[ExI] VR content

Sun Jan 25 17:39:53 UTC 2015

>
> >This whole notion really has me rethinking the wealth of nations.  This
> development could be the biggest stride in raising all boats we have seen
> in a long time.  Perhaps it will help more people stay home and take care
> of themselves, rather than the inefficient process of going off to an
> office, toiling for taxable currency, coming home, waiting in traffic both
> directions, hiring someone else with what is left of her taxed currency to
> do a task for which the hired person must pay taxes and so on.  Teaching
> people to do for themselves is more efficient.  Move bits, not butts.

This raises a very interesting idea about how cities could be developed in
the future. As the local economies grow more and more, there is a growing
trend of buying local products, having more personal relationships, being
more wise with our time, etc, I can envision cities in the future where you
barely leave your surrounding neighbourghood, working online or "on the go"
and having therefore plenty more time for personal activities.

I think VR would have a great impact on collaborative work, on personal
shopping and the way we work too. In the end, no, you won't meet your
plumber in person but with the time and money you save you would go meet
some friends and have a more fulfilling life. Or maybe not, maybe we end up
like The Matrix. Of course, there's always the dystopian side of this
technology, and it's scary.

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 6:10 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Anders Sandberg
> *Sent:* Sunday, January 25, 2015 8:40 AM
> *To:* ExI chat list
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] VR content
>
>
>
> >…I was active in VR during the original peak in the 90s. That makes me a
> bit cynical…
>
>
>
> Ja.  We had an active wearable computer online group that lived and died
> before ExI-chat really got cooking.  I have many fond memories of that.  I
> didn’t write much but listened to that.  All the major roadblocks
> identified in the early 90s are being chipped away.  We didn’t have the
> hardware back then.  We do now.
>
>
>
> >…It seems that today we have the software and hardware to make it work
> really well - one reason it didn't take off in the 90s was of course that
> limitation…
>
>
>
> This Microsloth Hololens looks cool:
>
>
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA
>
>
>
> >… But one needs to think of the use cases: what is it *good for*?
>
>
>
> I can think of a hundred uses for this before breakfast.
>
>
>
> You brought up education, and certainly there is that.  We have developed
> a winner-take-all MOOC, and that winner appears to be Khan Academy:
> terrific content, good explanations, plentiful and free.
>
>
>
> In that program, Sal Khan gave a history lecture which achieved something
> I never would have guessed was even possible: he explained the origin of
> the state of Israel without any particular political bias.
>
>
>
>
> https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/history/euro-hist/middle-east-20th-century/v/sinai-palestine-and-mesopotamia-campaigns
>
>
>
> I really like Microsloth’s notion of a plumber helping a prole through a
> repair without coming to the home.  I can imagine that would really be
> great for helping grandma fix her email.  Ja I know we have screenvisors
> and Skype which already does that.  But there is an advantage to working it
> this way: teach the homeowner to fix her plumbing and grandma to fix her
> email without actually doing it for them.
>
>
>
> This whole notion really has me rethinking the wealth of nations.  This
> development could be the biggest stride in raising all boats we have seen
> in a long time.  Perhaps it will help more people stay home and take care
> of themselves, rather than the inefficient process of going off to an
> office, toiling for taxable currency, coming home, waiting in traffic both
> directions, hiring someone else with what is left of her taxed currency to
> do a task for which the hired person must pay taxes and so on.  Teaching
> people to do for themselves is more efficient.  Move bits, not butts.
>
>
>
> We may now have a way to easily learn how to fix your own stuff around
> your house, to process your own foods from raw vegetables and produce, to
> do at least the easy things by getting on the HoloLens with the cat who
> knows how to do it.  That to me is an exciting development, and uses
> something we didn’t have much of in the early 90s: cell phones.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Obviously one can make computer games even more immersive, which is good
> insofar people play them for immersion. But quite a bit of gaming has
> social aspects - people in the room participate to some extent. This use
> case is not enhanced by VR/AR. So I predict that for the dedicated gamer VR
> would be great, but it would not work for the informal/light gaming or
> social gaming in a group. Same thing for demonstrating things, whether
> infoviz, architecture or sales forecasts: switching context into a VR
> environment must be so simple and seamless that people do not mind it.
>
>
>
> Interactive immersion is great for visualising stuff, and I can see some
> amazing educational applications. But the cost of making a good educational
> worldlet is also higher: making a neat demo of a property in calculus will
> take longer than explaining it on the blackboard. Yes, it can be re-used
> globally and endlessly, but so can a good explanation. So far I have rarely
> been impressed with interactive software education because the shining
> parts - where somebody actually used the medium for something awesome - are
> usually padded with rather crummy software experiences. Probably a
> MOOC-like winner-takes all phenomenon could occur, where everybody shares
> the very best VR explanation for something. But I suspect it will be a
> *long* while before we have great material for every part of education.
>
>
>
> My personal guess is that VR for gaming will drive the technology, while
> AR applications is where we actually get the useful enhancements of human
> capability. But since good design is hard I expect that the utility will be
> rather uneven. I predict it will take up to 20 years from good VR
> hardware/software is invented until it is properly integrated in human
> life.
>
>
>
>
>
> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford
> University
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>

-- 
* Nicolás Alcalá <http://nicolasalcala.com> | Story-hacker
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150125/4c644187/attachment.html>