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
- See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more