In 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that gadgets
we wear on our wrists “could be a profound area of technology.”
It wasn’t. Maybe you own a Fitbit or an Apple
Watch, but that category of digital devices hasn’t been as momentous as Cook
and many other tech optimists hoped.
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A half-decade ago, Pokémon Go persuaded people
to roam their neighborhoods to chase animated characters that they could see by
pointing a smartphone camera at their surroundings. Cook was among the
corporate executives who said that the game might be the beginning of a
transformative melding of digital and real life, sometimes called augmented
reality or AR.
“I think AR can be huge,” Cook told Apple
investors in 2016.
It wasn’t. Augmented reality, virtual reality
and similar technologies remain promising and occasionally useful, but they
haven’t been huge yet.
Today, Cook and a zillion other people are
betting that a combination of those two technologies will become the next major
phase of the internet. Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Snap are steering toward a
future in which we’ll wear computers on our heads for interactions that fuse
physical and digital life. (You and Mark Zuckerberg can call this the
metaverse. I won’t.)
Given technologists’ spotty record of
predicting digital revolutions, it’s worth examining why their pronouncements
haven’t come true yet — and if this time, they’re right.
There are two ways of looking at predictions
of wearable computers and immersive digital worlds over the past decade. The
first is that all the past inventions were necessary steps on the path to
something grand.
People mocked Google Glass after the company
released a test version of the computer headset in 2013, but the glasses might
have been a building block. Computer chips, software, cameras and microphones
have since improved so much that digital headgear might soon be less obtrusive
and more useful.
Likewise, Pokémon Go, virtual reality video
games and apps to check out a new lipstick through augmented reality might not
have been for everyone, but they helped techies refine the ideas and made some
people excited about the possibilities of more engrossing digital experiences.
Next year, Apple reportedly may release a
ski-goggle-like computer headset that aims to offer virtual- and
augmented-reality experiences. Apple gave only hints about that work during an
event Monday to unveil iPhone software tweaks, but the company has been laying
the groundwork for such technologies to be its potential next big product
category.
The second possibility is that technologists
might be wrong again about the potential of the next iterations of Google Glass
plus Pokémon Go. Maybe more refined features, longer battery life, less dorky
eyewear and more entertaining things to do on face computers are not the most
essential ingredients for the next big thing in technology.
One issue is that technologists haven’t yet
given us good reasons for why we would want to live in the digital-plus-real
world that they imagine for us. Any new technology inevitably competes with the
smartphone, which is at the center of our digital lives. Everything that comes
next must answer the question: What does this thing do that my phone can’t?
That challenge doesn’t mean that technology is
frozen where it is today. I have been excited by workouts that make it seem as
if a trainer is coaching me along a virtual mountain lake, and I can imagine
new ways of connecting with people far away that feel more intimate than Zoom.
Apple in particular has a track record of taking existing technology concepts
like smartphones and streaming music and making them appealing for the masses.
But the more rich our current digital lives
have become, the more difficult it will be for us to embrace something new.
That’s something that those past and current predictions of a more immersive
computing future haven’t really reckoned with.
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