Seeing some excellent work by @kevinmgill recently gave me some inspiration. Much of his recent work on processing data, colorising images and finishing are centered on Jupiter. He takes data beamed back by satellites and explorer probes and creates beautful images. So much so that many folks use them as device / phone backgrounds.
I too often find myself switching through the screenshots from his feed and using them for phone backgrounds. It feels exciting to me to have a piece of far space, deep space - inhospitable, intense storms order of magnitude stronger than what we have on earth. All here in your pocket:
What I particularly enjoy about his work is the annotations and credits that he makes - citing NASA probe Juno data set, talking through his projects around machine learning to pinpoint dust-devils (small dust tornadoes) in martian camera feed data. He even prepared a video collating feed data from the Juno probe. Truly it feels like you are there.
I thought about these images a lot recently, and contrasted that with the work being done by SpaceX in their accelerated production manufacturing and testing schedule at Boca Chica, Texas. These rockets will enable point to point travel on earth, fulfil mankind's dream to return to the Moon, and carry us on the vital steps to get to Mars.
However, this will become the reality, in reality, for a vanishingly small percentage of us. The best minds, astronauts and exceedingly wealthy folks will, in this lifetime, gain the chance to experience space, the Moon, and Mars. This is unheard of 10 years ago. But like Elon says:
"If we don't make stuff, there's no stuff".
And the same goes for trips - travel - to space and elsewhere. However, I did consider that even if Mars is home to a million people at the midpoint of this century, the rest of us - at that point estimated - a smidge shy of 10 billion - would be left here on Terra.
That got me thinking - with the advent of quality VR, driven at this point by blockbuster games with an almost-cult-like following - there could be an opportunity here. This sentiment is echoed, in part at least, by Cathie Wood of Ark Invest, whose firm recently launched "Big Ideas 2021".
In this document, her research teams have collated the best of their summary on many different areas of burgeoning innovation sectors. In particular they have a section "Virtual Worlds" which treats just this issue.
The main headers being: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Video Games. Consider that there could be value in synergy between the data gathering during Martian, Jovian, Moon missions, and the output side of Virtual Reality Worlds. It would be churlish to assume that the first Martian explorers to set foot on our rusty Twin World would not be packing some serious camera equipment. At that point in time, say 4 years from now, at a minimum, a big part of the mission would be to spur further support from people on Earth through showing people on Mars. And high quality video would be a key aspect of the data coming back to Earth.
By using advanced AI with machine learning to smooth things out, I think it would be a great opportunity to turn these videos into livable experiences.
Circling on Cathie's Big Ideas report - her team specifically charts out the scaling profile of Augmented Reality. Seen here - glasses-/ applied-hardware-based and mobile platform-based use of augmented reality is expected to scale around the latter half of the 2020s. This is just when the initial sets of colonists on Mars are started to set up shop on the Red Planet.
Extending this logic further - if there can also be development in adjacent technologies to give deep immersion, this can be used to give an artificial space experience.
Reading the Big Ideas 2021 document, there is a strong suggestion that the advent of Virtual Worlds could lead to them becoming a third space alongside work and home in short order. If we consider this level of popularity, there could be novel uses of data from other worlds, ranging from short expeditions, to full immersion, watching news live, telepresence to help inspect some formation or issue on-station on Mars.
Rounding out the experiecne could be some extra-sensory application of heat, wind, movement to give the impression of the external environment shown by the feeds.
What do you think? What is your impression of Virtual reality/ Augmented reality so far?
Comments
Post a Comment