Epilogue

In small ways and big ways, our world is about to change. The 2020s are already seeing more change than we've seen in decades, and it is the technology presented here that will drive change at an even faster pace. In a few years, our kids will learn more in a few minutes, wearing Augmented Reality glasses, than many of us learned in an hour in the books and classrooms of old.

Looking at the seven industry verticals we discussed here, there are some commonalities. All benefit from new 3D tools and new ways to work, learn, and live together, thanks to new realities. All will become more efficient, from running a factory, to delivering goods, to getting rides to grandma's house. These changes are profound and needed in order to solve the problems of tomorrow.

There are some major commonalities we are seeing that run, or will run, across all seven industry verticals, which will then extend into the consumer base. The increase in valuing virtual communication and worlds, ultimately reaching a level only previously reserved for the real physical world, is the top commonality. What does it mean to Main Street USA, Germany, China, or India, or indeed anywhere else, beyond that we expect to see many people walking around with some sort of new device on their face? Beyond what we just discussed in this book, as we dug into the changes that seven industries are already seeing due to Spatial Computing?

As the 2020s opened, we saw an explosion in two-dimensional virtual activity, as COVID-19 convinced us all to stay home for months, opening the door to working, educating, entertaining and eating, all at home. As we write these final paragraphs, many physical conferences and other events were being closed down or delayed, with many opting to put on a virtual conference.

In March 2020, we heard that food delivery startups were seeing such explosive growth in usage that they were hiring 20 percent more people every week, and Slack's founder and CEO, among others, shared massive growth numbers, as billions of people around the world discovered how to keep in touch with coworkers, friends, family, and others, via modern tools.

The profound shifts are painful at times, but the move to virtual events leaves us optimistic that more people can get access to the latest education, whether in industry or in new virtual classrooms from universities and other places.

We see this new arc of virtual freedom, which is another commonality continuing to expand, as Spatial Computing is more fully realized within the next three-to-five years with Augmented and Virtual Reality-based objects, assistants, and experiences, and much more. Freedom will come to mean that we will be able to do more, with more people, and do it faster, without being tied down to any particular physical location. Everything from ordering a sandwich to listening to music will change, and radical new capabilities, like designing a new home or building a new machine, will be far easier to do thanks to the 3D tools that will be in front of all of our eyes soon.

If it were only the visuality that is changing due to these new technologies, that would alone be a pretty sizable shift. After all, a few decades ago desktop computers and Windows, or rather, the Graphical User Interface, brought a very sizable shift to the world's tools and what was now possible.

This isn't just a skin-deep revolution, though. Underneath this stunning new 3D-centric world and the augmented layers on top of the existing one, is the third commonality, which includes new kinds of Artificial Intelligence algorithms and systems, Computer Vision, and other systems that fuse dozens, if not hundreds, of sensors and cameras and other information sources, and then process that by looking for patterns that many of us haven't yet dreamed of. As the 2020s open up, we are seeing cars using that technology to recognize everything from stop signs to pedestrians, and witnessing the use of facial recognition technology growing at an exponential rate.

As the 2030s arrive, these systems will recognize minute human patterns, in ways that even futurists are struggling to explain. Sometime in the future, robots based on sophisticated Spatial Computing systems will be able to effectively mimic many human activities, significantly freeing us up to do more meaningful things for ourselves and others.

With Spatial Computing, we have powerful new capabilities to bring a lot of social good to people. Climatologists can explain science to us in more immersive, and thus enlightening, ways that get us to work on our climate and environment. Doctors can predict more accurately, diagnose, and treat cancer and other diseases in new ways, and medical researchers can discover new drugs. Architects and designers can make more useful, beautiful, and efficient products, services, cars, buildings, and other products for us to use.

Spatial Computing's three commonalities of valuing the virtual, providing virtual freedom, and using data to understand our physical world have the capacity of truly changing our world in positive ways. We are very much looking forward to the changes and have appreciated this opportunity to share our knowledge with you.