1. Tell us a little more about your role in the XR industry*
Recognized internationally as a transformative Global Moonshots and XR edupreneur, current VR School District Superintendent and a Motivational Speaker on the Future of Work, I also co-founded Silicon Valley’s leading XR in Education startup InventXR which has a mission to connect the unconnected to exponential technologies. In 2017, immediately after teaching the Design as Discovery Computer Science course at Stanford University, the first VR wireless adaptors, standalone headsets and mobile headsets hit the market and the world’s first self-driving college became a Moonshot and provided some insight on the convergence of the AI revolution with XR advancements. I believe that the convergence of today’s AI revolution with AR advancements gives us the ability to create individually customized learning environments. Throw sensors in the mix for tracking of neural and physiological data, and students will soon be empowered to better mediate a growth mindset, and even work towards achieving a flow state (which research shows can vastly amplify learning).
Within the classroom, Magic Leap One’s Lumin operating system allows multiple wearers to share in a digital experience, such as a dissection or historical map. And from a collaborative creation standpoint, students can use Magic Leap’s CAD application to join forces on 3D designs. In success, AR’s convergence with biometric sensors and AI will give rise to an extraordinarily different education system: one comprised of delocalized, individually customizable, responsive, and accelerated learning environments. Continuous and learn-everywhere education will no longer be confined to the classroom. Already, numerous AR mobile apps can identify objects in a user’s visual field, instantaneously presenting relevant information. As user interface hardware undergoes a dramatic shift in the next decade, these software capabilities will only explode in development and use. Gazing out your window at a cloud will unlock interactive information about the water cycle and climate science. Walking past an old building, you might effortlessly learn about its history dating back to the sixteenth century.
One of my students, a 17 year old young lady designed a collaborative algorithm to empowered students to participate in the peer review process regardless of their demographics. Her moonshot, Yewno Create, generated a knowledge map which showed that when AI and VR converged with wireless 5G networks, our global education problem will move from the nearly impossible challenge of finding teachers and funding schools for the hundreds of millions in need, to the much more manageable puzzle of building a fantastic digital education system that we can give away for free to anyone with or without a VR headset. This inspired the invention of iStudyXR, an education operating system which would transform the future of XR learning forever. At Design Tech at Oracle, along with the godmother of Silicon Valley, Esther Wojcicki (Woj), we taught an XR Moonshots Design Lab and founded one of the world’s first VR Lab in a high school which was dubbed by Wired as Silicon Valley’s ultimate incubator. My students reimagined the Oracle school on Virtual Reality and using unity they were successful to do so. This culminated in the founding of the world’s first VR School which enrolled the first full-time diploma students in 2019. InventXR has made significant contributions in education transformation and acknowledged in the best seller, How to Raise Successful People.
Today, InventXR sits on the Steering Committee of the United Nations Green Jobs for Youth Initiative as an XR thought leader. Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities, driving urbanization on an unstoppable scale. By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. As new materials forge ahead to create pliable and self-healing structures, green infrastructure technologies are exploding into a competitive marketplace. Aided by plummeting costs, future cities will soon surround us with self-charging buildings, green city ecosystems, and urban residences that generate far more than they consume. And as 5G communications networks, proliferating sensors and centralized AI hubs monitor and analyze every aspect of our urban environments, cities are fast becoming intelligent organisms, capable of seeing and responding to our data in real time.
2. Where do you see the biggest opportunities and innovations arising? What three things do you think will take the industry to the next level?
Education XR biggest opportunity: For all of history, our lives have been limited by the laws of physics and mitigated by the five senses. VR is rewriting those rules. It’s letting us digitize experiences and teleport our senses into a computer-generated world where the limits of imagination become the only brake on reality. VR will democratize travel in unprecedented realms, one day allowing first graders to travel to the Moon or planets even farther afield. The VR space is massively heating up and we will see the biggest opportunities in education.
Augmented Reality Education (AR School): Today, adults in the U.S. spend over nine hours a day looking at screens. That counts for more than a third of our livelihoods. Yet even though they serve as a portal to 90 percent of our media consumption, screens continue to define and constrain how and where we consume content, and they may very soon become obsolete. We got our first taste of AR’s real-world gamification in 2016, when Nintendo released Pokemon Go. Thus began the greatest cartoon character turkey shoot in history. With 5 million daily users, 65 million monthly users, and over $2 billion in revenue, the virtual-overlaid experience remains one for the books. In the years since, similar AR apps have exploded. In 2019, both Apple and Google are racing to deploy phones with requisite infrastructure to support hyper-realistic AR. Riding new advancements in hardware and connectivity, augmented reality (AR) is set to replace these 2D interfaces, instead allowing us to see through a digital information layer. And ultimately, AR headsets will immerse us in dynamic stories, learn-everywhere education, and even gamified work tasks. In our classrooms, AR will allow children (and adults alike!) to explore both virtual objects and virtual worlds. But beyond the classroom, we will have the option to employ AR as a private teacher wherever we go. Buildings will project their history into our field of view. Museums might have AR-enhanced displays. Every pond and park will double as a virtual-overlaid lesson in biology and ecology. Or teach children the value of money with virtual budgeting and mathematical tabulations at grocery and department stores. Already, apps like Sky Map and Google Translate allow users to learn about their surroundings through smartphone camera lenses, and AR’s teaching capabilities are only on the rise. Ultimately, AR will give rise to neural architectures directly embedded through brain-computer interfaces. Our mode of interaction with the IoT will evolve from smartphone screens, to AR glasses, contact lenses, to BCIs. With companies like Niantic ($4B valuation), Improbable ($2B valuation), and Unity ($6B valuation) achieving unicorn status in recent years, the future of XR in Education is more abundant today than ever before. That is why I founded InventXR as an Edtech corporation committed to XR inventions.
XR in the Workplace: In the workplace, VR will serve as an efficient trainer for new employees. 10,000 of Walmart's 1.2 million employees have taken VR-based skills management tests. Learning modules that once took 35 to 45 minutes, now take 3 to 5. The company plans to train 1 million employees using the Oculus VR headset by the end of this year. The upfront costs of VR headsets will ultimately be recovered in labor efficiencies. Vuforia Chalk, a novel AR tool that helps customers fix appliances with real-time virtual assistance. As users direct their smartphone cameras towards troublesome appliances, remote tech support workers can draw on consumers’ screens to guide them through repair steps.
XR in Medicine: Riding the convergence of low-latency networks, mixed reality, high-precision robotics, and advanced sensors, telemedicine is making high-risk, life-saving procedures far more accessible. By allowing some of the world’s best doctors to operate in remote communities from afar, robotics and virtual interfaces will soon decentralize, delocalize and democratize healthcare. We will begin to see long-distance telerobotic platforms across the globe as 5G, satellite constellations, and balloons bring high-speed connectivity to today’s most inaccessible regions, distance to care could grow immaterial over the next 15 years.
Three Things that will take the industry to the next level
- Sensor Precision: VR has the potential to fundamentally change how we navigate both our personal lives and professional discourse. With the advancement of both sensor precision and high-fidelity VR rendering over the next 5 years, we will soon be able to send a virtual version of ourselves anywhere in the world, transforming the way people think about human presence, distance, and time. As machine learning minimizes the number of sensors needed for facial tracking, VR will continue to plummet in price, boosting commercialized headsets and everyday use at home, work and school. Brick and mortar schools will evolve into creative spaces such as moonshot labs or maker spaces.
- Mobile XR: We have already begun to sample AR’s extraordinary functions through mobile (smartphone) apps. And the growth of the market is only accelerating. Once thick and bulky, AR glasses are becoming increasingly lightweight, stylish, and unobtrusive. And over the next 15 years, AR portals will become almost unnoticeable, as hardware rapidly dematerializes. We might see AR contact lenses, slated to offer us heads-up display capabilities with no glasses required.As headsets plummet in price and size, AR will rapidly permeate households over the next decade. Once we have mastered headsets and smart glasses, AR-enabled contact lenses will make our virtually enhanced world second nature. And ultimately, Brain Computer Interfaces will directly interface with our neural signals to provide an instantaneous, seamlessly intuitive connection, merging our minds with limitless troves of knowledge, rich human connection, and never-before-possible experiences. While only approaching the knee of the curve, these pioneering mobile apps and novel headset technologies will soon give rise to one of the most revolutionary industries yet to be seen— one that will fundamentally transform our lives.
- The AR Cloud: While enterprises are fueling initial deployment of AR headsets for employee training and professional retooling, widespread consumer adoption is fast reaching the horizon. And as hardware and connectivity skyrocket, driving down prices and democratizing access, sleek AR glasses — if not dematerialized lenses — will become an everyday given. Advancements in cloud computing and 5G coverage are making AR products infinitely more scalable, ultra-fast, and transportable. Yet ultimately, AR will give rise to neural architectures directly embedded through brain-computer interfaces. Our mode of interaction with the IoT will evolve from smartphone screens, to AR glasses, to contact lenses, to BCIs. The business opportunity for AR content creators is now—whether building virtual universes or digitizing our physical one. But to create multi-player games, social media communities, and messaging platforms linked to the same physical space, a centralized AR Cloud must first unify all headsets within a synced virtual overlay. Just as search engines like Google serve multiple operating systems, the AR Cloud will serve every headset. Yet unlike today’s Cloud computing infrastructure, the AR Cloud will need to churn constant input-output loops in real-time, crunching and serving up far more data than we can currently comprehend. While most AR apps available today offer one-time wonders like furniture try-outs or human anatomy lessons, AR-native apps linked to daily tasks in the physical world will change the way we do everything. “A real-time 3D (or spatial) map of the world, the AR Cloud, will be the single most important software infrastructure in computing,” believes Ori Inbar, co-founder of Augmented World Expo. “In a nutshell, with the AR Cloud, the entire world becomes a shared spatial screen, enabling multi-user engagement and collaboration.” But the AR Cloud is also set to transform how information is organized. Currently, we actively input our questions and find answers through 2D mediums. But the AR Cloud will soon enable a smart environment that feeds us what is relevant, when relevant.
3. If you could name one complementary technology that will help grow the VR & AR/MR industries what would it be?
Artificial Intelligence is a complementary technology that will help grow XR industries and lead to superior Human Experiences. Through the 2000s, the convergence of increasingly powerful game engines and AI-image rendering software flipped the XR script and the XR universe opened for business across industries. In AR, we will begin to see the ability to switch into different modes such as the Education mode where education is wherever you look, your AI-enabled AR headset can deliver physics lessons, historical rundowns, or linguistics courses. Virtual educators appear on demand, answering nearly any question you could possibly think of. (Every action, from an arching football to an ocean wave, can teach you about physics.) Every moment is filled with constant learning and growth.
4. In which industry verticals do you see the biggest growth opportunities for XR? Why?
Education: VR will not only cover traditional educational content, but also expand our emotional education. We no longer live or learn in only one place. We have real-world personae and online personae. This delocalized existence is expanding exponentially. With the rise of XR, we’re introducing more layers to this equation. Every time we add a new layer to the digital strata, we’re also adding an entire economy built upon that layer, meaning we are now conducting our business in multiple worlds at once. VR, especially when combined with AI, has the potential to facilitate a top shelf traditional education, plus all the empathy and emotional skills that traditional education has long been lacking. In 2016, venture investments in VR exceeded US$800 million, while AR and MR received a total of $450 million. Just a year later, investments in AR and VR startups doubled to US$3.6 billion. Already, VR headset sales volumes are expected to reach 98.4 million by 2023, according to Futuresource Consulting. But beyond headsets themselves, Facebook’s $399 Oculus Quest brought in US$5 million in content sales within the first two weeks post-release this past spring.
AI Cloud XR : When researchers talk network evolution, “G” is the term-du-jour. It stands for “generation.” In 1940, when the first telephone networks began to roll out, we were at 0G. It took forty years to crawl our way to 1G, which showed up with the first mobile phones in the 1980s. But this also marked the transition from deceptive to disruptive. By the 90s—around the time the internet emerged—2G came along for the ride. But the ride didn’t last long. A decade later, 3G ushered in a new era of acceleration as bandwidth costs began to plummet at a staggeringly consistent 35 percent per year. 2010 saw 4G networks unleash smartphones, mobile banking and e-commerce. But starting in 2020, 5G will hotwire the whole deal, delivering speeds a hundred times faster at near-zero prices. How fast is 5G fast? With 3G, it takes 45 minutes to download a high-definition movie. 4G shrinks that to 21 seconds. But 5G?
With 5G on the ground, balloons in the air and private satellites blanketing the Earth from space, we are on the verge of connecting every person on the planet with gigabit connection speeds at de minimis cost. As 5G electrifies a world of trillions of sensors and devices, we’re about to live in a world where anyone anywhere can have access to the world’s knowledge, crowdfund ready capital across 8 billion potential investors, and 3D print on the cloud.And as the population of online users doubles, we’re about to witness perhaps the most historic acceleration of progress and technological innovation known to man. Meanwhile, groundbreaking progress in BCI is driving us closer to Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that our brains will connect seamlessly to the cloud by 2035. Elon’s Neuralink is already striving towards a 2 gigabit-per-second wireless connection between a patient’s brain and the cloud in the next few years. And in the long-term, BCIs will amplify both average human intelligence and our access to an instantaneous wealth of knowledge.
A leader in the brain-to-brain communication field, Miguel Nicolelis has previously conducted studies that linked rat brains through implanted electrodes, effectively creating an “organic computer.” The rat brains synchronized electrical activity to the same extent of a single brain, and the super-brain routinely outperformed individual rats in distinguishing two electrical patterns. Building on this research, the leaders of the “BrainNet” human study claim that their non-invasive device could connect a limitless number of individuals. As brain-to-brain signaling grows increasingly complex, human collaboration will reach extraordinary levels, allowing us to uncover novel ideas and thought processes. Rather than building “neural networks” in software, operations like BrainNet are truly linking networks of neurons, creating massive amounts of biological processing power. We are fast approaching the prediction of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murry Gell-Man, who envisioned “thoughts and feelings would be completely shared with none of the selectivity or deception that language permits.
5. What aspect of VRX 2019 are you most looking forward to?*
Networking and connecting with the World’s great thought leaders across verticals and building lasting connections towards an XR powered world.