Society, Culture & Augmented Reality
Sometimes, a new significantly advanced, technology comes into the public sphere and gets resoundingly rejected. Or accepted. This is culture at work. If that technology is quite good however, it will often find niche market opportunities at first, and slowly evolve over years, even decades, before it once again pushes into wider society.
Such is the case with blockchain, Web3, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The arrival of Generative AI (GAI) via Claude, ChatGPT and a number of open source AI tools, pushed AI into the broader public sphere even though some AI tools have been around for decades.
Now, Apple’s Vision Pro has arrived that mixes AR and VR. Unsurprisingly, humans have been using the headset in weird ways. Humans love to play with technologies. It’s an important part of how they evolve and get socioculturally acceptable. Whether or not Apple’s Vision Pro gains market traction is yet to be seen. But we may well see a whole slew of new AR glasses come out.
Should this indeed be the case, it signals a significant sociocultural moment for humans. It indicates that, as a society, we are indeed interested in becoming more entrenched in living in two worlds simultaneously, more so than ever before.
