The Philip DeFranco Show - MS 3.26 The Future of Augmented Reality And How It Could Transform our Lives

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

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Hello, hello, welcome to your Extra Morning News Show. My name is Philip DeFranco, and just a quick note before we get started. Today's episode has very awesomely been sponsored by NordVPN. With NordVPN, you can stay secure online no matter what. And actually, you're really going to understand the importance of VPN and internet privacy in general after today's video. And that's because today, we're going to be talking about a big aspect of our likely future, and specifically, I'm talking about augmented reality technology, or AR. Now, at the very least, you've likely heard of Pokemon Go, maybe you played it a lot in

the early days, maybe you still play it now. But main point, to bring us all kind of on the same page, what you might not know is that Pokemon Go was actually one of the first widespread uses of an AR app. But it's also just the tip of the iceberg as far as what AR could be, and unsurprisingly, many companies have been entering the AR space in the last few years, including Google and Apple. In order to fire a slingshot in SwiftShot, the way you do it is you move close to that slingshot. You don't have to pick which slingshot

you're gonna fire from the list. You don't have to reach out and try and aim for it on the screen. You just move close to it. And of note here is that it's not just massive, massive giant companies. There are also these smaller companies working their way into this emerging market,

often by tackling a specific issue. And even though there have been these massive strides in AR technology, both in software and hardware, it really hasn't taken off yet. But it is almost guaranteed to become widespread at some point, and maybe the most widespread application for AR besides games is actually creating a 3D map of indoor and outdoor spaces around the world but the thing is most people don't actually know the first thing about how ar works what it could mean

for our future and so to understand how ar technology could transform our world now and in the future we had dylan siegel from the rogue rocket team dig a little deeper a future where augmented reality is ubiquitous is one where we're not actually trying to take away the world it's actually where we're trying to enhance or improve the experience of the environments that we're in. And that makes it shared. And I think that better reflects what humans want. And I think that we're going to get there naturally because we don't want to sit in a headset all day long. You just heard from Jameson de Twyler, the CEO of Phantasmo.

They're a small company competing with Google and Apple in the AR space. Again, I think what to me is really compelling about the vision of augmented reality is that it can be this sort of assistant or useful services that you're using all the time. That's what really sets them apart to me from other technologies that we've had that we sort of use. We specifically say, like, I'm gonna take myself out of the physical world

to look at my phone or look at my laptop. And that was Franzi Rosner, a professor at the University of Washington who studies computer science and privacy with a special focus on technology like augmented reality. They're both optimistic about the future of AR, but the flip side of the coin is something like this short film called Hyper Reality from Keiichi Matsuda.

It shows just how overwhelming AR could be in a worst case scenario. But to understand the possibilities, we need to start with what AR is and how it works. AR is a type of technology that adds a digital feature on top of physical reality when looking through a device. That means things like changing your surroundings for fun, modeling how your room could look with furniture,

or helping autonomous vehicles navigate. And we've seen AR work on both mobile phones and standalone devices like Google Glass or Microsoft's HoloLens. AR tech basically uses a video feed from a device and turns it into something a computer can understand and operate on. And it's the software that companies like Google

and Apple are working on that allows AR to work in iPhones and Android phones. So how does it work? Machines see the world not in sort of solids. They actually see them in points. And so they'll take these measurements and store points in 3D space. This video shows what Jameson was talking about. It's Google's technology in action, marking points inside a store as a user walks around.

That's part of what Google calls its visual positioning service in action, or the part of the tech that forms the foundation for AR experiences. Phantasmo uses a similar system they call the camera positioning standard to drive their software. Maybe you've seen an example of how AR could work in the classroom, like exploring human anatomy. And while that's a great use, it's not close to AR's true potential to transform the world. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has even described AR as profound. And to really understand

why, we need to think a few steps ahead of where we are now. Basically you'd have this 3D shared memory that has semantics baked onto it. So it'll say, okay, this 3D object is a tree and these are leaves. And eventually you'll get down to, you know, theoretically this whole whole this point where you eventually have this comprehensive real-time digital twin of the entire planet down to The level of atoms that's Jameson explained to us how a 3d map of the entire earth could work It sounds complicated and impossible, right? Well one thing that will make that 3d shared memory possible is the cloud. When AR tech turns its surroundings into a set of points,

those points are then stored either on a server or on your phone in something called a point cloud. But the point cloud and 3D map aren't just grand ideas, according to Jamison. It's something that companies actually want to create. Every big technology company at least has ambitions to do this. They think about it a lot.

Google and Apple are pretty clearly doing it. Facebook is doing a lot of work in this space. And then there's a lot of startups that are approaching this. And Professor Rosner explained why these companies want that 3D map. I do think that these companies, in order to provide the services that they want to provide and to provide those benefits to end users, will want a 3D map of the world because AR applications fundamentally require understanding the physical world. We reached out to Google and Apple to talk about their AR platforms and 3D maps, but neither responded to our request for comment on this piece.

But the first clue that Google and Apple want 3D maps is that they have their own fleet of cars that already map the world. Apple's patent for part of its AR technology includes two examples of how their software would work. One shows a user navigating store, and another shows what looks like floating arrows inside a person's home. Google's 2014 patent for its visual positioning system that runs inside ARCore gives us a pretty good idea of how they're thinking too.

The application states, It is often desired to be able to locate and find things or places in an indoor environment. For example, a user arrives to a mall for the first time. The building is huge, he has several floors, and he just wants to buy a specific brand of sports shoes. This same example can be extrapolated to a user in a book, movies, or music store, in a hospital, university, transportation facilities like metro stations, bus stations, or airports, and so on and so on.

In other words, both companies are actively thinking about where their AR platforms could be used to navigate 3D spaces. And in order to navigate them, you need to map them. But there are potential trade-offs and risks for AR technology. We've obviously seen a crazy amount of high-profile data breach and mishandling cases in the last couple years. And AR may present new risks. In particular, camera data.

That's something that you don't walk around typically with your phone camera on all the time. But with AR it'll want to know not just where you are located in the physical world, but also what are you seeing in the world? Who are the people that you're seeing? What are the objects that you're seeing? And so on. And that again, there's this tension where for these things to work well, they need that data all the time. But that also dramatically increases the privacy risks. Now you're capturing video data of everything you're doing all day long, potentially. Many technologies and services that we use today are free, but there's a tradeoff. Like you might be giving up personal information about yourself in the process.

But what you might not know is that there is a vast market for your data. For example, there are companies out there that some privacy advocates call privacy death stars. Oracle is a company that claims it sells data on 300 million people in the world, has about 30,000 data points per individual, and covers 80% of the online US population.

And who's to say that companies like that wouldn't also want unique data collected from your AR experiences? Even then, most data brokers will claim that the data is anonymous if they're selling it. But a 2018 MIT study found that anonymous data sets aren't exactly anonymous. Researchers took two anonymous data sets in Singapore, one from a mobile company and another from a local transport system. Then they used a statistical model to match users' location stamps between both records. After a week of data logged, they could match around 17% of people. At a month,

it was 55%. And of course, those sets likely include location stamps where users live and work, effectively de-anonymizing them. All this doesn't necessarily mean the largest companies have bad intentions. You know, one question is often, what are the incentives of the companies versus the end users versus third party application developers? There's all these different stakeholders in the ecosystem that have different incentives and different values. And I think in some cases, those incentives are aligned, like it is important for companies to uphold their reputations around how they treat customer data. And I don't think any AR company wants to be in

the headlines for having caused physical harm to somebody. On the other hand, we've seen in the web in particular that sometimes the business models make this challenging. So on the web with targeted advertising, relying on data collection that in some ways benefits end users by giving them free content and services, but on the other hand maybe has impacted their privacy in ways that they didn't anticipate when they made this bargain. Professor Rosner brings up an important point. Each company that handles data has a different approach. Google prefers to have your data on its servers, that in turn helps it provide services like targeted advertising. Apple has styled itself as the privacy-first company has a different approach. Google prefers to have your data on its servers, that in turn helps it provide services

like targeted advertising. Apple has styled itself as the privacy first company that keeps your data encrypted on your device. The big difference that we're doing is that we're holding that information on your device encrypted. So it is yours. I don't need to know what time you go to bed at night.

I don't wanna read your email. I don't wanna read your text. This is not information that't need to know what time you go to bed at night. I don't want to read your email. I don't want to read your text. This is not information that we need to know, that we want to know, that we should know. Jameson and Fantasmo, on the other hand, look at what they're building and how they handle the data in completely different terms than Google and Apple. So we are building what we like to think of essentially as like a utility. This is actually just the next major utility that needs to be installed on the planet. And once we're sort of done with that,

the end user's not really necessarily gonna know that we've done that. Because it's really the, just like you don't necessarily have to know how the internet works to use it, or how GPS works to use it, it just does, we provide that technology to just make it work. We believe that this ultimately needs to be built around open standards and open source

software. This is not something that really you can get the ubiquity that you need of this technology if you don't build it like the internet was built. You can't build it like the Apple App Store. It's just not going to work. In the end, like with any new technology, there are millions of unknowns. People are afraid of this level of change. And we've already seen plenty of representations in TV and film of what the worst could be.

But what do the experts think the worst and best outcomes are? I think the worst case scenario is some sort of dystopian black mirror episode where people can't distinguish what's real and what's not that they're seeing in the physical world. And all of their data is used against them to manipulate them and otherwise harm them. I think the best case scenario here is that what we do is we design this in a way that is safe and secure, doesn't evade privacy, and what it does is it enables us to integrate technology in this organic fashion to our daily lives. It removes the piece of glass that separates us when we pick up our phone and look at our Instagram that's in between us and it removes that from the equation. Ultimately with augmented reality, a 3D map of the world, and our privacy in those areas,

we're really just gonna have to wait to see what the future holds. That said, we do know that some places are creating legislation to help users protect their data and to keep the worst-case scenario from happening, right? Things like the EU's general data protection regulation and California's Consumer Privacy Act are supposed to be some of the most rigorous, but there are always going to be bad actors out there. Which, actually, on that note, I want to thank again the sponsor of today's video, NordVPN. Digital privacy is vital and that's why I believe in practicing what people call digital hygiene. I mean, think about where you're giving up your info to who part of the issue is also your info is being resold and resold and resold until it possibly

gets in the wrong hands and something that everyone should have I mean I was horrified recently when I realized some of my devices I thought I had it on it I didn't. This is a situation whether you're doing it at home or definitely when you're out there in the world accessing other networks if you want to check it out all you got to do is go to NordVPN.com slash Phil and you can start protecting yourself today. And best of all, if and when you use code Phil, you get 75% off a three-year plan and an extra month for free. But with all that said, that's the video. A thanks to our sponsor. And of course, I want to pass the question off to you.

What are your thoughts regarding AR? Do you think the technology is fantastic? It's exciting. It's just filled with amazing potential. Or are you scared? Are you concerned about how it will be used? What this might bring on? Maybe are you somewhere in the middle? Let us know in those comments down below. Yes, that is the end of this video. Thanks for taking a little time out of your day to come hang out. Whether you're actually watching this in the morning or at nighttime, somewhere in between, I appreciate you. Of course, as always, love your faces, hope you have a fantastic day, and I'll see you later today right back here on this channel with a brand new Philip DeFranco show.