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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur