The future of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is one which we’re already being prepared for, with pretty much every element of modern day life playing out online in some or other way.
Your food will be prepared by a food stylist, your personalised data about you and your surroundings stored for the purpose of letting you know exactly what your glass of wine will taste like.
It’ll be content which, when downloaded, will allow you to interact with a VR world in a way that’s never been possible before. And the people who made your food and your entertainment will be free and available to you from anywhere in the world.
On a basic level, it’ll be things like social networking. All those messages you receive on the other end of your keyboard are going to be in an online format, and where possible, without having to install an app. That means, of course, if you’re in a gaming session in the pub and the match has finished and you need to wait for the rest of the team to arrive, you can continue playing.
Sure, you might need to bring the phone with you into the pub for those strange occasions where the WiFi in the pub isn’t doing it’s best. But the chances are you won’t.
Super Mario is going to have a virtual presence. We’ll be able to zoom in on his face to see how he’s feeling on the inside. The Fire Phone isn’t just for gaming, it’s for taking photographs and checking on your friends’ lives.
There will be VR which will be as real as the world around you and which will communicate with the real world around you to a point that makes you believe that when your kids or your friends get into a car, the whole experience will be like the real thing.
None of this can happen overnight, of course. It all takes time, and the gradual development of different technologies. The first phones to support VR and AR were first earmarked to be available in the middle of 2015. It seems like the market’s reaction is one of some indifference, because even my running through the mobile casinos sites list leaves me wishing there might be one or two casinos that can be experienced via the full VR and AR spectrum.
The likes of Apple is perhaps justifiably accused of suffering an innovation lull, but that’s to be expected I guess, because what more can you add to a modern day smartphone which doesn’t already exist and which would enhance the existing experience? VR and AR are novelties, still, with not much application beyond entertainment as of right now.
When that happens, just think what we could have achieved by now. In 20 years, VR and AR technology has evolved to such an extent that we’ll be using our phones to buy our food and our groceries in the supermarket and when you finally get home from work, your lounge will be in a virtual world so that you can relax and enjoy a virtual bath.