Sosadiaz was present at the Immersive Technology Conference Academia XR 2023 in Medellín, where several talks were held, demonstrating some of the possible applications of immersive technologies and reflecting on concepts such as intelligence, immersion, and reality.
The future is leading us to spatial computing, where we need to think of the body as an interface. As we approach creating new, more immersive digital realities, it is necessary to interact in more complex, portable, and flexible ways that are only possible if we use our own body. This is where we see some examples that are already moving toward this paradigm: virtual reality headsets like the Meta Quest are starting to use hands as controllers and gaze as a selector, smartwatches like the Apple Watch are using gesture-based interactions, glasses like the Ray-Ban with voice recognition, and more recently, the Humane AI Pin, a device for interacting with assistants powered by artificial intelligence.
Reality is the medium. Despite what might be thought, augmented and virtual reality are also worlds with interaction media that increasingly resemble what we consider our actual real world, with effects on our bodies. This is how we can say that we can generate real experiences through digital worlds. And for this, we must start creating our identities in these new realities, including a new body.
Immersive technologies will allow a total personalization of our reality.
Does technology create new possibilities, or should it be the most relevant when solving a need? The answer is: no. The most important thing should be the added value that is being delivered to solve our needs. For example, a robot like those from Amazon for managing a warehouse, despite being an amazing technology, should not be the most relevant. The benefit it brings, which is an increase in productivity while maintaining quality and reducing costs, should be what matters most. If it’s not, it’s an indicator that the added value generated is much lower than the technology it uses. And it’s very likely that this happens when you’re only trying to create an image of innovation without the innovation process itself. In these cases, the inclusion of technologies for the sake of image can be very costly and inefficient.
This is why it is a myth that realism, for example in a video game, is necessary for its success. The perfect case to demonstrate this is pixel art like Minecraft, where the graphics are very primitive, but they satisfy the player. This shows the previous point: in this case, the value brought by the solution is much greater than the technology used to create it.
A technology is as good as it can be used. Access to devices is gradual, but in many cases slow (and therefore limiting), so we must design experiences that have alternative visualization methods with the least loss of interactivity possible. For example, 360 experiences that can be viewed in virtual reality, an interactive exploration with a gyroscope on a cell phone or rotating 360 video on a computer.
Immersive technologies must find ways to be applied in situations where they truly add value with digital content designed for that purpose.
