Skip to main content

The Infinite Retina - Irena Cronin and Robert Scoble ***

I really wanted to like this book - spatial computing and augmented/virtual reality are topics that are fascinating and will definitely influence our lives. There is a lot on them in this chunky tome, but a considerable amount of the content is repetitive, and it suffers strongly from geek-enthusiasm, making wildly optimistic predictions of how we'll all be wearing augmented/virtual reality glasses by 2023-2025, and of the transformative dominance of autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars if you prefer fewer syllables).

The approach to each of these areas was, for me, full of issues. If I think about what I currently use a smartphone for and it's a very wide range of applications - maybe 40 different roles - but I can only think of one, following directions using mapping software, that would be enhanced by augmented or virtual reality. Similar, my main computer I do maybe 20 different things more intensively. Here, for example while working with text documents or spreadsheets, I can't see any point whatsoever.

 Similarly, the self-driving cars section seemed dominated by enthusiasm for the concept and Tesla-love. (Tesla gets an awful lot of mentions.) But it didn't address the problem of what will happen when autonomous vehicles kill hundreds of people. Yes, they will be saving thousands of lives - but those are virtual lives, not real people. The families of those killed by robots or faceless corporations will be very real people. Such is the authors' enthusiasm for self-driving cars, at one point they comment 'Electric vehicles are cheaper. Autonomous vehicles are too...' At the moment you pay at least £15,000 extra for an electric car over the equivalent petrol vehicle. Autonomous will have a significantly bigger markup still. Yes, you save on fuel costs - but it's going to take a good number of years to pay off that strange version of 'cheaper' that involves paying a whole lot more.

 The trouble with looking at this sort of technology through geeky eyes is the assumption that everyone else is like you and cares all that much about the latest hot tech - but most of us don't really care as long as what we have does the job.  What the authors seem to miss when they predict an explosion of AR/VR headsets is that (as they tell us) this technology has existed in the military since the 1960s and commercially since 1990s. But it is still only bought by a tiny fraction of a percent of computer/smartphone users, in part because people don't like to wear stuff on their face. (Remember 3D TV anyone?) Yes, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds, but Cronin and Scoble really don’t explain how we can possibly get from where we are now in 2020 to AR/VR glasses being mass market affordable products in 3 to 5 years time as they suggest.

 Occasionally, the book does acknowledge some of the problems, and here it's at its most effective. In a section on why Google Glass failed so spectacularly, for example, it notes that one big problem was the over-hyping of the product (even though that's exactly what's being done in this book for the next generation). Similarly, there's a really well-thought out section on the difficulties that are going to be faced over privacy and data sharing if we're using systems that track our every movement, down to where we're looking all the time. One scary revelation, for example, is that already a Tesla is constantly capturing and photographing everything it passes and sharing the information. I'd love to be able to afford an electric car, but what I've read here has certainly persuaded me it shouldn't be a Tesla.

 I genuinely did appreciate reading the book for those occasions when it got real. (There was also a lot of interesting material on the use of spatial computing technology in, for example, warehousing and retail.) But what perhaps should have been the most interesting but balanced bits - on the personal environment, including what we currently use smartphones for, and cars - felt like wading through fanboi treacle.

P.S. spot the grammatical error in the subtitle 'Spatial Computing, Augmented Reality, and how a collision of new technologies are bringing about the next tech revolution.'
Paperback:    
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more