructure, such as transfortation and power supplies benefit from mixed reality? Couldn’t it be more efficient, more accessible? Could mixed reality improve city surveillance to be safer?
- Death: We usually design for humans. Then, what about for the death? Death is big part of our lives. Mixed reality may help us to prepare for sudden parting with our family.
- Work: How a new environment created by mixed reality would influence on job market, wokring process, working types, workplace, and so on? Would telecommuting incease? What kinds of new labor would emerge for the environment?
- Health & wellbeing: Our bodies rooted in physical world. We eat, breath, and walk. If the physical world merged with virtual world, what happen to what we eat, breath, and stand on. How would virtual food feel like? Could it be effect on our physical health or minds?
We also talked about “Medical”, “Education”, “Politics”, and “Religion” as generic category to apply mixed reality alongside “Superpower” which means by enhnacing human capacity like capturing and saving memories or dreams. In addition we identified senior citizens as a group displaced by technology in design brief.
Then we changed gear toward mixed reality itself. We discussed about meaning and unique qualities of it compared to reality and VR/AR. Although we need to tackle it in-depth, we all agreed on some generous criteria.
- It would support multi-sensory experience. In other words, it might be able to trick your sensory system including vision, hearing, touch, and proprioception beyond constraints of physics.
- It would enable people to be more flexible with time, scale, and location.
- Textual, imaginal, auditory, haptic, and more information would be ubiquitously present and accessible.
Current stage of VR and AR heavily rely on devices both personal wearables and fixed installations. However, we believed that mixed reality would be much free from the obstruct. Hologram might be the one way mixed reality would look like.
