Well, this is going to be the final installment in this auto-biographical adventure, From the Slide Rule to the Metaverse. If you have missed any of the previous 6 posts you can do a quick search on this site using “metaverse” as the search word. While I am thinking of it, that is what I love about the blog. It’s my personal lidar search engine, assuming I can remember the key word.
We left off with me being “RIF’D” – reduction in force from Autodesk in 2008 and at the recommendation of my 16 year old son starting the In the Scan blog. To date, I have made over 5,000 blog posts on all things related to 3D lidar. I like to emphasize 3D because this is the key to the value that lidar brings to a growing list of industries and markets.
So what does the future hold? For me, it’s about visualization in 3D which is the power of lidar and the reason why I believe it will become more prevalent in society than GPS by the end of this decade.
The main driver of this will be autonomous vehicles, but don’t take this part of that statement as a prediction that we will all be riding around in cars without a steering wheel or brakes any time soon. That is not going to happen for a LONG time. I am talking decades, if ever. The final so-called edge cases, the one’s that cause a lot of the accidents, defy a solution. It’s like cancer. You can spend all the money you like on research, but there is no guarantee you will ever get the desired result.
Which brings me to a more realistic, but still futuristic technology for the metaverse – augmented and virtual reality. The challenge here (as with the personal navigation device that we developed 25 years ago) is the ergonomics. In most cases the headsets block the user’s vision. That is a major safety issue and market limiting factor. Google Glass overcame that to a certain extent, but the experience is not the same as being immersed in the 3D environment of a headset.
I blogged about a promising platform for construction about a month ago – the AR hardhat from XYZ Reality. There is still a safety issue, but I think it can be managed with some creative thinking.
So despite that the fact that Zuck is betting the farm on the metaverse (it’s really hard to hit 2 home runs – ask Bill Gates) I think there is a long way to go before we are all living there.
Thanks for your ongoing support of Lidar News and I hope you have enjoyed From the Slide Rule to the Metaverse.
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