XR for every citizen and every industry

Edited excerpts from an exhaustive video interview with Sravanth Aluru, Founder & CEO, Avataar.Me...

“XR is usually the right term to talk about the umbrella Extended Reality concept. When you’re talking about Augmented Reality (AR), it’s about dropping an augment in the physical reality. You are the center of the experience. You are dropping something around you. Virtual Reality (VR) is more the classic Facebook way of looking at the metaverse in the sense that you are transported into a virtual world and are experiencing it, perhaps dynamically interacting with others as well in a social or gamified set-up. That is the classical VR. There is the Mixed Reality (MR) aspect which is the confluence of both in the sense that something can switch between these two and be interoperable.

The convergence into the multiverse

In each of these, the underlying shift is from the native 2D formats that we see today which are the digital web pages and content on flat screens, all of that shifting into a life-sized 3D. That’s the inflection you’ll see in the next decade as we evolve in the sophistication in terms of hardware, which is needed to make the switch, equally software, which is going to be capitalizing on these new capabilities, building AI and computer vision on top of that.

All of this is converging into the multiverse. If you were to think about Web3 and the common theme of decentralizing the control into the user’s hand, think of XR as an attempt to take experience and make the consumer the protagonist. It’s equally about making the user the center of the experience and spawning the digital worlds around them.

The way forward from now

At Avataar, we are working with large commercial enterprises, bringing 3D to websites, and making the mobile phone literally a 3D device. I call it 2.5D because the screen is still 2D, but there is a six degrees of freedom in terms of you walking around and looking at an object. The next evolution will be a headset. There is an AR smart glass approach which is something similar to your seeing the physical reality and the ability to do digital overlays on top of the shared physical reality. The other approach is the VR headset approach which is saying that I’ll transport you into a virtual world and you’ll start living in it. The third is the Apple strategy of saying that both will co-exist, but instead of one platform owning it, the consumers will say: These are what I want.

Let’s say a salesman wearing one of these devices will see the LinkedIn bios of everyone who’s walked into the room and has a lot more context about the person he is speaking with. That’s going to be superhuman compared to someone not wearing the glasses.

Key will be the moment the first true consumer experience of that device comes in. I see the iPhone being replaced with an Apple smart glass maybe in 5 years. That will be the first tectonic shift of consumers going from flat digital worlds into something like the metaverse or the multiverse.

Helping humans in every sphere

I think a lot of the grunt work can be automated. That could be a powerful government strategy if you think of productivity and GDP. If you think of industrial use cases, delivery or logistics, you already see AR quietly doing a lot of work. There is a lot of robotics that has come in. There is a lot of image detection that is already bringing productivity and helping humans do a better job. I don’t think this is going to eat into human jobs. There is a long way for AI to truly create a threat of that nature. It will remove a lot of inefficiencies and in the process bring in a lot of advantages.”

These are excerpts from a video chat with Editor Sunil Rajguru and part of our PCQuest 35 Years Series on the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow of Technology.

Check out the complete interview...