Are we ready for this alternate reality?

A glance into how {Virtual, Augmented, Mixed} Reality will revolutionize our perception of reality.

Imagine driving on the highway listening to your favourite music, and out of nowhere, a deer jumps out! You panic, slam the brakes, lose control and crash!

Now what if I told you that the deer was there, but not in reality?

The last 30 years has set stage for cultural and technological changes at an unprecedented scale. The rise of smartphones has completely redefined the way we interact with our world and everyone around us. One such technology, extended reality has the potential to be that big, and it may well be the closest to an alternate reality. Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term encapsulating Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed reality (MR), and everything in between.

The applications of AR and VR has seen an exponential growth in last decade, with AR having a wide range of applications from navigation assistance to supportive healthcare and VR being huge in gaming. While VR, AR and MR are similar in many ways, they have some fundamental differences. Devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR help you experience Virtual Reality — a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be explored and interacted with.

Augmented reality on the other hand overlays digital content and information onto the physical world — as if they’re actually there with you, in your own space. The most common example being the popular game, Pokémon Go. AR has become so ultra realistic, that this twitter post left people wondering whether the video was fake. So imagine a future where your glasses or contact lenses could render this quality of augmentation. Would you be able to tell what is real?

Mixed Reality, however, is a completely different beast that merges the real and virtual world to produce new environments and visualizations, where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. MR devices are constantly scanning your room and gathering a 3D understanding of your surroundings, using that information to seamlessly place digital information within your space and interact with it.

Mixed reality has the potential to transform our lives, but there’s a lot that we don’t know about the technology and its impact on people and society, particularly when it comes to privacy and safety issues. There is also the threat of cyber criminals and worse — a large section of the young population who can be easily distracted and fail to exercise judgement — all of which could slow or even derail the the growth of this technology. We should call out these issues before these devices and apps become parts of our daily lives.

Here's a dystopian video in which an engineer who has retinal implants manipulates his reality.

While the privacy and security issues are alarming, another less talked about issue is that of addiction and mental health. Psychiatrist Keith Ablow talked about the issues mixed reality can have on young generation and a developing brain. Currently there is no longitudinal data showing the safety and efficacy of these technologies.

Because MR by design blurs the divide between the virtual and real world, threats to safety, job security, and digital identity can emerge in ways that were simply inconceivable in a world that has never experienced anything like this before.

Here are some of the pitfalls, as well as some solutions of MR:

MR Devices can threaten our Privacy

Once MR devices become more mainstream, either in the form of glasses, or even implants like shown in the video, anything can be recorded and misused. This could be controlled by using mechanisms like geofencing on hardware and software. For example, drones that fly into restricted zones in some countries automatically come down.

MR can cause Identity and Property Issues

In times where digital identity is given so much value, for example your Instagram or Facebook profiles, its not hard to think of an identity in a separate virtual world. Fundamentally, we could lose our perception of the outside world, or the power to control how people see us. We have witnessed the damage a hacked twitter account itself can do. Imagine someone puts a clown mask on you through MR and you weren’t able to remove it!

Another issue is that of property in a virtual world. Who owns what? Pokémon Go saw thousands of people gather in parks to get a chance to get a rare Pokémon. What lengths will people go to when its part of their daily lives? Strict measures have to be made to control identity of individuals and a feedback system to immediately resolve issues that may arise.

MR could give an unfair edge to people who have access to it

Even in movies superheroes need virtual assistants that use AR to help them out. Imagine how much more productive it would make a working man. It could track your productivity, reward you in real time, give you access to data and significantly improve your performance. But what if initially the digitally elite use this technology, or it is priced in a manner that only the rich have access to it. These issues call for a governing body that sets some industry standards, not only for fairness, but also for issues like security and privacy.

These are only some of the first steps to responding to a revolutionary change. The vast areas in which our lives could be improved using these technologies is enormous, and largely undiscovered. The more we understand the technology and the more it grows, the more its long term vulnerabilities get exposed and can be resolved. But we collectively have to ensure that the right steps and precautions are taken when something this powerful is brought into out lives!