Personal technology is going to change not only your world but the world around you -
12th April 2017

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Very personal technology: Guestures, implants, in home radar. Are we ready for the tech of 2050 Supplied

by Leo Mirani

It was only 20 years ago that the default mode for even the most enthusiastic geek was offline. Connecting to the internet meant going to the internet, like fetching water from the village well. To get online, early users would dial a phone number using a modem that sat beside a towering desktop computer, waiting patiently as the connection bleeped and blooped to life. Today, in the rich world, the internet is all around us, with ubiquitous Wi-Fi and mobile coverage. The transition from a default offline world to a default online one is largely not remarked upon today. Like running water, it is something noticed only by its absence.

Something similar will happen over the next few decades to the devices that serve as our gateways to the internet. They will disappear. Sitting at a desk with a computer or whipping out a smartphone will seem as old-fashioned as manually making a connection to the internet. Indeed, the word computer itself will drop away from the lexicon. When everything around you is capable of computation, what constitutes a computer any more?

This change will be driven by huge advances in virtual reality, its cousin augmented reality, and a family of related technologies that will allow us to interact with the cloud (or whatever we are calling it by then: "the world", perhaps?). It will drive a shift in human behaviour bigger even than that caused by the advent of smartphones and the web. Personal technology will at last be truly personal.

Virtual Reality

Start with virtual reality (VR). The most remarkable thing about it – the thing that makes it unique in the rich history of human communication – is "presence". This is the deep, visceral feeling of "being there". Those who have experienced it recount memories from VR as though it were a place they visited, not something they saw on a screen, even if the experience itself is of a low-fi, obviously computer-generated world. In 2017 that still inspires a feeling of awe. By 2050 it will be the most natural thing in the world.

What are the benefits of being there? The first application is entertainment. It will not take until 2050 for people in the Western world to start attending concerts and sporting events from the comfort of their couches. Nor need it cost the earth – just as 3D movies are slightly more expensive than their 2D versions, so VR entertainment will be priced comfortably within reach of those who already pay big sums for pay-per-view sports and other events. As more people join in, the prices of the devices will drop.

As the cost declines, so too will the heft of the gadgets. The first VR rigs, invented by VPL Research, a pioneer in the field, were huge things, bulky body suits with lots of trailing wires, data gloves and heavy headsets that looked as if a mechanical octopus had attached itself to the top of the wearer. (A later, smaller version cost some $9000 and was called the EyePhone.) Today they come in two forms. The simpler version is a cradle to slip a smartphone into, such as Samsung's Gear VR or Google's Cardboard (literally a piece of cardboard). The other type is exemplified by the Playstation VR, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, which come with built-in displays but rely on external processing power (typically in the form of a computer or game console). It is a safe bet that by 2050 even the most demanding devices will not require external processors, and they will be lighter and smaller than anything that exists today.

The second early application of virtual reality is gaming. Gamers have always demanded faster processors, better screens and more reliable connections, happily paying large sums for the privilege of being at the cutting edge of technology. They will do the same again with VR, creating the initial market for new products and giving manufacturers a sample group on which to test new ideas. In the 33 years since Tetris was first released, computer games have become eerily lifelike and immensely complicated, with computer graphics that rival anything in big-budget superhero action movies. The year 2050 is another 33 years away – and the rate of improvement in computer graphics is only accelerating.

These early, easy wins will lead to more useful ones: doctors examining patients from afar; immunocompromised children attending school without fear of catching bugs; factory inspectors checking products via remote robot; soldiers training for unfamiliar terrain; business negotiations where participants can see every fidget of their counterparts – the list goes on.

Yet it is when you look beyond the obvious that VR becomes truly compelling. Chalktalk, a program created by Ken Perlin of New York University, suggests one possible future. Chalktalk is a virtual pad on which its users can sketch anything – shapes, graphs, computer code, mathematical equations – just as they would on a blackboard. The difference is that the shapes become three-dimensional objects, the equations work, the code compiles. In one example, Perlin draws a pendulum and sets it swinging.

The swings are measured on a graph, which is also drawn. In another, he makes a chart, which resolves into a 3D graph. A matrix of logarithms influences the curves. In a third, he sketches a vase, finessing it and refining it until it becomes a fully formed 3D object. Step out for a coffee just a decade or two in the future, and the 3D printer in the corner will have finished manufacturing that object by the time you are back. These far-out ideas are already possible using computer screens and existing technology. But it is easy to see how advanced versions of similar ideas might be used in virtual reality for teaching, collaboration, business, or applications yet to be imagined

An augmented world

If presence is what makes VR so uniquely powerful, it is also what limits it. This is where augmented reality (AR) comes in. If virtual reality is something that requires being in a delineated space where you don't crash against walls or coffee tables, augmented reality is made for the outside world. AR is to smartphones what VR is to desktop computers.

Again, existing technology hints at what is possible. Pilots have for years used "heads-up displays" projected onto the front of their cockpits or on visors mounted on their helmets. These displays are becoming common on car windscreens too. But this is the most primitive form of AR. A slightly more advanced version is Google Glass, which displays information in a pair of spectacles worn like normal glasses. But it shows only a small rectangular display, which is not that much better than a screen held in a hand and seen at a distance. Magic Leap, a secretive Florida-based start-up, goes one better: its technology shows 3D objects that bear some relation to the objects around them.

Yet these too are for the moment novelties – models of the solar system, for example, rather than useful information overlaid onto the real world. Indeed, that is what makes AR trickier than VR: the glasses must not only display information but also map and understand the physical world, sense depth and distance, crunch data to figure out what they are looking at and place objects in the correct positions.

By 2050 this will be the norm. In advanced societies, AR glasses will have replaced smartphones for all but the most technophobic. No longer will directions be displayed as blue lines on flat smartphone screens. Instead they will appear as trails to be followed on the streets ahead. Restaurant menus will be redundant. Walk past a café and its entire selection will be available to scroll through, with steaming projections of what the dishes look like. Conversations with people who speak other languages will be simultaneously translated.

Plumbers will go out of business as detailed visual instructions for fixing a blocked sink will be readily available, overlaid on the problematic drain. Buses need not display information. Your glasses can tell you the bus number, its destination, its route and the expected time of arrival in a language of your choice. Municipal authorities could scrub away the road markings and signs that mar our cities.

The visual clutter of early 21st-century life will be replaced by pristine environments in which what we see depends only on what we need to know, and nothing more. We will also be able to decide what level of reality we want. Most of it? Or as little as possible? We could spend our days wandering around 14th-century versions of our cities if we so desired, and still be fully functioning creatures of the 21st. Just as no two smartphones are the same once you turn them on – each user has a different set of apps, shortcuts and contacts – so will the world appear different to each one of us.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many newspapers no longer publish print editions, that London buses no longer accept cash as a form of payment, that there are taxis on our streets that bear no external signage and can be hailed only through an app (and for all practical purposes are invisible as taxis to those without smartphones), and that all of this has happened within a decade of the introduction of the first iPhone.

The coming of virtual reality has been predicted for at least a quarter of a century. The latest wave of excitement – triggered in large part by the purchase of Oculus, a VR start-up, by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014 – brings to mind the optimism of the early 1990s. But there is cause to believe that this time is different.

First, the number of people who use computers is manyfold larger. The pool of early adopters who might cough up cash to buy the latest thing is correspondingly much larger as well. Second, the amount of money needed is tiny by most standards. In 1990 a prototype VR headset cost nearly $10,000; in 2016 the Oculus Rift was priced at $599. In less than a decade the price is likely to have dropped by an order of magnitude.

By 2050 it will be cheap enough to reach much of the world, not just the rich bits. Third, VR has gone from something that was the domain of geeks in Silicon Valley to a technology for which every major entertainment company is preparing content. More and more film festivals have a VR section; gamesmakers are releasing titles in VR. In the early 1990s, studio executives would say, of embracing new technologies, "Why bother?" recalls Nick Demartino, who at the time ran a technology studio at the American Film Institute. Today, he says, they are terrified of missing out.

The fourth reason for optimism is that the technology VR needs has now advanced to a point where it is not wildly impractical to think that it is poised to take off. The internet is everywhere, processing power is cheap and plentiful, and high-definition displays have been here for years.

But for VR to fulfil its potential, technology needs to progress farther, making both incremental improvements as well as great leaps.

Take incremental improvements first. Already telecoms operators are racing to be the first to offer 5G mobile networks. The vast majority of the world uses either 3G mobile broadband or 4G/LTE, which transmits data 10 times faster than its predecessor (the G stands for "generation"). The next version, 5G, will be anywhere between 10 and 100 times faster than 4G/LTE, but it will come with other improvements as well, including support for lots of devices at the same time and extremely low latency (the time lost in the process of transmission)

High-speed connections are important not only to access information, but also to connect to processing power. As Moore's law, the 1965 rule of thumb whereby processors get twice as fast every 12 months (later amended to 24 months), stops working its magic (see Chapter 4), computation will move to the cloud. For lightweight AR glasses to become a reality, they will need to be in constant communication with bigger computers somewhere far away.

Other technologies will need to improve too. Displays will become lighter, pixels smaller and denser, and computer graphics will have ever more polygons. These things are a matter of when, not if. They are already in development.

Then there are the technologies that are yet to mature. A modern smartphone conceals within it a dozen or so sensors. But that number will explode, both within and outside our machines. The world will need to be crammed full of tiny sensors for our new devices to know where they are and what they are looking at, and to understand space and depth. This is easier to imagine indoors. Living rooms or offices can be kitted out with sensors and 3D projectors. Discreet devices can project lifelike objects or avatars of people, while sensors track our movements and interactions with them. This too is not far in the future: Microsoft's Kinect, a gaming device, can sense movement.

Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning will also be important. One person using an AR device is a lot less useful than a hundred million people using AR: the usage patterns and behaviours from a massive number of users can be analysed to improve the technology, allowing machines to figure out what people expect when they look at something or tilt their heads in a particular fashion.

Great leaps forward

Farther into the future, it is the great leaps that will make VR and AR appear seamless in 2050. We may experiment with things like sensor-laden wristbands or clothing with circuitry woven into them. As time passes, technology will come ever closer to our bodies – eventually finding its way inside us. It starts with contact lenses instead of glasses. The technology for this, in a rudimentary form, is coming into view. In 2016 Samsung applied for a patent for smart contact lenses.

From contact lenses it is a short leap to imagine a simple operation to replace the lens of the eye with a technologically superior version, perhaps done at birth. While we are getting speculative, why not replace the entire eyeball with one that comprises all the gadgetry required to make AR work? Indeed, as human beings become more comfortable with the idea of implants, technology will burrow its way deeper into us, perhaps concluding with implants in the brain.

That is how we receive information. But how do we transmit it? When Minority Report, a film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, was released in 2002, its vision of the future was one where computers were panels of glass that required touch and gesture to manipulate. This has come to pass; moving our fingers around glass screens has become a natural form of input. Even infants can figure it out. Dale Herigstad, an "advanced interaction consultant" and one of the people who worked on the film's futuristic interface, thinks he didn't go far enough. Why do you need big screens when empty space is a good enough canvas to project upon and draw shapes on?

Just as glass screens as displays will seem archaic by 2050, so too will the idea of bashing away at a keyboard seem antediluvian. Google is working on something called Project Soli, which uses radar to sense the movements of fingers; the idea is that natural actions, such as turning a radio knob or pressing a button, can be simulated without the need for actual knobs or buttons. Herigstad thinks that we will create something akin to sign language: entire new grammars and vocabularies to communicate with our machines, languages that will feel as natural as swiping left on a smartphone screen (which itself is something that did not exist a decade ago).

Or perhaps systems will evolve by 2050 that allow machines to look directly into our brainwaves. This is not as remote as it sounds; at least one company, called Emotiv, has been formed to explore the possibilities of what it calls "brain-computer interfaces". Long before that we will be able to control things simply by looking at them and blinking. The technology for this, too, is in development – and it works, if in a rudimentary fashion.

There is a third, equally important aspect to virtual reality, beyond display and input: haptic (or physical) feedback. Touching a smartphone screen is a satisfying experience because of the resistance offered by a stiff piece of glass. Drawing shapes in the air may work because of visual cues. But what of things that require physical sensation, such as shaking hands? A decade or two ago the answer might have been tech-enabled gloves. But the future offers better. Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer of VR, believes it is sound you cannot hear that carries the answer to haptic feedback.

Sound travels in waves, and as anyone who has ever attended a rock concert can attest, it is possible to feel the bass pulsating through the crowd. At the right frequency, pitched at the correct angle, sound could also provide the sensation of touching something, of shaking hands with a virtual friend several thousand miles away.

None of these systems needs to work perfectly on its own. Nor will they be right for every situation. But working together, along with technologies as yet undreamed of, they provide the basis for a world in which computers have ceased to exist as things we carry around. Instead, they will be everywhere, including inside us.

No hiding place

Society will have to accept certain trade-offs to enjoy this future. The first is constant, near-perfect surveillance. Today, the data collected by your smartphone already know more about you than your partner or your mother. With GPS tracking, motion sensors and call logs, it is possible to draw a rich picture of your day-to-day activities. Add in browsing on social networks and search history, and your smartphone may know you better than you know yourself.

But there are still things that machines don't know about us. With VR, this will change. The companies that make these devices will transmit back to their headquarters every twist of your neck, every flick of your pupils, every reaction to stimulus. This surveillance will reach further in AR: devicemakers will be able to see everything you see. They will, literally, be able to see the world through your eyes.

The companies in charge will claim they have no choice, as these data form the basis on which the service works and, besides, they help improve it for the next version and for other users. They will point out that no human beings have access to this information, that only machines and algorithms ever sift through it. They will have a point. But that does not make it any less creepy. Moreover, governments will inevitably want access to all that information as well. It will be too valuable to pass up.

Present-day users of smartphones and free web services have shown that they are willing to give up some degree of privacy in exchange for convenience. This is on the understanding that their data will be used to make profits – through targeted advertising, for example – and not abused to track their moves. So long as this compact holds, increasing surveillance is unlikely to bother everyday consumers.

But the future will require a more robust framework than exists today. Those that work in the field hold out hope that regulatory, legal and enforcement powers will keep large corporations, as well as overreaching government agencies, in check. The debate that started with Edward Snowden's massive leaks in 2013 is gathering momentum, and both companies and bureaucrats have pushed back against excessive data collection by states. Meanwhile, antitrust agencies around the world are keeping a check on big tech companies.

The second concern is that our world will be irredeemably mediated by corporations. To judge by the current state of consumer technology, it will be a small handful of firms that come to dominate the business of VR and AR. Every developer will be beholden to them; every consumer will have to agree to their terms and conditions. Their views of what constitutes acceptable behaviour and content (informed by the cultures they come from and by lawyers who want to limit liability) will form the basis of our interactions with the world. Indeed, just as they can disappear things from search results or social-network feeds, the power of AR may allow them to disappear people and objects from the real world too – it is all there but you just can't see it.

Users who don't comply with the rules may find themselves cut off, cast adrift into a world with no reality but the real one. And the manner in which VR is evolving is very different from the development of the internet. Whereas the web was built on open standards and on the principle that anyone should be able to access, publish and link to each other, VR is being dominated by large companies with a fondness for "walled gardens".

Society will have to come up with ways to check the power of these companies, perhaps by enshrining new rights. Today, if Facebook or Google shuts down an account, its owner has little recourse. But as our online selves take shape, the question of who has the right to our avatars will become more urgent. Is signing up to a company's terms and conditions enough to sign away your virtual life? Or will companies have to allow their users to freely import and export their data? The latter seems more likely. Other rights will be up for debate too. What is your right to see the world unmediated, with naked eyes? Does that conflict with others' rights to block you or stay hidden? For a world based on virtual and augmented reality to work, these questions will need to be answered sooner rather than later.

A third worry is security. Despite years of work, computer security is nowhere near perfect. Even the most secure systems can be broken into by a determined hacker. And at the consumer level, security is only as good as any individual's ability to adhere to best practices. It is possible that by 2050 computer security will have advanced to a point where strong encryption, properly implemented, is the default, where passwords are a thing of the past and where it requires the might of a nation-state to break into systems. With the notable exception of Yahoo, the biggest tech companies have shown themselves up to the task of maintaining user security: hacking incidents at Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are notable by their absence. This may be one positive result of a VR world run by giants.

The final concern is perhaps the least worrying. Pessimists predict that VR will make the world a lonely place, with people absorbed in their private virtual worlds at the expense of the real world around them. VR will rot our children's brains, they fret. But these worries have been repeated over and over, about everything from social media, video games, television and rock music in the 20th century to the printing press in the 16th and indeed the written word in the time of Socrates (at least according to Plato).

Greybeards complain that children these days spend all their time staring into smartphone screens, but the kids in question are using their devices to engage with the world around them – taking pictures to Snapchat to their friends, Whatsapping about things they see, observing life in all its colour – rather than wandering around in made-up worlds. Even as technology changes, human beings remain fundamentally the same, and this means we will always want to interact with the world of flesh and flora.

The above is an edited extract from Megatech by Daniel Franklin, published by Allen & Unwin.

Leo Mirani is The Economist magazine's news editor. Previously he reported on technology for Quartz. The author would like to thank the following people for their generosity with their time and insight: Justin Hendrix, Janet Murray, Alastair Reynolds, Mark Skwarek and Saschka Unseld. Megatech is a production of The Economist

(The Economist)