Will Augmented Reality Ruin Your Dating Life?

A few years ago I read a book, Super Sad True Love Story, a dystopian love story about people obsessed with superficiality driven by their wearable technology. The wearables, called "apparats" in the book, allow everyone to see instantly how everyone rates everyone else's attractiveness, called a "fuckability" rating, in a bar or any other social environment. Everyone rates everyone, constantly. The book was published in 2010 and in the three years since I read it, I've seen many aspects of the book slowly come true. 

Imagine my horror when I discovered a new app, Lulu, which allows women to rate men with a number evaluation and hashtags such as "#ObsessedWithHisMom and #GoneByMorning." Despite Lulu's claim that this is "unleashing the power of girl talk" and my position as a proud feminist, let me confirm that I find this app straight up creepy, not to mention cruel. No one should have to have to relive a history of dating missteps each time they meet someone new. Many men agreed that apps like Lulu aren't ethical, and in response Lulu has now required that men opt-in to the site. 

How long will it be before technology like this is wearable and part of augmented reality? How long will it be before your Tinder "swipe yes's" are recorded and shared? Before your crowdsourced physical desirability is viewable in glasses or contact lenses? What effect could this have on our dating behavior? 

In this video, one woman takes a comedic look at how Google glasses might affect men's dating behavior.

Pushing the bounds of wearable apps, we can envision more disturbing situations, as seen in the video "Sight" below:

How ethical is it for someone to research you on social networks before a date? For them to use an app to improve their dating "performance"? Are these technologies a boon for the socially awkward or a manipulation of your dating partner?

Personally, I'm a bit old-fashioned about this stuff. If I pay more attention to my phone than my dinner date, at the end all I've earned is a closer relationship with my device. I do my best to keep my phone in my bag, but wearables combined with augmented reality technology imply that our attention has the potential to be constantly divided. The idea of a guy using an app to take me home would certainly feel like a manipulation... if I found out. But what if I didn't? Would ignorance be bliss?

It's possible that companies that advocate for wearables and the associated apps will succeed in shifting public opinion to become comfortable with these technologies and potential privacy invasions that they present. Alternatively, some trends indicate that people are becoming less comfortable with their private information being public, even on current social media. For example, many reports indicate that teens are abandoning Facebook and flocking to Whatsapp and Snapchat precisely because these apps allow them to more strictly control the audience that sees their information.

My prediction is that we will become more comfortable with wearables at the same time as we seek to share personal information with only a smaller, tighter network of who we consider our real friends, not our "facebook friends."

How AR will save your life before you know you have a health condition

One of the areas in which Augmented Reality is really making a difference for everyone is medicine. 

As the process of decoding the human genome continues, 23&me has become one of the most known services in genetics. This company provides you with a detailed genetic analysis that shows how prone you are to certain diseases or conditions. At the same time, you can build your own family tree and see how the mixture of different families and races increases or decreases the likelihood of certain conditions. And finally, you can get in touch with people that have similar genes as you and try to see how specific genes affected their lives! All this is achieved through a $100 mail-it-yourself kit, which includes a small medical apparatus for you to send a blood sample. 

So what does Augmented Reality have to do with this? Well this is the first step, as the world we live in is characterized by exponentially growing information and increased interconnection of data. Imagine you are enjoying an afternoon trek in Cinque Terre, Italy, and suddenly fall and get a concussion that knocks you out. Your partner rushes you to the local hospital, where the physician gets instant access to your digital records just from your thumbprint. She sees all your information in a tablet or even wearable glasses, which could even tell her instantly your blood pressure, locate the hematoma at the place of trauma, and show your white and red blood cell movement. There is no loss of precious seconds to take care of your injury. Now imagine the same situation, but you have a heart attack in the streets of Pasadena. Think of how valuable that information would be for the paramedics treating you and how much more prepared the doctors would be when you arrived at the hospital. 

Even further, imagine being able to perform DIY checks for your blood pressure, sugar levels, calorie intake or even weight that automatically record your levels and maintain updated daily records accessible to your doctor to track daily variance and how you stick to your diet. It's possible that your bathroom mirror could provide your daily checkup while you brush your teeth!

Did you know that less that 20% of all doctor's appointments require that the physician actually touch the patient? That means that 80% of diagnostics could be performed remotely, via chat or by sending pictures. This could allow patients to speak with a doctor quickly, prevent unnecessary visits and transaction costs, and sensibly reduce healthcare expenses. These developments, along with the preventive diagnostics of small and relatively inexpensive wearable devices, are completely changing the medical environment. Companies are even making the devices more imperceptible and even fashionable to prevent the embarrassment of carrying an ugly medical device. 

These changes will also affect more intense and invasive procedures. How many people avoid their checkups because of the way colonoscopies or prostate exams are conducted? Imagine how many diseases could be prevented if people were able to virtually go through those procedures. The technology is almost there, and the initial trials are being carried in order to avoid intrusion on the patient, one of the biggest traumas during certain exams. At the same time, robotics and augmented reality are tearing down the walls of physical presence of doctors during procedures. Some surgeries have already been conducted with physicians located miles away and operating a terminal connected through the internet to the operating room. We can now even have a multidisciplinary team of doctors in 5 continents and participating together in the same surgery. They could see your whole diagnosis, identify possible problems during the procedures, and react faster to them.

Imagine the implications for remote or underserved towns that currently lack facilities due to high costs and low populations. Specific modern hospitals could be built at almost no cost and with little staff with a few minor futuristic devices and physicians with regular office hours connected by Internet. We could virtually build a hospital everywhere just with the internet and electricity. 

Scientist are already testing the "cancer pill", a pill shaped analysis tool that will screen your whole body from inside and detect the possibility of cancer surfacing, converting damaging control medicine into completely preventive medicine. This type of pill is being tested for diverse diagnostics, and we could consider them to be a part of our routine weekend check-up while they transfer tons of data to our files like the Spider Robots from Minority Report. 

Other implications for medicine include advancements made in prosthetics and the possibility to build functional exoskeletons for disabled persons and allow them to walk again. Even more, initial trials are being done to get 3D printers to create organs! This will allow thousands of people waiting for organ donors to get organs quickly and prevent potential rejections due to incompatibilities, as they could be designed from scratch to match the patient. 

All these developments are making medicine more personalized, so the doctor of the future will prescribe the drug you need to cure your problem and not a generic cure based on a generic condition. Physicians will know how you react or how people with your genes react to the common cold and know that Drug X is much more effective than Drug Y. This information would continue to build your personal file and the personal files of thousands of people worldwide that share part of your genes...

Augmented Reality is building a faster, more efficient, and personalized health system. Imagine medicine based in prevention, doctors that are constantly updated about patients' developments even though they are miles away, and people proudly using sleek and fashionable check-up devices that screen them for diseases without being invasive.

For further information, we recommend these two amazing talks about what the future is weaving for augmented reality in a medical environment:

Medicine's future (18 minutes)

Crowdsource your health (5 minutes) - The impact of social awareness to identify AEDs

The Evolution of Augmented Reality

In the previous two blog posts we have given you a small introduction to Augmented Reality (AR) and seen the difference between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. In this post, we will look more at the history and evolution of Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality as a concept is born

For most people AR as a concept can be seen as something very new. And the introduction of new products and gadgets like Google Glasses has created an increased awareness around it, and is sometimes referred to as the "wearable revolution". But as this blog will show you, AR, is a lot more than just wearable gadgets. When that is said, similar to most technologies, AR has been present in labs and research institutions for nearly half a century. The introduction of AR, can be tracked back to Ivan Sutherland, a scientist from University of Utah who in 1965 introduced a head-mounted display, with mirrors attached, allowing the wearer to see a very limited virtual world superimposed on the real world.  The display was too heavy for a human head to carry, and was therefor suspended from the ceiling in the lab (See below for pictures)

 Source: http://www.computerhistory.org

Augmented Reality as a name is born

The name Augmented Reality (AR), was first introduced in 1992, by Tom Caudell, working for Boeing. He was working in an area where also the US Army and related industries was looking at Augmented Reality, as a way to improve their manufacturing and engineering process. They used AR to present very simple layers on top of the real world (i.e. in the process of laying cables in certain airplane components, the software and the hardware, could indicate where which cable should be placed, without the user having to look up in manuals for every single one)

During the 90s there was a rapid technological development, which also lead to a rapid development in the space of AR. 1999 is by many seen as the turning point for AR, when Hirokazu Kato introduced the ARToolKit, an open source software package which is still one of the main technologies used for today's AR applications. The software would be taking output generated by a simple camera and overlaying it with simple virtual 3D objects

Augmented Reality today

As we moved into the new century mobile computer devices became more apparent (including mobile phones and smart phones), we saw the introduction of GPS and compasses into mobile devices and wireless data communication was introduced. All this created a foundation for several projects looking at combining this with camera processing (Cameras was becoming integrated into phones). And as of this, we saw the introductions of different Augmented Reality Browsers, which basically uses the camera on your smartphone, the GPS and data available on the World Wide Web, to display virtual information on top of the image of reality you see in your display. Examples of such browsers today are Accrossair, Google Goggles, Google Skymap etc

Then as many people are aware of, Google launched its Google Glasses for developers and testing in February 2013, and is expecting to release them to the public during 2014.

 
So looking at what Sutherland came up with in 1965, Google now is taking the same concept to the next level. Google Glasses are now more like a wearable computer, with a small optical head mounted display and will display smartphone like content in a hands-free fashion and you can communicate with it through your voice. Stay tuned for more information around today's usage of Augmented Reality and the gadgets available, or soon to be.