Mirrorworld does not fully exist yet, but it will appear. One day, every place and thing in the real world - every street, lamppost, building, and room - will have its full-size digital twin in the mirror world. Today, tiny fragments of this mirrored world can be seen using augmented reality (AR) devices. Gradually, these virtual fragments will be stitched together, acquiring a dedicated permanent place in the parallel world.
The writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map that would be exactly the size of the area it represents. "Over time," Borges wrote, "the cartographers' guild created a map of the empire, the exact size of which corresponded to the size of the empire and coincided with it at every point." We are now building such a 1: 1 scale map of almost unimaginable dimensions, and this map - this world - will become the next great digital platform.
Mirrorworld: digital parallel world
Google Earth has long provided clues as to what this mirror world will look like. A modern writer can now open Google Earth and find himself where he has never been - in order to transfer this experience into a book. This is a rough version of the mirror world.
And it is already under construction. Deep in the research labs of technology companies around the world, scientists and engineers are striving to create virtual places that overlap real-world ones. Crucially, these emerging digital landscapes will appear to be completely real; they will demonstrate what architects call place-ness, that is, create the illusion of a real place. But in the mirrored world, a virtual building will have volume, a virtual chair - textures, and a virtual street - with layers of textures, gaps, inclusions, which together will give the feeling of "street".
Mirrorworld, or mirrorworld, is a term first popularized by Yale computer scientist David Gelerntner. It reflects not only the appearance of something, but also the context, meaning and function. We will interact with this something, manipulate it, feel it as in the real world.
First, the mirror world will appear as a layer of high-resolution information superimposed on the real world. We'll be able to see a virtual name tag floating over people we've met before. Perhaps a blue arrow will show us where to turn. Or useful annotations attached to points of interest (unlike tightly curtained VR glasses, AR glasses will show a transparent layer).
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Eventually, we will be able to search for physical places in the same way we search for the text: "Find me all the places where the bench in the park stands overlooking the sunrise over the river." We will link objects into a physical web, leave physical links like links in words, producing amazing and new products.
The mirror world will have its quirks and surprises. Its curious dual nature, combining the real and the virtual, will allow the creation of unthinkable games and entertainment. Pokémon Go gives only a hint of the almost unlimited possibilities for exploring this platform.
These examples are simple and rudimentary, equivalent to our earliest, flimsy guesses about what the Internet would be like immediately after it came out - the budding Compu-Serve, early AOL. The real value of this work will come from the trillions of unexpected combinations of all these primitive elements.
The first large technological platform was the Web, which digitized information, transferred knowledge to algorithms; Google became king. The second major platform has become social networks, which run mainly on mobile phones. They digitized people and conveyed human behavior and attitudes to algorithms; they are ruled by Facebook and WeChat.
We are now witnessing the emergence of a third platform that will digitize the rest of the world. On this platform, all things and places will be machine readable, at the mercy of algorithms. Whoever leads this great third platform will become the richest and most powerful person and company in history, as will the rulers of the other two platforms. Just like its predecessors, this new platform will free up thousands of new companies in its ecosystem, and spawn a million new ideas - and challenges - that weren't possible before machines learned to read the world.
The manifestations of the mirror world are all around us. Perhaps best proven by the possibility of a virtual-physical marriage, Pokémon Go has transformed explicitly virtual characters into a mind-blowing outdoor reality. In 2016, the whole world got carried away with the pursuit of cartoon characters in local parks.
The alpha version of the Mirror World in the form of Pokémon Go has been adopted by hundreds of millions of players in at least 153 countries. Niantic, which created Pokémon Go, was founded by John Hanke, who previously worked on early versions of Google Earth. Today, Nianitc's headquarters are on the second floor of the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see the promontory and the distant hills. Offices are filled with toys and puzzles, including an elaborate boat questroom.
Hanke says that despite the many other possibilities augmented reality opens up, Niantic will continue to work on games and maps as the best way to use this new technology. New technologies are born in games, and they are honed there: “If you can solve a problem for the gamer, you can solve it for everyone else,” adds Hanke.
But games are not the only context in which the shards of the mirror world appear. Microsoft, another major augmented reality player besides Magic Leap, has been making HoloLens devices since 2016. HoloLens are transparent glasses that attach to the head. Once turned on and loaded, HoloLens displays the room you are in. Then, using your hands, you can control the items of the pop-up menus in front of you, choosing which applications or programs to download. One option is to hang virtual screens in front of you.
Microsoft's vision for HoloLens is simple: it's the office of the future. Wherever you are, you can insert as many screens as you want and work from there. According to venture capital firm Emergence, "80 percent of the world's workforce has no desktops." Among these workers are those who are now using HoloLens in factories and plants, creating 3D models and receiving training. Tesla recently applied for two patents for using AR in factory production. The logistics company Trimble makes certified helmets with integrated HoloLens.
In 2018, the US Army announced that it was acquiring up to 100,000 HoloLens redesigned headsets for jobs that weren't designed for conventional factories: to stay one step ahead of enemies on the battlefield and "increase lethality." You will likely wear your HoloLens at work rather than at home. Even Google Glass is slowly making its way into factories and factories.
In the mirror world, everything will have its twin. NASA engineers first applied this concept in the 1960s. By keeping a duplicate of any machine that goes into space, they could troubleshoot any component when the main instrument is many thousands of miles away. These twins gradually evolved into computer models - digital twins.
Digital copies of everything
General Electric, one of the largest companies in the world, makes extremely sophisticated machines that can kill people in case of failure: power generators, nuclear reactors for submarines, control systems for oil refineries, jet turbines. To design, build, and operate these large devices, GE borrowed an idea from NASA: it creates digital twins for each machine. A jet turbine with serial number E174, for example, may have a sibling - also E174. Each of its parts can be spatially represented in three dimensions and placed in a corresponding virtual location. In the near future, such digital twins could essentially become dynamic digital engine simulators. But such a full-fledged, three-dimensional digital twin is not just an electronic model. It embodies volume, size and texture - just like in an avatar.
In 2016, GE evolved into a “digital manufacturing company,” which it defines as “the fusion of the physical and digital worlds.” This is another way to claim that she is building a mirror world. The digital twins have already improved the reliability of industrial processes that use GE machines, such as oil refining or equipment manufacturing.
Microsoft, for its part, has expanded the concept of digital twins from objects to entire systems. The company uses AI "to create an immersive virtual copy of what is happening throughout the factory floor." What's the best way to fix a huge six-axis mill robot without having a digital replica machine on top of it using AR? A repair technician will see a virtual ghost lying on top of a real robot. Examine virtual overlay to see possible faulty parts. A specialist from headquarters will be able to connect to the repairman and direct his hands in the right direction.
One day, everything will have its own digital twin. This is happening faster than you might think. Home improvement retailer Wayfair displays many millions of products in its online catalog, but not all images are from a photo studio. Instead, Wayfair found it would be cheaper to create a 3D photorealistic computer model for each item. You need to look very closely at the kitchen faucet on the Wayfair website to realize that it is virtual. As you browse the company's website today, you are peering into a mirror-like world.
Now Wayfair is releasing these digital objects into the wild. “We want you to buy from home, from your home,” says Wayfair co-founder Steve Konin. The company has released an AR app that uses the phone's camera to create a digital version of the interior. The app then places the 3D object in the room and anchors it even if you move. By looking at your phone, you can walk around the virtual furniture and see the illusion of a three-dimensional environment. Place the virtual couch in your den, view it from different angles, and replace the fabric and upholstery. You will see practically what you get.
When shoppers try the service at home, they're "11 times more likely to buy," says Sally Huang, developer of the app for Houzz. Ori Inbar, a venture capitalist in AR, calls this "moving the internet from screens to the real world."
For the mirror world to be fully connected to the Web, we need to do more than just have a digital twin; we need to build a 3D model of physical reality in which these twins will be placed. For the most part, consumers will do it themselves: when someone looks at the scene through a device, particularly wearable glasses, tiny built-in cameras will display a map of what they see. Cameras will only capture pixel particles, but they don't need much. But artificial intelligence - in the device, in the clouds, and in both - will extract meaning from these pixels; it will determine where you are and estimate your location at the same time. The technical term for this is SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and all of this is already happening.
For example, the 6D.ai startup has built a platform for developing augmented reality applications that can recognize large objects in real time. If you take one of these apps and take a photo of a street, it recognizes each car as a separate vehicle object, each lantern as a tall object isolated from nearby tree objects, and shop windows as flat objects behind cars. And we will find a meaningful order.
And this order will be continuous and connected. In the mirror world, objects will exist relative to other things. Digital windows will exist in the context of a digital wall. Instead of connections generated by chips and bandwidth, the connections will be contextual, AI-generated. The mirror world will thus create the long-awaited Internet of Things.
Another application on the phone, Google Lens, can also distinguish between individual objects. It's smart enough to identify a dog's breed, shirt design, or plant species. These features will be integrated soon. When you look at your living room through the magic glasses, the system will put everything together, informing you that there is a framed engraving and wallpaper with four flowers on the wall, and there are white roses in a vase. There is an old Persian carpet on the floor, a new sofa would be perfect for it. Based on the colors and styles of furniture already in the room, the app will recommend a specific color and style for the sofa. You'll like it. Will you take this lamp here?
Augmented reality is the technology behind the mirror world; it is a clumsy newborn who will turn into a giant. “Mirrored worlds immerse you without changing the floor under your feet. You are still present, but on a different plane of reality. Like Frodo putting on his ring. Instead of cutting you off from the world, they form new connections with it,”writes Keiichi Matsuda, former creative director at Leap Motion, a company that develops gesture technology for augmented reality.
The full bloom of the mirror world awaits the appearance of cheap and always active wearable glasses. There are rumors that one of the largest technology companies may be developing just such a product. Apple is active in augmented reality and recently acquired a startup called Akonia Holographics that specializes in thin, clear lenses for smart glasses. “Augmented reality will change everything,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook during a phone call in late 2017. "I think it's deep, and I think Apple is uniquely positioned to lead this area."
But you don't have to use augmented reality glasses; you can use almost any device. You can do this with a Google Pixel phone, but without the burdensome 3D glasses. Even now, wearable devices like watches or smart clothes can detect and interact with the proto-mirror world.
Anything connected to the Internet will interact with the mirror world. And everything that is connected with the mirror world will see and will be seen by everyone else in this interconnected environment. The watch will detect chairs; chairs will work with spreadsheets; glasses will find the watch even under the sleeve; the tablets will see the inside of the turbine; turbines will see workers around them.
The emergence of a vast mirror world will depend, in part, on a fundamental shift now taking place, away from a telephone-centric life to a technology that's already two centuries old: the camera. To recreate a map the size of a globe - in 3D, no less - you need to photograph all places and things from any possible angle, all the time, which means the planet must be filled with cameras that are always on.
We make this distributed, all-seeing network of cameras down to pinpoint electric pupils that can be pointed wherever and how you want. Like computer chips before them, cameras are getting better, cheaper and smaller every year. You may have a couple on your phone; a couple more - in the car. Some have a camera on the peephole. Most of these newly formed artificial eyes will be in front of our eyes, on glasses or in contact lenses, so where we humans look is where the filming will take place.
The heavy particles in the cameras will continue to be replaced by particles of weightless software, squeezing them into microscopic dots that scan the environment 24 hours a day. The mirrored world will be a world guided by beams of light that scurry back and forth, hitting cameras, leaving displays, entering the eyes: a tireless and unceasing stream of photons that paint the shapes we walk through and the visible ghosts we touch. The laws of light will determine what is possible.
New technologies will give new superpowers. We got super speed with jets, super cure with antibiotics, super hearing with radio. The mirror world promises to give us super vision. We will get something like X-ray vision and will be able to look inside objects, disassemble them into their constituent particles, unravel their schemes. Just as past generations gained literacy with the advent of schools, learned to write, made alphabets and multiplication tables, the new generation will master visual literacy. An educated person will be able to create three-dimensional images in three-dimensional landscapes as quickly as he types today. They will know how to find any video without even needing words. The complexity of color and the rules of perspective will be universally understood, like the rules of grammar. The era of photons will come.
And here's what's important: robots will be able to see this world. Partly self-driving cars and robots are beginning to see the modern world: reality merged with a virtual shadow. When the robot can finally roam the crowded streets, it will see them with its silicon eyes and consciousness - it will be on the mirror-world version of this street. The robot's success in navigation will depend on previously compiled road contour maps - three-dimensional scans of lanterns and fire hydrants, exact state positions of road signs, detailed road routes and store windows digitized by the owners.
Of course, like all interactions in the mirror world, this virtual realm will be layered on the physical world, so robots will see people's movements in real time as they pass by. It will be the same with self-driving cars; they will also be immersed in the mirror world. They will rely on a fully digitalized version of roads and cars on the platform. Much of the digitizing process will be done by other cars as they drive, because whatever the robot sees will be instantly projected into the mirror world for the benefit of other cars. By observing, the robot will simultaneously extract information for itself and provide scanning for other robots.
Augmented reality
In the mirror world, virtual robots will also be physical; they will receive a virtual, three-dimensional, photorealistic shell, be it a car, animal, human or alien. In the mirror world, agents such as Siri and Alexa will receive 3D photos that can be seen and can be seen. Their eyes will be embodied in billions of matrix eyes. They will capture the micro-emotions and expressions of our faces. Shapes - faces, limbs - will also improve interaction. The mirror world will become the very interface that artificial intelligence needs.
There is another way to look at objects in the mirror world. They can be dual-purpose, perform different roles in different planes. “We can take a pencil and use it like a magic wand. We can turn our tables into touch screens,”writes Matsuda.
We will be able not only to play with the position and roles of objects, but also over time. Let's say I'm walking along a path near the Hudson River (real) and I see a nest of wrens that my birdwatcher friend would love. So I leave a virtual note for her. She will make herself felt when her friend follows this path. We saw a similar phenomenon of presence with Pokémon Go: virtual creatures left in real physical places. Time is a dimension of the mirror world that can be changed. Unlike the real world, you will be able to travel through time.
History will become a verb. By sliding your finger across your hand, you can go back in time, to any place, to see what happened before. You will be able to overlay a reconstructed 19th century view on top of existing reality. To visit a place in its early submission, it will be enough to simply roll back the version. The entire mirror world will become one whole "Photoshop" file in which you can substitute and remove layers. Or you can skip into the distant future, where artists have already left their ideas about future versions of this place. Thus, the mirror world would be easier to call a 4D world.
As with the Internet and social media, the mirror world will unfold and grow, creating unforeseen challenges and unexpected benefits. Let's start with the business model. Will we try to launch the platform with ads? Maybe. Those who remember the Internet before commercial activity would agree that it grew extremely slowly. A mirrored world without ads would be unnecessary and unwanted. However, if the only business model involves buying our attention, it will be a nightmare - because in such a world, our attention will be tracked with the highest precision and resolution.
At the macro level, the mirror world will have the most important property of increasing returns. The more people use it, the better it gets. The better it gets, the more people will use it, and so on. This chain is at the heart of the logic of platforms, and this is why platforms - like the Internet and social media - are growing so rapidly and widely. However, it also follows from this dynamic that the winner takes everything; that's why one or two members will fit at the top of the platform leaders. Now we are just beginning to fight these natural monopolies - with Facebook, Google and WeChat, which have become the kind of governments on the Internet.
In the long run, the mirror world can support itself as a utility; for other utilities like water, electricity or the Internet, we are used to paying regularly - by subscription, so to speak. We will be happy to do it again, in the hope of getting something valuable and interesting from this virtual place.
The emergence of the mirror world will affect us all on a deeply personal level. We know that existence in two worlds will have serious physiological and psychological consequences. Our experience of life in cyberspace and virtual reality taught us this. But we don't know exactly what these effects will be, and we definitely won't be ready. We don't even know what cognitive mechanisms actually underlie the AR illusion.
The paradox is that the only way to understand how AR works is to build AR and experience it yourself. The technology itself is the microscope needed to study this technology. Sounds strange, agree.
Some people get very upset that new technologies are creating new harm, and we willingly put up with these risks without always being careful. For example, we should not allow something new if it is not recognized as safe. But this principle does not work, because the old technologies that we are trying to replace are even more dangerous. More than a million people die on the roads every year, but we tend to blame robotic drivers even if they kill one. We worry about social media politics, while letting go of all the dirt that pours from the TV screen. The mirror world will definitely be subject to double standards of strict norms.
Many of the risks of the mirror world are easy to imagine because they are the same as we see on modern platforms. For example, we will need mechanisms in the mirror world to prevent counterfeiting, stop illegal intrusions, delete spam, and detect unauthorized inserts while maintaining security. Ideally, we would like to open up the world to everyone involved without the need for a Big Brother to oversee everything.
Parallel reality on blockchain
Blockchain needs work, and ensuring the integrity of an open mirror world may be what it was born to do. There are already people who are enthusiastically working on this opportunity. Unfortunately, it's not that hard to imagine a scenario in which the mirror world would be centralized and subordinate. We have yet to think about this topic.
Many people believe that a centralized and open platform will be richer and more reliable. Clay Bayvor, VP of AR and VR at Google, says: "We need an open service that will improve whenever someone uses it, like the Internet."
The mirrored world will cause serious privacy issues. In the end, it will hide billions of eyes that follow each point, converging into one continuous eye. The mirror world will create so much data, big data, from its legions of eyes and other sensors, that we cannot imagine its scale. Making this spatial sphere work - synchronizing virtual counterparts of all places and all things with real places and things, while making them visible to millions - would require tracking people and things to a degree that could be called a complete state of observation.
We can imagine how bad it will be for us. But there are several ways to be useful, and the main one is the mirror world. The road to a big data civilization, in which we gain more than we lose, is uncertain, complex, and non-obvious.
But we already have some experience that can form the basis for our approach to the mirror world. Good practices include mandatory transparency and accountability for any party that touches data; symmetry in the flow of information so that observers can be observed; and stability so that data creators derive clear benefits, including monetary benefits, from the system. We will definitely find a way to handle all this data, since the mirror world is not the only place where it will accumulate. Big data will be everywhere.
Since the very appearance of the Internet, the digital world has been viewed as an incorporeal cyberspace - an immaterial kingdom separated from the physical world, so unlike material existence that this electronic space has acquired its own rules. In many ways, the virtual and physical worlds evolved in parallel, never meeting. In the virtual world, you can find a sense of endless freedom, released by disconnecting from physical form: freedom from friction, gravity, momentum and all Newtonian constraints. Who wouldn't want to escape into cyberspace to find the best version of themselves?
The mirror world will bring the two platforms together so that digital bits are incorporated into atomic materials. Information about the famous fountain in the square of Rome can be found at this very fountain in Rome. To repair a 30-meter wind turbine, we will repair a virtual version of it. Take a towel from the bathroom and it turns into a magic robe. We will depend on the fact that each object contains its own bits, as if each atom had a ghost and each ghost has a physical shell.
It will take at least ten years for the mirror world to begin to be used by millions, and another several decades for billions to settle in it. But we already foresee something.
Ultimately, this mixed world will become the size of our planet. It will become the greatest achievement of humanity, creating new benefits, new social problems and countless opportunities for billions of people.
Ilya Khel
