THE METAVERSE IS ALREADY HERE

HOW IS VIRTUAL REALITY REMAKING OUR WORLD?

- PETER SUDERMAN

IT'S FAIR TO say that reality has a lot of problems. War. Famine. Disease. Taxes. Unwanted accumulations of pet hair. But if you look at the world through the eyes of some of the world's biggest tech companies, a deeper, more fundamental problem reveals itself: There just aren't enough holograms.

From the earliest days of the modern technology revolution the postwar rise of computers and connections that would eventually give us the internet and email and iPhones and Farmville-technologists and sci-fi writers have dreamed of a world with holograms: information and three-dimensional virtual objects floating in space around you, or entirely new spaces out of the digital ether that you can explore and interact with.

This was a multidisciplinary head-scratcher. It's easy to think of holograms as just an advanced display technology, like televisions and computer monitors. But it goes much deeper than that. To interact seamlessly with objects in three-dimensional space, even in the simplest way-say, turning your head to look at something from a different angle-requires the display not only to acquire information about the physical properties of your environment but to track what you are seeing and how, and then adapt accordingly.

The same is true of sound, which varies subtly based on factors such as the mass and texture of objects in your room as well as the tilt and location of your head. Your eyes and ears are sensors, detecting a vast amount of information about the world around you, which your brain then decodes, processes, and synthesizes in real-time. Add touch, and the sensory measurement challenges grow broader still. To create a world rich with virtual interaction, you'd need technology to track and measure the breadth of human perception.