Stuff You Should Know - Augmented Reality: Coming Soon?

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Augmented reality adds a digital layer over the real world and soon it will revolutionize how we live. Ultra-tailored information will be everywhere we look, creating a richer, more personalized experience in everything from surgery to walking down the street. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer Andrew over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, everybody, the real, real edition, but not the online consignment retailer, just meaning real twice over. That's right. Very real. Yeah. Not augmented in any way. As a matter of fact, we're about as low tech as it comes as far as podcasts go. Oh, I think all podcasts are pretty low tech, right?

No, some people really kind of, you know, jazz it up. Yeah. A little razzle-dazzle. Sure. Like, could you imagine a world where someone listens to Stuff You Should Know, and they're wearing a headset. Right. And in front of their face, it was either us, or what we're talking about, or any of a mix of those things. I like the second idea, or what we're talking about, or if it was an animated version of us. Remember those animated shorts? Yeah. Gosh, those were good. Yeah. And, you know, we have a mutual friend who I will name off air to you, who was getting into this quite a few years ago with another company, and came to me and was like, hey, what do you think about maybe one day you and Josh, you know, doing these shooting

videos. And at first, I was like, nope. Now, here we are shooting videos to where we were, let's say, walking people on a virtual tour of like a neighborhood in New York City and telling about the history and the way that we do and stuff like that. Oh, man, that would be awesome. You think? Yes, dude. I think people would love that. I would love that. Well, this person was also a big believer in AR and said, dude, in a few years, you won't be able to buy a pair of glasses or sunglasses that don't have this built in. Yeah. I think your friend is right. Well, no, this was a few years ago. It's like it should be happening right now, according to this person. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the time thinking, not only will that not happen in a

few years, but that will never happen. I don't know, man. I don't know. So I see what you're saying, like with a lot of tech, there's like, you know, in five years, this is going to be all the rage in five years comes and goes, and we're not that much further along. But if you step back and look at the progress that augmented reality is making, I think your friend is ultimately going to be proven right. Maybe not over the same time frame, obviously, because they've totally failed with their prediction. But I think in the end, your friend will be vindicated. I disagree. And I hope, is this somebody that I like? Because I hope it's not someone I dislike and I'm vindicating them because I feel like I'm trapped here. Here's my prediction is that in

the future, there could be for sure people that are into this and that you can easily buy glasses like this. But I think the notion that this is all of humans at some point, walking around like this is silly. We'll see. We'll see. We'll revisit this in five years. And I think things will be a lot different than, I think you'll be seeing a different tune walking around with your VR glasses on. Hey, mark the date, everyone. Okay. Five years from now. Yep. I'm not going to say I'll buy everyone a beer if that doesn't come true. Halloween 2024. Yeah, that's five years from now. If we don't look out of our house and see everybody walking around with living a virtual augmented world. Right. Or I guess it's possible that that could also be the title of

a Rob Zombie movie too. Halloween 2024. There's nothing but augmented Michael Myers everywhere. That's true. I just wanted to go ahead and I guess foreshadow my future poo-pooing. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. That's easy to do when you're talking about predictions. But I guess we should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. It's augmented reality. It's in the title, so you should have some heads up. But to give kind of a brief definition of augmented reality, augmented reality. I'm going to say it a fourth time here. Augmented reality is a type of technology that adds like a digital layer, a computer-generated layer of augmentation to real life. And it can be really actually any kind of sensory input. Typically it's something visual, but it could

also be haptic feedback. So tactile like touch. It can be sound. You can be walking through a certain place that will trigger like a sound. Eventually it might be smells, warmth. Who knows what we'll be able to do. But right now most people are typically talking about visual stuff. Yeah. Well, they could combine the eye smell with VR or AR. I love that idea, man. I think the eye smell was just ahead of its time. Not that it was a bad idea. They've already gotten music. They've had that since The Walkman. Sure. I guess that's a primitive AR, sure. So I don't know that I would call a sound AR, except for the fact that maybe you could look at something and it's triggered. Right. But it's all there. It's all ready to have us leave our material world

on a daily basis and go somewhere else entirely. Well, that technically is virtual reality where you're plunged into an entirely alternative version of reality. Augmented reality is it's real. It's our normal reality, but there's an extra little touch to it that's digitized. Yeah. But the videos that I've seen, there was so much going on. In my opinion, you are leaving the real world. Gotcha. Gotcha. I'm not saying you're transported to Venus or anything, but when you're sitting in a room and there are screens all in front of your face and the couches, you can change your couch to a different fabric virtually. I don't consider that the real world. Okay. I think that you might be in the minority, but okay.

Oh, I think we'll see in five years that I'm not. Okay. So if you kind of are like, well, I still don't quite get it. What we're talking about is Pokemon Go, basically. Yeah. So Pokemon Go in 2016, it was an enormous hit. It's this game where you walk around and you basically play Pokemon in the real world. You go visit with Pokemon creatures and try to capture them and like your score is shown on the screen of your phone and you're using your camera and it's adding that digitized Pokemon layer to the real world you're seeing through your camera screen. Right. And it was huge. Apparently it just passed the $3 billion mark, which is pretty substantial profit made for a game that's actually free. It's a free game, but there's a lot of

in-app purchases and they've made $3 billion off of that so far. So there's a huge appetite for augmented reality that Pokemon Go showed everyone. Oh, for sure. I think there are plenty of applications for augmented reality in the future. Right. And so we kind of got into it a little bit. The difference between virtual reality and augmented reality. I've seen it put really well in that virtual reality takes the user anywhere and augmented reality brings everything to the user. I think that's a great description. But the idea is in VR, you're transported to a different world in augmented reality, your world has that digitized layer added to it. And then there's also something called mixed reality, which if you read about it, that to me is that's the future of

augmented reality. Yeah, I wasn't quite sure the exact difference here. It seems like very fine lines definition wise. It is because augmented reality and mixed reality are virtually the same thing. It's just mixed reality is kind of like the more sophisticated version of augmented reality, but a good example that kind of distinguishes the two that I've seen is let's say that you have your augmented reality phone going and you hold a soup can up in front of it. Well, your app says, oh, it's this soup. It's Campbell's low sodium tomato soup. Obviously, user friend who's holding the phone up to the soup can wants to know more about this soup. And it triggers like some nutrition facts that aren't found on the label or maybe a recipe or

something like that. And when you're looking at this soup can through your phone, the additional layer of information that's digitized over it that makes it augmented reality, it doesn't look like it's on the soup can. It's just like a little, it's like you're looking at your computer screen, but it's in front of your face. Yeah, it's kind of yes, but not nearly sophisticated. That's a different thing that we'll get into later, but it's just kind of like this layer of information that's just floating in space over there. Mixed reality is far more sophisticated, where if you held your hand up in front of, in between the soup can and your phone, your hand would, what's called a clue, it would cover up that information. That's a big thing,

and it's really, really hard to do, but it makes the stuff that digitized layer of augmented reality interact with reality that much more. So it could wrap around the soup can. It could be covered up by something that comes in between you and it. That's mixed reality, and that's really ultimately what augmented reality will be in the future. That's right. We'll see. I'm starting to suspect you have a real opinion about this. No, again, I think there are totally people, the same people that loved Google Glass, which we'll get to later. Whereas at the time, I was like, this is not going to work. I think you're wrong. I'm going to argue against your argument later on.

I love it. Okay. So we can explain a little bit about how this works. We are not tech experts, and we're not going to go bother Jonathan Strickland right now. No, or bother ourselves, frankly. But we can give you sort of a brief, the briefest layman's overview of how this stuff works. There's a field of, I mean, there's a lot of disciplines in it called computer vision. That's really super complicated. But for our purposes, I guess we can just say that computer vision basically understands what's going on in the world around whoever is using the augmented

reality. And they do this by, you know, there's got to be an interaction. And we'll talk about the wearables and the headsets and stuff as opposed to smartphones. But what they use is something called a time of flight sensor, which is sort of works like bats use echolocation, except it's not echolocation, it's infrared light. So they bounce this light. And if you look at these things, it looks like a, almost like a little GoPro camera or something like that, on your forehead, which sends out these pulses of light that are reflected by the objects around you. And then it measures the delay of that light reflecting back to you to calculate, you know, everything basically the depth of everything around you.

Right. And then every time it makes this measurement, it also says, I'm a dork. That's right. Because you're wearing this on your forehead. Right. And we also see with two eyes, we have binocular vision. So in order to simulate that, they have something called stereo cameras that are, you know, basically placed like your eyeballs are at a fixed distance and then triangulates everything together to work with your two eyeballs. Right. Exactly. So if you look at the, if you have a new iPhone, if you look at the back, you'll see that there's two cameras on the back. Some cameras, I think Huawei, Highway, I can't remember how to pronounce it. They have a phone with three cameras.

I think a new iPhone does too, no? Does it? Okay. Yeah. But the input from these cameras are providing slightly different information to the onboard brain on your phone. And so it uses this different information to triangulate. It basically differentiates between the information and says, oh, okay, this is how far away this thing is, or this wall is, or this, you know, walkway goes. And it uses that information to create the digitized layer that is augmented reality within the space that it realizes it's looking at. It's like, okay, this is what I have to work with. Let's get rendering. And that's the next step, is rendering, which can be as simple as adding like that layer of text in front of you when you

hold up that soup can, or it can be far, far more sophisticated, like say using a Snapchat filter that makes you look like you're wearing a cute little cat mask. But no matter where you move your face up and down, or if you open your mouth or something like that, it follows it perfectly, which would actually technically make the Snapchat filter mixed reality rather than augmented reality. Yeah, I don't do the Snapchat thing, but you can do that on FaceTime. And I made the mistake of doing that FaceTiming my kid. And now that's all she wants to do whenever you FaceTime is be a monkey, or a dinosaur, or a lion, or a lizard, or a robot, or whatever. Which is kind of fun. And it is, you know, it is pretty amazing that on this little phone,

you can stick your tongue out and wrinkle your eyes, and you can do that as a kitty cat or a monkey in real time. And so it does all this because of all the facial recognition software aboard your phone, the gyroscope, you know, where you're like, who needs a compass? I'm not going to walk around in the woods with this thing. I eat this that all the time, actually. Do you really? Yeah, I mean, I'm not in the woods, but you know me, I have a terrible sense of direction. So if I'm in New York or wherever, and I'm like, I need to go north, then it's a very simple way to find out. Yeah, true. But I mean, I always just use maps, and it's really good for maps. That's how it knows which way you're facing is that gyroscope and GPS coordinates. So it's using all this stuff

along with facial recognition to map and track where you're moving. And no matter whether it's rendering the soup can information or the Snapchat filter, it does this. It does all these calculations and figures out where what's going on in the room and your motion and where your face is or where the soup can is, all that stuff. It does it every time the camera sends a frame of info to the onboard computer on your phone, which happens 30 times per second. So these calculations are being adjusted, analyzed and re-measured. And then the output is being put out 30 times per second, which is pretty impressive. You know what, I think you just hit on the key difference in our outlook on this. What? It sounds like you are primed for AR because I am someone,

if I'm in New York, let's say, and I will say, I will say, all right, I know I need to go northeast to get to this place. Yeah. So I'll just chart what northeast is. I'll put the phone in my pocket and I'll start walking. Start walking. And I think you are more primed to look at your map and go along the streets that it's telling you to go on. I listen to the computers what you're saying. No, not necessarily, but I think those are two distinct differences of like kinds of people and how they interact with technology in the world around them. Whereas I just want to know I'm going northeast and that's correct. A lot of people wanted to look at that map the whole way and know they're going on the exact right street

to get them there. I guess the quickest. Right. Which one do you think is correct? I don't know. I mean, I like to meander. Yeah, I like meandering too. I'm with you too, for sure. But I also use Waze like everywhere I drive too. I've never used it. It's really helpful, but I don't just sit like I don't sit there and like follow the Waze app or anything like I'm looking out the window. So I would say I'm somewhere between you and like a Pokemon Go player. Well, I drive Emily crazy because I am quite comfortable unless I'm in a hurry, not getting someplace as quickly as possible. And she's always like, where are you going? I'm like, we'll get there. Eventually. I like that too. I like that too.

So don't mistake me. I'm somewhere in the middle, but yes, I feel like I'm a little more into tech or exploited by tech than you are saying. Where did we leave off here? With the two types of augmented reality? Yeah. Did you say those? No, we haven't talked about that. Okay, because I was just about to talk about marker and marker less. Yeah, those are the two broad categories. Yeah. And these, I mean, it's very simple and it makes a lot of sense. Marker based is basically if something is sort of pre-programmed and loaded into your program or your app or your phone, and it knows, you know, once you look up at that thing,

like the New York Public Library, if you're, let's say you have an app about New York history, I keep picking on New York here because it's easy. Well, we were just there too. Yeah, that's right. So it would have something pre-loaded about the New York Public Library that will pop up in front of your face. Right. It recognizes the library. It goes, oh, I know that thing. Yeah, exactly. And it spits out the information. It's a marker. Yeah. Or, you know, it could be a QR code, marker list. Or a soup can. Don't forget soup cans, Chuck. Gotta know those soup recipes. Right. It's add water. Right. I don't even add water. I think you're a chump if you add water to condense soup because it's condensed to perfection,

if you ask me. Oh, do you just do the straight up? Yeah, I like it to not run off the spoon when you hold the spoon upside down. Wow. All right. It depends on the soup, actually. I'm kidding. But I have eaten soup that I have not added water to. I will use a little less water, like in a, let's say, Campbell's Chicken Noodle. Sometimes it can get a little watery, so I'll use like three quarters of a can maybe. Hey, I've got one for you. Have you ever had progressos? I don't remember. It's supposedly their healthier version or whatever, but they have a creamy chicken noodle. Is it good? It's amazing. Yumi got it, and I just happened to be like, what's in the pantry? I'll open this, and I ate it, and I like it so much that I would have

felt bad not mentioning it since we're talking about soup. Yeah, I'm a fan of canned soup. I'm having that around. Yeah, it is that time of year, too. It is. It's canned soup time of year, everyone. No one ever eats canned gazpacho in the summer. Canned soup is like a fall winter kind of thing. This episode brought to you by Progresso. It's that time of year, everyone. I wish it were that easy. Where were we? Markerless is a little bit different and a little bit trickier. It basically means there are no markers, so your device has to actually recognize things and be smart enough to say that's a soup can, and it's not pre-programmed in, but I know what a soup can looks like, so here's what you do, add water.

Right, exactly. Pokemon Go apparently did that. For example, when you were walking by a river, it would say, oh, I recognize a river or I recognize this bit of land or something like that, and it doesn't have actual markers that are pre-programmed. It's just smart enough to know a river when it sees a river, and it will show you like a water-loving Pokemon like Gyro Dose or something like that. Oh boy. All right, let's take a break. I'm going to forget that ever happened. We'll talk about the history right after this. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised

to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this is brand new, right? Yes, it just happened. This is all brand new.

No one has ever done anything with augmented reality until Pokemon Go in 2016. I thought it was interesting though that the very common thing that people might not think about football fans is that that first down line and now they have all kinds of stuff like yards to go to make a kick maybe and stuff like that, but they're overlays. And we talked about that on some other show, some other episode. I can't remember. I couldn't remember which one it was either, but we've definitely talked about it. Yeah, but those screen overlays and from 1998 is when they debuted Sports Vision, the glowing line that is augmented reality. That's the kind I can get down with. Right. Well, that's the... So that works because you can only see it from one point of

view. Right. So it really works on TV because you can only see from one point of view, which is the camera's point of view when you're watching TV. Works really well and you can overlay all sorts of cool stuff. But what differentiates that from the augmented reality that's coming around today is that in the stands or whatever, maybe they can project it so you could see it from one angle. In the future, meaning like six months from now, everybody will be sitting around in a football stadium and they will be able to see the first down line from whatever their vantage point or point of view is. By looking through their phone or their headset. Yeah, their headset eventually. I'll bet if there's not an app out that you can do that with your phone yet, it's

coming. Yeah. Yeah, very soon, I'm sure. I'm surprised they haven't overlaid ads on the field and stuff. I'm surprised by that too, which will probably push things forward as well, advertising. Sure. So that was 1998 that the first down line came out, but it goes back way further than that. As a matter of fact, 30 years before that, there's a guy named Ivan Sutherland who's a computer scientist and he came up with a headset that you wore that looks a lot like a scary, clunky, old turn of the century version of a VR headset. Yeah. But it dropped you into these wire frame rooms, wire frame like line drawn, computer generated line drawn, like tron-ish kind of rooms. I was going to say battle zone, but sure. I don't know what that is. No. It was another arcade game

where you put your face into a sort of a headset. Oh yeah, was it like a battleship? Yeah, there were like tanks and things, but it was green wire frame. It was sort of 3D looking and you controlled your tank with two controllers, like shifting controllers. I got you. I'm thinking of the one where it was like you're looking through a periscope and you had to like torpedo ship. So like the joystick were two handles coming off of like the periscope face plate that you were putting your face up to. Do you remember that one? I do. What was that one? I don't remember. It was probably just called periscope or something stupid like that. Submarine bomb? Maybe. I don't think you said what year it was for Ivan Sutherland though.

That was the summer of love, my friends. It was 1968. I thought 69 was the summer of love. I mean it. No, I really wasn't, but now I'm blushing. I didn't mean that at all. This is what I'm saying. Like these things just kind of happened to me. I'm a victim. I think 68 was the summer of love. I might be wrong. Well, let's just say both were. 69 was post-coital. Right. Or pre. Wow. So there was another researcher in 1974 named Myron Kruger at UConn. Sounds like a Halloween villain. He sounds like a 70s computer researcher if I've ever heard of him. Myron Kruger? Yeah. That's true. The Krugs. He invented something called video place, which, if you look up, is kind of fun to look at too. It was interactive. And just think of the

most rudimentary VR you could think of, which is like someone going up to like a 1970s Apple computer if there was such a thing, and being able to touch the screen to make something happen. Very, very rudimentary. Very rudimentary, but for the 70s in particular, this was like really ahead of its time. And Ivan Sutherland and Myron Kruger, they were both working in computer science labs, just generating like proof of concept. The fact that this was even possible, and here's a possible path forward to this. And then that's kind of how things like augmented reality get pushed forward as people who figure out how to do it in the clunkiest, most primitive way possible. And then over time, other researchers and other students come along and they figure

out how to shrink it down. And then the next thing you know, you have a smartphone that's capable of doing this kind of thing. And that's really where VR just took an enormous leap forward, was when the first smartphone started to come out. Because if it weren't for smartphones, we would still be pressing like bedsheets at video place, you know what I mean? But the fact that smartphones were able to carry the hardware needed, like things like onboard cameras and gyroscopes and GPS coordinates and connections to the internet, the fact that all of this was suddenly in the palm of people's hands, people said, well, we should start doing things with this. Yeah. And I'm not knocking those early pioneers. Like I think that's the

coolest part about anything like this is the people that were brave enough to say like, hey, put this microwave on your head. And this is the future, you know. Right. If you want to talk about an adorable presentation, you could go back to February 2009 and look at the TED Talk on six cents. It's really great because things were smaller, but they still didn't know how to like bring it all together in one small thing. They had to cobble a bunch of stuff together. Right. So they had like a camera that you wore around your neck at like chest height. You had a smartphone. You had a mirror. You had initially a projector strapped to a helmet that you wore on your head.

Dork. And it was all strung together. And you wore these little colored caps on your fingers to be able to interact with the thing that the projector on your head was emitting. They do. They work for that. They also work really well to keep your fingers clean when you're eating buffalo wings. I used to work with a commercial director named Tom Schiller, who was one of my idols, because he was an early writer for Saturday Night Live and did all those old black and white SNL things with Belushi. Sure. Yeah. And Schiller was great. And he kind of took me under his wing and I want to get in touch with the guy again, but he wore just as a gag, he would walk around on set and eat Cheetos with a surgical glove.

Oh, nice. Nice. And he told me one day, I was like, man, that's so funny. And he went, I don't even like Cheetos. He's like, I just do it for the gag. It's pretty great. Yeah. So they make surgical gloves that are just fingertip protectors. And Yumi got me some of those. And one time we went out to eat with a friend and I was eating buffalo wings like that. Did you really? Yeah. And he like, it didn't say anything to make a big deal out of it. And he just looked over and just lost it. It was pretty great. It went about as good as you can hope. I think I've seen those. What are those for? I don't know, man. I don't know, but I can tell you they really do work for eating buffalo wings. For some reason, I remember my grandmother had

those when I was a kid. And I think it may have been like, to protect a cut or something if you're washing dishes, or maybe that's what she used them for. Sure. I think it's one of those things where it's like, we're just going to manufacture these and put them out there in the world and use them for whatever you want. Of course, this was the mid-70s. This is pre-buffalo wing. Okay. That's about to get crazy. I just wanted to rile up all the people in Buffalo, New York. So yes, you're wearing these caps on your fingers. That is used to, you know, act as your go between and manipulate the images that the projector on your head is showing everywhere, which is kind of cool because it's on your head.

Right. So anything can be turned into a surface? Sure. Like, I mean, ideally you're looking at a white wall. Right. Or your wrist was one that they used. So like you could put like a numeric keypad projected onto your wrist, which is neat, but it doesn't mean anything unless if you press the numbers, it does something. And that's where those finger caps came in. Like it allowed the camera to track what your fingers were doing. And that was a really, really big proof of concept that Sixth Sense put out there, which is tracking how we move because there's a difference between just adding a layer of recipes on your soup can and being able to swipe through recipes just by making

a gesture in the air with your finger. And that was something that Sixth Sense showed could be done. And that is starting to show up on phones as well, where now you squeeze your phone, like the screen of your phone. It's using all sorts of sensors and pressure gauges and vibration measurements to figure out what you're doing with your fingers. Now they're starting to track it using things like the infrared time of flight camera so that you don't actually touch your screen. You just kind of make these gestures above it. And when that becomes further and further developed, that will very clearly be used for AR in the future. Yeah. And it's kind of funny and clunky as something from 2009 appears now, just 10 years ago. Just scrub through to the end of that

TED Talk and see the audience go wild. Like that's the cool thing about this early tech, are the people at these TED Talks, man. They can see it. They can see the future because they know, they can see beyond the fact that you've got six different things hanging around your neck and strapped to your head. Sure. It's the proof of concept because like you said, they can always package it in the future in a nice little tidy thing that you can sell. Well, everybody knows that TED Talks were populated by only the best people. Only the best. So there's a lot of this going on now all around you beyond the NFL on the football field in the NCAA. They use that stuff too, right? Yeah. I think everybody uses that glowing line for first downs. And remember,

they had it following the hockey puck for a little while there? Yeah, they did last. It didn't. And I specifically remember we talked about that too, wherever we talked about this before. Yeah, hockey fans were like, I don't like it. I don't want my puck to glow. But it kind of has popped up here, there in all sorts of random places. There was an Esquire cover once where when you waved your smartphone over it using the app, Robert Downey Jr. would start talking to you. There's Starbucks Valentine's you can send where you like looked at a cup and it would say, hey, be my Valentine or something stupid like that. There was a theater production in the 90s called Dancing in Cyberspace. Amazing. So people are like, oh, you can do stuff like

this. So let me figure out a neat way to use it. But it hadn't really started to accumulate until the last probably five or seven or 10 years when people really started throwing money at AR development and app creation. Yeah. I use some of this stuff here and there. I'm not like a total poopooer. I'm just saying I'm never going to walk around the world with a headset on. I don't think that that's correct. Oh man, I will not do it just despite you. I know that now it's correct, but it wouldn't have been had I not said had I just been like, sure, sure, of course, they'll be doing stories on the last man on earth to not do this. Right. I wish I could go back and edit out your mind here or there because this is one time I

would do it. But I like stuff like the Skymaps, these apps where you can go out at nighttime or in the daytime, but it's more fun at night. Sure. And look at the stars and hold up your phone and see what what planets and constellations are out there and tap on one to get information. Yeah. Stuff like that's really neat. My uncle or rather I guess Emily's uncle Tim came to visit not too long ago and he I looked over was with with my kid showing her the room around him. And I was like, all right, what's that all about? And I went over and looked and I don't know what the program was, but it was just the walls were dripping with blood. That wasn't there, but it very well could have been because they were like sharp. You were like an aquarium.

There were sharks and fish and all these things. And she just, of course, it blew her mind. Sure. But this is the world that she's growing up and this is going to be totally normal to her that that application when she's in her twenties will seem as primitive and clunky as a walkman does today. Oh, for sure. You know, oh, I mean, it looks clunky now. Yeah, I would say I would say so how about like people walking around with the phonograph? We're gonna say that one instead. I'm gonna just double down even more. Triple down, I guess you could say. Triple down. There are also other applications like there's one for the for the Gatwick airport. It's a passenger app where you can hold it up and find out information about wait times and

where the restrooms are, where, you know, where the restaurant you want to go to is. Yeah, there's also one that's helpful. Actually, there's a handful of them where like it you remember where you park your car. And then when you're walking through a parking lot, there's like a big giant like arrow or something over your car that you just walk toward. I would use that because I go ahead, buddy, because it's out there right now. I use the primitive version now, which is I just take a picture of the row number. Knowing you, you probably like just carve a picture into a piece of tree bark. And then maybe you'll use your, you'll use your phone to note where, you know,

what direction your car is so you can walk into. No, man, I'll drop a pen. I'm not a total Luddite. The military obviously with anything tech is where a lot of the application goes. They are, they have something called synthetic training environments. Yeah. Where you can fully, well, there are a couple of ways to use it. You can fully practice stuff like you could practice a raid on a terrorist compound over and over again with like as much information as you have about the compound and the building. You can build that out virtually, or you can potentially at some point have soldiers on the

field that wear this stuff and look up and have overlays of, you know, stuff beamed down from satellites about blueprints or just information, bring, you know, instead of hearing it through your walkie talkie or whatever. Try it in front of your face. Yeah. You know how like when you zoom in at us and you accidentally like move your, your thumbs in a certain way, all of a sudden the street map, I think Google maps like becomes three dimensional. And like you're kind of looking at it in a little bit of a three, well, you wouldn't know everyone else listening to this episode knows what I'm talking about. But that's what they're saying. Like you could be on a battlefield and all of a sudden there's

like a three dimensional visualization of what's ahead that you can know where to go. That's right. And it will show you where your car is parked. Which is great. Or potentially my friend was working on an app in Los Angeles for like music festivals so you can find your friends, stuff like that. Well, that's one that's that kind of pops up for something called wickitude. And this is a, that's a pretty good example of an entire kind of type of augmented reality app where you just are looking at the world around you and it shows you all sorts of different

information. So like a building you're passing might have a restaurant in it and it'll show you like the daily specials for that restaurant. And then over here there's somebody walking down the street and it has their Twitter handle over their head. And then there's like the hotel rates for a hotel down the street. And all this stuff is right there on your phone, which is pretty amazing. But I guess I hopefully you have to opt in for your Twitter handle to like be shown in an app like this. But that's a really good example of an entire variety of apps, which is just basically like that overlay of information, additional information about the world around us as we're moving through it. Yeah. And I could see a world where, and this is what I told our mutual friend

because he was just like, what applications could you see? What could be cool? I was like, I could get, I guess I could see like if you go to the Museum of Natural History, you could load up anyone from Jerry Seinfeld to us to us to be your docent for the day. We could dress like Teddy Roosevelt. We could. Yeah. Or you could just point your camera at someone and it dresses them as Teddy Roosevelt because that's a thing. If that's not a thing, it's about to be next week, I'm sure. So I could see applications like that. Historically walking around a neighborhood, getting information instead of going through the trouble to read the plaque by the statue. Yeah, for sure. There's also one, there's one for Pompeii that somebody built that's

where you hover over the ruins and you look at your screen and it shows you what the building looked like before Pompeii was destroyed. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah. So there's a lot of, you know, really great applications already for learning about our world. My prediction is, is that is what our world's just going to look like when you're walking down the street or walking around a historical site or walking anywhere. You're going to be inundated with information like that. And I think you will be able to curate it yourself where you select, say, you know, if you're an Instagram user and you don't really use Twitter, well, it wouldn't show you people's Twitter handles. It would show you their Instagram handles. Or if you,

if it knew you were looking for a hotel, hotels.com would show you rates, but it wouldn't otherwise. Like if it was in the city that you live in or something like that, like you, it will be ultra tailored to the individual. Yeah, they would never just feed you content that you didn't want to see automatically. Right, exactly. No one, no one does that. No. Health care is obviously a big, big field for AR because you can do practice surgeries that aren't just generic. You can do it very specific to the person. There are maybe the situation is like somebody could come in and have a wound and they could point a camera or, you know, your phone, a phone, I guess. I would imagine a hospital would have something a little more advanced, but maybe not. I don't

think you need it. I think you just need a smartphone. I just think they would gussy it up at least so you didn't feel like what you just get a phone. Didn't you set that down on a food tray on an airplane? I mean, like, is that thing clean? But it would look at the wound and it would send a message that says you're screwed or yes, or you're great. Yeah, one of them, one of the diagnoses is you. Yeah. But reading about this, I was like, I guess I'll go look up images of wounds for a little while and I did. Did you really? Sometimes I can't help myself. Whenever I see the word wound, if I'm researching, I'll just be like, let's go see what some wound pictures look like. I'll do that. And Emily, I was just like, why do you do that? Yeah, it's like

picking at a scab or something. It's tough not to. Well, and I also argued this just happened the other day. I was like, you know, it's that same curiosity that like is why Josh and I do what we do for a living. Yeah, the same one that also kills cats left and right. What are some other great applications? If you have sensory impairments, that is huge. Yeah. Yeah, I want to give a shout out real quick here because I got this from this article called 39 ways augmented reality can change the world in the next five years. And it's by Ytzi Wiener on Thrive Global on Medium. It's a lot of words I just spit out, but they all make sense eventually if you type them into Google. And Ytzi Wiener, I guess, asks like 39 different people what they

thought about the future of AR and stuff that's like just around the corner. And this was one of them. Yeah. If you think about, if you have a partial vision and it can actually help you to see, you know, it can make things pop more and make edges more visible. It's, you know, it's not going to restore vision, obviously, but it can actually help out partially sighted people. Yeah. Or if you have a hearing impairment, you can say walk around and it'll say, oh, there's a train coming because it hears the sound of a train and no flash on your screen, maybe a picture of a train or just the word train or something like that. There's a lot of applications for that that will basically, cure is not the right word, but that will make living

in, you know, the world so much easier for people with disabilities that it's just, that's a really exciting thing too. And shopping is also exciting. Well, that's probably as much as the military's funding will push this technology forward. Retail will be at least as big a contributor as well. And it already is. Like some of the coolest VR apps around are ones that help us consume better. Yeah. I mean, I definitely see this happening all around us and in the near future even more and more. You walk into a store, you're shopping for a couch, let's say, and you can, you can see what that couch might look like in your home or if it fits through your door or in your space or what those glasses look like. Instead of trying them on, if they don't have

them in the store, you can virtually try them on. Yeah. And you don't even have to leave your home either too. Another way to do it is like, you can just hold your phone up and you can, you know, look at the space where you want a couch to go and select that couch and it'll show up and you'll be able to see what it looks like in that space. Yes. And I'm sure it will be complete with suggested purchases and add-ons. Right. You'll just be able to like click it and purchase it and it'll show up at your house. And you might also want this ottoman and this throw rug. Right. Yeah, you're right about that. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, for sure. But the idea that all of this, that our world, our augmented world in the not too distant future is going to be very personalized,

that kind of comes through too. One of those people that Ytzi Wiener spoke to, which by the way, Ytzi Wiener has one of the better names of all time if you ask me, Ytzi Wiener spoke to somebody who said, you know, this is going to be really personalized. So this AR world that you're experiencing, if you go to a restaurant that a friend recommended, they might have left like a recommendation for a dish for you to eat, just scrawled on the wall. No one else would be able to see it because your friend left it for you. But this is like the kind of personalization that we'll have. Or if you walk into a store, rather than like tailored ads coming up in your web searches, like tailored ads will come up in your field of view, where it's like, hey,

we heard that you were talking about this Depeche Mode album. Well, it just happens to be right there, even though nobody buys albums anymore, go buy it because this is a terrible example. But you get what I'm saying. For sure. That's what the ad will say. You get what I'm saying. All right, let's take our last break here, and we will talk a little bit about some of the potential pitfalls and hurdles facing AR. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over

childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember

Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, so ASUS, which makes all sorts of tech hardware and stuff, they released a phone recently called the Zenfone AR, and it is basically made for augmented reality. It does all the other stuff that a phone does, but it has like an extra

bit of hardware and software that makes it like an ace at augmented reality. And one of the things that it has on board is Google's Tango software. And Tango is basically like an AR suite. It has things like amazing motion detection, area learning. Do you remember how we talked about Markerless AR where it's like, oh, that's a river. Oh, that's a walkway. Like it's really, really good at that at determining Markerless objects to figure out what needs to be projected where. And it's a really amazing phone as far as AR goes. The fact that it's out there really kind of shows like people are really pouring money into this idea, this AR idea. And eventually that is why I think it's going to hit. Yeah. And the Zenfone looks, it's not so clunky. It's like a regular

smartphone and just at the top in the center has a little bit of a hardware situation. Right. But it seems like it could probably still just fit into your pocket nicely. Right. It's not super bulky. Nothing on your forehead. Nothing on your forehead yet. But that's the thing though. You still need a phone. And most people, not most people, but over three billion people close to, you know, inching toward 50% of the global population has a smartphone at this point. Right. So that's not an issue. Not the biggest issue. But there are some challenges. And they are basically boiled down to hardware and bandwidth. Bandwidth is a really big deal right now until 5G is like fully integrated. It's just really tough to meet the bandwidth needs of AR right now on a day-to-day

basis. Yeah. And like the kind of AR that we're talking about where it's called Always On, Augmented Reality, where you're just walking through the world and there's just digital, that digital layer is everywhere and it's really mixed too so that it's really interacting with reality in a very believable way. That is extraordinarily bandwidth hungry. Whereas like walking down the street and streaming a YouTube video and HD requires something like five or six megabytes per second of bandwidth and something like 30 to 50 milliseconds of latency, which is lag time between when your phone sends a command to a server and then receives the info back. That's about what it takes to watch an HD movie, to stream an HD movie. But with augmented

reality apps, that's nothing. Like you wouldn't get anywhere with that. No, you'd need about 100 per second bandwidth and a latency of one millisecond. And they think 5G could solve this problem, but we'll see. I think that it definitely will. I mean, they're talking about like an average download speed of a gigabyte a second and peaks of like 10 gigs a second, which is way more than enough for an AR app. So I think 5G really will help move AR along. But you still, you said it earlier, we still have that problem with hardware, with a phone. Like the phone, holding your phone up in front of you is no way to move through the world. But that's basically what you have to do if you want to take part with augmented reality. Well, Google said,

we have an idea. How about Google Glass? And everybody said, that's a terrible idea. Get that thing out of here. Yeah, this was six years ago. I remember Jonathan Strickland, I think he was sent some in his defense. I don't think he purchased them. But no, but he definitely, he really wore him a lot, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that did not work out. And one of the big problems was they didn't have it fully worked out before they said, Hey, do you want to go ahead and try this thing out? They should have probably worked on it a little longer, but the prototype was released as the product. And they thought that this would just get such a claim that it's going to be the next big thing. And then we'll work out the kinks as the money comes flooding in. Right.

And that didn't happen. Because people didn't like the idea of people walking around with a camera honed on everything or themselves. No, that was a, that's a big one. And it still is today. I mean, privacy is an enormous problem with augmented reality, because to be a part of it, like you have, you're wearable or your phone or whatever has to be taking in the world around it. And that very frequently includes people. And it's like you said, maybe there will very soon be an augmented reality app where if you look at somebody, they're suddenly dressed like Teddy Roosevelt. That's probably pretty innocuous, but also maybe it takes their clothes off and it shows them naked right there standing in front of you. And all of a sudden you're

leering at them and they know what you're looking at. And that is an enormous invasion of privacy. Plus also with as much stuff as we share on social media, all that stuff can be cobbled together to create a pretty amazing profile of you. And if all of that comes up when you look at somebody, when somebody comes into your field of vision while you're wearing an augmented reality wearable or something, that's an enormous invasion of privacy too, especially if the person hasn't opted in for that to be shared. That's right. And they are, here's the real scary thing. They're talking about AR contact lenses that you wear on your eyeballs where this is just the world you see at all times. They're not clunky glasses. They're not headsets.

You wouldn't even know that someone has these in necessarily. And the problem now is they can't provide a power source, which means that they have not figured out a way to make them run on human tears. Right. Human tears are blinking. Surely there's a way to make them work from blinking. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, I could see that. You just got to blink a lot. Yes. So there was something that we ran across that I think if you ask me, this is why a lot of people are going to start using things like augmented reality wearables or implants or something like that. There's going to be what's called, or there could be, I should say, I don't mean to say gunna because it's definitely not a foregone conclusion, but there could be a

like a career arms races, how I've seen it put, where somebody who has like this implant or who has gone out and bought these contact lenses or whatever is going to be a much more productive employee than somebody who still goes to the trouble of typing out, you know, how to, you know, an internet search or something for information. And they're doing it the old school way. Right. They're going to get left behind. And when you're talking about things like livelihood, people are going to say, well, I need to go get those contact lenses or I need to undergo that surgery to get that implant so that I can keep up in today's job market. That is what's going to get everybody into the world of AR. Yeah. And there are also clearly just day to day physical pitfalls,

like walking into traffic or driving off a cliff, because you're wearing those wearable while you're in a car or something like that. I would think that some of those are going to start coming with, like you won't be able to operate it if it's moving, you know, over a certain miles per hour or something. I don't know, man. I do not know. I do know that one of the issues that was raised about that though is the ability to hack into stuff like that. And I mean, if we're, if we're just completely reliant in trusting of our apps or AR apps to like kind of take us from place to place, we might stop thinking for ourselves and just kind of follow them blindly. Like you don't use Waze, but Waze is very well known as good as it is for leading you on some real like dingbat

side trips to save you like a half of a second. Yeah. And I follow them like very rarely. Am I like, okay, wait, where are you taking me? And you'll scroll ahead or whatever, look at the turns, you know, in texts. Instead, you just follow it and, you know, you have to look over sheepishly at the people who just watched you get off on a spur and then get back on and really not get anywhere. That's a really great example, but imagine if that leads you off of a cliff or something like that. And that happens. People literally have walked off cliffs playing Pokemon Go because they weren't paying attention to the real world around them. Yeah. And this isn't exactly AR, but my, again, Emily's uncle came to see us and he has, he's a drone guy and he had a

setup where you could fly the drone up and then he put a headset on me and then I could see through the drone's camera. So the drone's 200 feet in the air and then I can look around and operate the camera as if I was up there. And I could not get that headset off of my head quickly enough. Yeah. Well, that's another thing too. And I think that's another reason why that 5G is going to have to take places. Like this thing needs to be as smooth as possible. People are just going to walk around throwing up everywhere. Oh, it did make me sick. I just, it's just not my thing, man. I was like, I want to be in the real world. I don't want to wear a headset and look at something projected. I think that that is, I think that will definitely be a thing, Chuck,

or there will be like, there'll be a whole movement of, you know, back to reality types where rather than back to nature, it'll be back to reality where people are like, no, we just want to experience reality as it is. Then other people will be like, how can you ever say what reality really is? You know, what is subjective consciousness? You loon and then they'll say, you're right. We might as well just get digitized. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, let's revisit this one in five years. Okay. Let's do Halloween 2024. If you want to know more about augmented reality, go online and start finding apps and see what you think. You'll love it. There's also a pretty good article on how stuff works. You can check out too. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Man.

This is called Disagreement About Trunk or Treating. Okay. We had a very minor spat, which I thought was pretty fun. Yeah, I thought so too. Hey guys, been listening since 2016 and consider myself a devotee. I've marveled for some time about how good nature you are toward each other, even when you disagree slightly on some of the controversial topics. I think it's an important skill to have, especially in the midst of divisive ages. After over three years of listening to your dulcet tones, however, your masks finally began to slip on the most unlikely of episodes. Trunk or Treating. Yeah. I thought that the disagreement over the presence of apple bobbing at Trunk or Treating was going to boil over. But being the consummate

professionals you are, you swiftly moved on. I did find the momentary annoyance in your voices hilarious though. And it just goes to show you that you take every episode very seriously, despite the seemingly laid back manner in which you deliver your pearls of wisdom. I've long been waiting for a conflict between the two of you because I found your on-mic relationship very funny. And the fact that the first sign of an argument came when discussing a child's Halloween event is the most stuff you should know thing that has ever happened. It made me laugh out loud. That's awesome. So that is from Alex in London. Thanks Alex. You should go back and listen to the Barbie episode. We had a little spat in that one too, if I remember correctly. And I will say

this is not a grass, water and grass level vindication, but we got at least one email from a guy that said our Trunk or Treating has Fall Festival stuff too because. Yes, that's fine. He said because the kids, it would take them 15 minutes to visit the cars and that's not long enough. Right. So in this case, Trunk or Treating is a feature of the larger Fall Festival, but Apple Bobbing has nothing to do with Trunk or Treating. Let's just send this. Okay. Let's do it. All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Alex from London did, you can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's

How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.