DOCSF22: Metaverse Chat
In this episode, Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous AI, illustrates what it means to live in a world of complete virtual and augmented reality: the metaverse. Louis has been working in this field since the late eighties, but technology has only caught up recently to make VR and AR widely accessible and not just something used for education purposes in the healthcare industry.
With the rise of the Internet, interest in virtual reality dropped around the late nineties after a decade of being latent. The medical industry kept it alive with training simulators for doctors, as they were in demand and development. The smartphone, particularly the iPhone, was the catalyst for change that brought down the costs of processors, sensors, and flat panel screens, all of which allowed for VR headsets to be more accessible. With these devices and technology up-to-par, conversations and advancements around the concept of the metaverse skyrocketed, and Louis believes that just as the smartphone did, the metaverse will be weaved into our lives within the next ten years.
He talks about two metaverses: the virtual reality world and the augmented reality world. The former consists of a world purely used for entertainment, the way we currently use television, while the latter is one where, by using lightweight glasses, information will be brought up from the virtual world interposed in our physical one. We live in a society where information is very valuable, so much so that humans are willing to trade their own data for access to more information. Louis is pushing for regulations in the upcoming augmented metaverse to avoid third-party entities to take advantage of it the way marketing has been through targeted ads.
Listen to this episode to learn about Louis’s journey with virtual and augmented reality and how he’s taking a different approach with Unanimous AI to augment human abilities within the metaverse instead of replacing them with AI!