Augmented Reality: Coming Soon?

Nov 12, 2019

Augmented reality adds a digital layer over the real world and soon it will revolutionize how we live. Ultra-tailored information will be everywhere we look, creating a richer, more personalized experience in everything from surgery to walking down the street. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio is how stuff works hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Brian there's guest producer Andrew over there and this is stuff you should know everybody the real real Edition but not the online Consignment retailer just meaning real twice over

that's right very real yeah not augmented it anyway as mayor Factor about as low Tech as it comes as far as podcasts go oh I think I'll pad Caster pretty low-tech right know some people really kind of you know Jazz it up yeah a little razzle-dazzle sure I could you imagine a world where someone listens to stuff you should know and they're wearing a headset right and in front of their face it was either us or right what we're talking about

out

or any of a mix of those things I like the second idea or what we're talking about or if it was an animated version of us remember those animated shorts yeah - those were good yeah and you know we have a mutual friend who I will tell name off are to you who was getting into this quite a few years ago with another company hmm and came to me and was like hey what do you think about maybe one day you and Josh you know doing

he's shooting videos in the first I was like nope now hear me out shooting videos to where we were let's say walking people on a virtual tour of like a neighborhood in New York City and telling about the history and the way that we do and stuff oh man that would be awesome you think yes dude I think people would love that I would love that well this person was also a big believer in AR and said

dude in a few years you won't be able to buy a pair of glasses or sunglasses that don't have this built-in yeah I think your friend is right well no this was a few years ago it's like it should be happening right now according to this person and you're right yeah I remember at the time thinking not only will that not happen in a few years but that will never happen I don't know man I don't know I so I see what you're saying like with a lot of tech there's like you know in five years this is going to

All the Rage in five years comes and goes and we're not that much further along but if you step back and look at the progress that augmented reality is making yes it's I think your friend is ultimately going to be proven right maybe not over the same timeframe obviously because they've totally failed with their prediction but I think in the end your friend will be Vindicated I die I hope is this somebody is this somebody that I like because I hope it's not someone I dislike and I was indicating

I'm them because I feel like I'm trapped here here's my prediction is that in the future there could be for sure people that are into this and that you can easily buy glasses like this correct but I think the notion that this is all of humans at some point walking around like this is silly we'll see we'll see we'll revisit this in five years and I think things will be a lot different than I think you'll be singing a different tune walking around with your VR glasses on

Mark the date everyone okay five years from now yep I'm not going to say I'll buy everyone a beer if that doesn't come true Halloween 2024 yeah that's five years from now if we don't look out and of our house and see everybody walking around with living a virtual augmented world right or I guess it's possible that that could also be the title of a Rob Zombie movie to Halloween 2024 it's nothing but augmented Michael Myers

every way that's true I just wanted to go ahead and I guess foreshadow my future pooh-poohing okay that's fine that's fine that's easy to do when you're talking about predictions but I guess we should probably tell everybody what we're talking about it's augmented reality it's in the title so you should have some heads up but to give kind of a brief definition of augmented reality augmented reality I'm going to say it a fourth time here augmented reality is a type of technology that

ads like a digital layer computer-generated layer of augmentation to real life and it can be really actually any kind of sensory input typically it's something visual but it could also be haptic feedback so tactile like to touch Jerry can be sound you can be walking through a certain place that will trigger like a sound eventually it might be smells warmth who knows what will

able to do but right now most people are typically talking about visual stuff yeah well they could combine the I smell mmm with VR or a are I love that idea man I think the I smell was just ahead of its time not that it was a bad idea they've already got music they've had that since the Walkman I guess it's a its primitive a are sure so I don't know that I would call sound AR except for the fact that maybe you could look at something and it's triggered right

but but it's all there it's all ready to have us leave our Material World on a daily basis and go somewhere else entirely well that technically is virtual reality where you were plunged into an entirely alternative version of reality augmented reality is it's real it's our normal reality but there's there's an extra little touch to it that's digitized yeah but the videos that I've seen there was so much going on

in my opinion you are leaving the real world gotcha gotcha I'm not saying you're transported to you know Venus or anything mmm but when you're sitting in a room and there are screens all in front of your face and the couches you know you can change your couch to a different fabric virtually like I don't consider that the real world okay I I think that your might be in the minority but okay well I think we'll see you in five years that I'm not okay so if you

if you kind of are like well I still don't I don't quite get it what we're talking about is Pokemon go basically yeah so Pokemon go in 2016 it was an enormous hit it's this game where you walk around and you basically play Pokemon in the real world you go visit with Pokemon creatures and try to capture them and like your score is as shown on the screen of your phone and you're using your camera and it's adding that digitized Pokemon layer to the real world you're seeing

camera screen right and it was huge apparently it just passed the three billion dollar Mark which is pretty pretty substantial profit made for a game that's actually free it's a free game but there's a lot of in-app purchases and they've made three billion dollars off of that so far so there's a huge appetite for augmented reality that Pokemon go showed everyone oh for sure I think there are plenty of applications

for augmented reality in the future right and so we kind of got into it a little bit the difference between virtual reality augmented reality I've seen it put really well in that virtual reality takes the user anywhere and augmented reality brings everything to the user I think that's a great description but the idea is in VR you're transported to a different world in augmented reality your world is has that digitized layer added to it and then there's also

the called mixed reality which if you read about it that to me is that's the future of augmented reality yeah I wasn't quite sure the exact difference here it seems like very fine lines definition wise it is because augmented reality and mixed reality are virtually the same thing it's just mixed reality is kind of like the more sophisticated version of augmented reality but a good example that kind of distinguishes the two that I've seen is let's say that you are you have your augmented reality

t-phone going yeah and you hold a soup can up in front of it okay well your your app says oh it's this soup you know it's Campbell's low sodium tomato soup obviously user friend who's holding the phone up to the soup can wants to know more about this soup and it triggers like a some nutrition facts that aren't found on the label or maybe a recipe or something like that and when you're looking at this soup can through your phone the additional layer of

of information that's digitized over it that makes it augmented reality it doesn't look like it's on the soup can that's just like a little it's like you're looking at your computer screen but it's in front of your face yeah it's kinda weird for it we kind of yes but not nearly as sophisticated that's a different thing that we'll get into later but it's just kind of like this layer of information that is floating in space over there mixed reality is far more sophisticated where if you held your hand up in front of in between

in the soup can and your phone your hand would would what's called a clue to it would cover up that information that's a big thing and it's really really hard to do but it makes the the stuff that digitized layer of augmented reality interact with reality that much more so it could wrap around the soup can it could be covered up by something that comes in between you and it that's mixed reality and that's really ultimately what augmented reality will be in the future that's

we'll see I'm starting to suspect you have a real opinion about this now again I think there are totally people the same people that loved Google Glass which we'll get to later whereas at the time I was like this is not going to work I'm going to I think you're wrong I'm going to argue against your argument great later on I love it okay so we can explain a little bit about how this works it is we are not Tech experts

and we're not going to go bother Jonathan Strickland right now no or bother ourselves frankly but we can give you sort of a brief the briefest Layman's overview of how this stuff works there's a field of I mean there's a lot of disciplines in it called computer vision that's really super complicated but for our purposes I guess we can just say that computer vision basically understands what's going on

the world around whoever is using the augmented reality hmm and they do this by you know there's there's got to be an interaction and we'll talk about the wearables in the headsets and stuff as opposed to smartphones but what they use is something called the time of flight sensor which is sort of works like a bats use echolocation except it's not echolocation it's infrared light so they bounce this light and if you look at these things

looks like a almost like a little GoPro camera or something like that right on your forehead which sends out these pulses of light that are reflected by the objects around you and then it measures the delay of that light reflecting back to you to calculate you know everything basically the depth of everything around you right and then every time it makes this measurement It also says I'm a dork that's right because your way

this on your forehead right and we also see with two eyes we have binocular vision so in order to simulate that they have something called stereo cameras that are you know basically place like your eyeballs are at a fixed distance and then triangulates everything together to work with your two eyeballs right exactly so if you look at the if you have a new iPhone if you look at the back you'll see that there's two cameras on the back some cameras

I think who way highway I can't remember how to pronounce it they have a phone with three cameras but the new iPhone does to know does it okay yeah but the the input from these cameras are providing slightly different information to the onboard brain on your phone and so it uses this different information to triangulate basically differentiates between the information and says okay this is how far away this this thing is or this wall is or this you know walkway goes

and it uses that information to create the the digitized layer that that is augmented reality within the space that it realizes it's looking at it's like okay this is what I have to work with let's get rendering and that's the next step is rendering which can be as simple as adding like that layer of text in front of you when you hold up that soup can or it can be far far more sophisticated like say using a Snapchat filter

that makes you look like you're wearing a cute little cat mask but no matter where you move your face up and down or if you open your mouth or something like that it follows it perfectly which would actually technically make the Snapchat filter mixed reality rather than augmented reality yeah I don't do the SnapChat thing but you can do that on FaceTime and I made the mistake of doing that FaceTiming my kid and now that's all she wants to do when it was first time yeah is be a monkey or a dinosaur

or a lion or a lizard or a robot or whatever rawr which is kind of fun and it is you know it is pretty amazing that on this little phone you can stick your tongue out and wrinkle your eyes and and you can do that as a kitty cat or a monkey in real time and so it does all this because of all the Facebook facial recognition software board your phone the gyroscope you know where you're like who needs a compass I'm not going to walk around in the woods with

this thing I'll do that all the time actually you really yeah I mean I'm not in the woods but you know me I'm a terrible sense of direction so if I'm in New York or whatever and I'm like I need to go north then it's very simple way to find out yeah true but I've always just use maps and its really good for maps that's how it knows which way you're facing is that gyroscope and GPS coordinates so it's using all of this stuff along with facial recognition to map and track where you're moving and no matter whether it's rendering the the soup can information

or the Snapchat filter it does this it does all these calculations and figures out where what's going on in the room and your motion and where your faces or where the suit can is all that stuff it does it every time the camera sends a frame of info to the to the on-board computer on your phone which happens 30 times per second so these calculations are being adjusted analyzed in re-measured and then the output is being put out 30 times per second which is pretty impressive you know what I think you just hit on the

the key difference in our outlook on this what it sounds like you are primed for a are because I am someone if I'm in New York let's say and I will say I will say all right I know I need to go northeast to get to this place yeah so I'll just chart what Northeast is I'll put the phone in my pocket and I'll start walking start walking and I think you were more Prime to look at your map and go along the streets that it's telling you to go on I listened to the computers what you're saying no not necessarily

like the I think those are two distinct differences of like kinds of people and how they interact with technology in the world around them whereas I just want to know I'm going Northeast and that's correct all right A lot of people are wanted to look at that map the whole way and now they're going like on the exact right Street to get them there so I guess the quickest right which one do you think is correct I don't know I mean I'm I like to meander and I like me and doing to I'm with you too for sure but I also

also use ways like everywhere I drive to I've never used it it's really helpful but I don't I don't just sit like I don't sit there and like follow the Waze app or anything like I'm looking out the window so I would say I'm somewhere between between you and like a Pokemon go player well I drive Emily crazy because I am quite comfortable get it unless I'm in a hurry not getting some place as quickly as possible and she's always like where are you going I'm like we'll get there eventually I like that too I'd like that too so

mistake me but I'm somewhere in the middle but yes I feel like I'm a little more into Tech in or exploited by Tech than you are say where did we leave off here what the two types of augmented reality yeah did we did we did you say those know we haven't talked about okay because I was just about to talk about marker and mark are less yeah those are the two broad categories yeah and these I mean it's very simple and it makes a lot of sense marker based is basically if something is sort of pre-programmed

and and loaded into your program or your app or your phone and it knows you know once you look up at that thing like the New York Public Library if you're let's say you have an app about New York history I keep picking on New York here because it's easy well we were just there to yeah that's right so it would have something preloaded about the New York Public Library that will pop up in front of your face but it recognizes the library goes oh I know that thing yeah exactly and it spits out the information

a marker yeah or you know could be a QR code marketers can don't forget the Soup cans Chuck got to know those soup recipes right it's add water and boil don't even add water I think you're a chump if you had water to condense soup because it's condensed to Perfection if you ask me how do you just do the straight up yeah I'd like it to not run off the spoon when you hold the spoon upside down wow all right it depends on the soup actually I'm

I'm kidding but guy I have eaten soup that I have not added water to always use a little less water like in a let's say Campbell's chicken noodle mmm sometimes it can get a little watery so I'll use like 3/4 of a can maybe hey I've got one for you have you ever had progressed OHS I don't remember it was like supposedly they're like healthier version or whatever but they have a creamy chicken noodle is a good it's amazing you me got it and I just happen to be like what's in the pantry all open this and I ate it and

I liked it so much that I would have felt bad not mentioning it since we're talking about soup yeah I'm a fan of canned soup I've having that around yeah it is that time of year to it is its Camp Time of Year everyone no one ever eats can gazpacho in the summer canned soup is like a fall winter kind of thing this episode brought to you by Progresso it's that time of year everyone I wish it were that easy where we markerless is a little bit

different and a little bit trickier they basically means there are no markers so your device actually has actually recognize things and be smart enough to say that's a soup can and it's not pre-programmed in but I know what a soup can looks like so here's what you do add water right exactly so that Pokemon go apparently did that for example when you are walking by a river yeah it would say oh I recognize a river or I recognize this bit of land or something like that

and it doesn't have actual markers that are pre-programmed it's just smart enough to to know a river when it sees a river and it will show you like a water-loving Pokémon like Jireh dose or something like that oh boy all right let's take a break I'm gonna forget that ever happened we'll talk about the history right after this stuff you should know Josh and Chuck

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so this is brand-new right yes this is how you knew no one has ever done anything with augmented reality until Pokemon go in 2016 I thought it was interesting though that the a very common thing that people might not think about football fans is that that first down line

and now they have all kinds of stuff like yards to go to make a kick maybe and stuff like that but they're overlays and we talked about that on some other show some other episode I can't remember I couldn't remember which one it was either but we've definitely talked about it yeah but those screen overlays and from 1998 is when they debuted Sports Vision that glowing line that is augmented reality it is a kind I can get down with right well that's the so that works because

you can only see it from one point of view right so it really works on TV because you can only see from one point of view which is the cameras point of view when you're watching TV works really well and you can overlay all sorts of cool stuff but what differentiates that from the augmented reality that is coming around today is that in this in the stands or whatever maybe they can project it so you know you could see it from one angle in the future meaning like six months from now

now everybody will be sitting around in a football stadium and they will be able to see the first down line from whatever their vantage point or point of view is by looking through their phone or their Headley yeah their headset eventually I'll bet you if there's not an app out that you can do that with your phone yet I'm it's coming yeah yeah very soon I'm sure I'm surprised they haven't overlay Dad's on the field and stuff I'm surprised by that to which will probably push things forward as well advertising sure

that was 1998 that the first down line came out but it goes back way further than that as a matter of fact 30 years before that there is a guy named Ivan Sutherland who is a computer scientist and he came up with a headset that you wore that looks a lot like a scary clunky old turn-of-the-century version of a VR headset yeah but it drops you into these like wireframe rooms wireframe like you know line drawn computer-generated line drawn

electron is shhhh kind of rooms I was gonna say Battle Zone but sure I don't know if that is no it was it was another arcade game where you put your face into a into a sort of a headset oh yeah was it like a battleship yeah they were like tanks and things but it was green wire frame it was sort of 3D looking mmm and you controlled that your tank with two two controllers like shifting controllers I got you

I'm thinking of the one where you it was like you're looking through a periscope and you had to like torpedo ships so like you were like your the joystick were two handles coming off of like the Periscope face plate that you were putting your face up to do you remember that one I do what was that one I don't remember it was probably just called Periscope or something stupid like that submarine bomb maybe maybe I don't think you said what year was for Ivan Sutherland know that was the summer of love my

friends was 1968 I thought 69 was the summer of love I mean a joke no I really wasn't but now I'm blushing I didn't mean that at all this is what I'm saying like these things just kind of happened to me I'm a victim I think 68 was the summer of love I might be wrong well let's just say both were okay 69 was post-coital right or pre wow

so there was another researcher in 1974 name Myron Krueger at UConn hmm sounds like a Halloween villain and he sounds like a 70s computer researcher if I've ever heard Myron Krueger yeah that's true the krug's he invented something called video place which if you look up as kind of fun to look at to it was interactive and just think of the most rudimentary

VR you could think of which is like someone going up to like a 1970s Apple computer right there was such a thing and being able to touch the screen to make something happen very very rudimentary very rudimentary but for the 70s in particular this was like really ahead of its time and like you know Ivan Sutherland admiring Krueger they were both working in computer science labs just generating like proof-of-concept yeah

that this was even possible and here's a here's a possible path forward to this and then that's kind of how things like augmented reality get pushed forward is right people who figure out how to do it in the clunkiest most primitive way possible and then over time other researchers and other students come along and they figure out how to shrink it down and then the next thing you know you have a smartphone that's capable of doing this kind of thing and that's really where VR just took an enormous leap

word was when the first smartphone started to come out because if it weren't for smartphones we would still be pressing like bed sheets yeah at video place you know what I mean but the fact that smartphones were able to carry the hardware needed like things like onboard cameras and gyroscopes and GPS coordinates and connections to the internet the fact that all this was suddenly in the Palm people's hands people say well we should start doing things with with this yeah and I'm not knocking those those early Pioneers like I think that's the coolest part about any

anything like this is the people that were brave enough to say like hey put this microwave on your head right and this is the future you know right if you want to talk about an adorable presentation you could go back to February 2009 and look at the Ted Talk on six cents it's really great because things were smaller but they still didn't know how to like bring it all together in one small like thing

had to Cobble a bunch of stuff together right so they had like a camera that you wore around your neck it like chest height you had a smartphone you had a mirror you had a initially a projector strapped to a helmet that you were on your head dork and it was all strung together and you wore these little colored caps on your fingers to be able to interact with the thing that the projector on your head was emitting they do they work for that they also

work really well to keep your fingers clean when you're eating buffalo wings problem I used to work with the commercial director named Tom Schiller who was one of my Idols because he was an early writer for Saturday Night Live and did all those old black-and-white SNL things Belushi sure yeah and Schiller was great and he kind of took me under his wing and I want to get in touch with the guy again but he wore just as a gag he would walk around on set and eat Cheetos with a surgical glove oh nice nice and he told me one day I was like man that's so funny and he went I

like Cheetos he's like I just do it for the gag it's pretty great yeah those so they make surgical gloves that are just finger tip protectors and you me got me some of those and one time we went out to eat with a friend and I was eating buffalo wings like that so did you really yeah and he liked it didn't say anything to make a big deal out of it he just looked over it just lost it is pretty great it was it went about as good as you can hope I think I've seen those what are those for I don't know man I don't know but I can tell

tell you they really do work for eating buffalo wings for some reason I remember my grandmother had those when I was a kid and I think it may have been like to protect a cut or something if you're washing dishes or maybe that's what she used him for sure I think it's one of the things where it's like where's this going to manufacture these and put them out there in the world and yeah whatever Hughes me with or whatever you whatever you want course this is the mid-70s this is pre buffalo wing when we're okay

it's about to get crazy I just wanted to rile up all the people in Buffalo New York so yes you're wearing these caps on your fingers that is used to to you know act as your go-between and manipulate the images that projector on your head is showing everywhere which is kind of cool because it's on your head right so anything can be turned into a surface sure like I mean ideally you're looking at a white wall right or your wrist was one that they use so like you could put

like a numeric keypad projected onto your wrist yeah which is neat but it doesn't mean anything unless if you press the numbers it does something and that's where those finger caps came in like the the allowed the camera to track what your fingers were doing and that was a really really big proof of concept that oh yeah that's put out there which is tracking how we move because there's a difference between just adding a layer of recipes on your soup can and being able to

swipe through recipes just by making a gesture in the air with your finger and that was something that 6-inch showed could be done and that is starting to show up on phones as well where now you know you squeeze your phone like the screen of your phone it's using all sorts of sensors and pressure gauges and vibration measurements to figure out what you're doing with your fingers now they're starting to track it using things like the infrared time-of-flight camera

right so that you don't actually touch your screen you just kind of make these gestures above it and when when that becomes further and further developed that will very clearly be used for a are in the future yeah and is kind of funny and clunky something from 2009 appears now just 10 years ago just scrub through to the end of that Ted Talk and see the audience go wild like that that's the cool thing about this early Tech are the people of these TED Talks man

they can see it they can see the future because they know they can see beyond the fact that you've got six different things hanging around your neck and strapped to your head sure it's the proof of concept because like you said they can always package it in the future and a nice little tiny thing that you can sell well everybody knows that TED Talks were populated by only the best people only the best uh-huh so there's a lot of this going on now all around you beyond the NFL on the football field the NCAA they use that stuff

too right yeah I think everybody uses that that glowing line four first downs and member they had it following the hockey puck for a little while their last it didn't and I specifically remember we talked about that too wherever we talked about this before Dickie fans were like I don't like it yeah I don't want my Puck to Glow but the the it kind of has popped up here there and all sorts of random places there was an Esquire cover once where when you waved your

over it using the app Robert Downey jr. would start talking to you there's Starbucks Valentine's you can send where you like look to the cup and it would say hey be my Valentine or something stupid like that there was a theater production in the 90s called dancing in cyberspace amazing people are like oh you can do stuff like this so let me figure out a neat way to use it but it hadn't really started to accumulate until the last probably five or seven or ten years when people really started throwing

owing money at a our development and app creation yeah I mean one of you know I use some of this stuff here and there I'm not like a total poopoo her I'm just saying I'm never going to walk around the world with a headset on I don't think that that's correct oh man I will not do it just to spite you I know that okay now it's correct but it wouldn't have been had I not said had I just been like sure sure of course it'll be it'll be doing stories on the last man on Earth to not do this right

I wish I could go back and edit out your mind you're there because this is one time I would do it but I like stuff like the sky maps these apps where you can go out at night time or in the daytime but it's one fun at night sure and look at the stars and hold up your phone and see what what planets and constellations are out there and tap on one to get information yeah stuff like that's really neat my uncle or rather I guess Emily's Uncle Tim came

to visit not too long ago and he looked over was with with my kid showing her the room around him and I was like all right what's that all about and I went over and looked and I don't know what the program was but it was just the walls were dripping with blood and gore that wasn't there but a very well could have been because there were like Shari you were like an aquarium there were sharks and fish and all these things and she just of course it blew her mind sure but this is the world that she's growing up in the night and be totally normal to her that

that application when she's in her 20s will seem as primitive and clunky as a Walkman does today oh for sure you know oh I mean it looks clunky now yeah I would say I would say so how about like a people walking around with the phonograph we're going to say that one instead I'm going to just double down even more triple down I guess you could say triple down there are also other applications like there's one for the for the Gatwick Airport

it's a passenger app where you can hold it up and find out information about wait times and where the restrooms are where you know where the restaurant you want to go to as yeah there's also one that's helpful or actually there's a handful of them where like it you remember where you park your car and then when you're walking through a parking lot there's like a big giant like Arrow or something over your car that you just walk toward I would use that she was ahead buddy because it's out there right now I use the Primitive version now which is I just take

picture of the row number knowing you you probably like just carve a picture in your piece of tree bark and then really the oil use your you'll use your phone to know where you know what direction your car is so you can walk into no man I'll drop a pin I'm not a total Luddite okay the military obviously with anything Tech is where a lot of the application goes they are they have something called synthetic training environments yeah where you

can fully well there are a couple of ways to use that you can fully practice stuff like you could practice a raid on a terrorist compound over and over again with like as much information as you have about the compound and the building you can build that out virtually or you can potentially at some point have soldiers on the field that where the stuff and look up and have overlays of you know stuff beam down from satellites about blueprints or

information bring you know instead of hearing it through your walkie-talkie or whatever try right yes yeah you know how like when you zoom in at us and you accidentally like move your your thumbs in a certain way all of a sudden the street map I think Google Maps like becomes three dimensional and like you're kind of looking at it in a little bit of a three well you wouldn't know everyone else listening to this episode knows what I'm talking about but that's what they're saying like you could be on a battlefield and all of a sudden there's like a three-dimensional

oh ization of what's ahead that you can know where to go that's right and it will show you where your car is parked which is great or potentially my friend was working on an app and Los Angeles for like music festivals uh-huh so you can find your friends yeah stuff like that well that's one that's that kind of pops up for something called wicked tude and this is a it's a pretty good example of a an entire kind of type

of augmented reality app where you just are looking at the world around you and it shows you all sorts of different information so like a building you're passing might have a restaurant in it and it'll show you like the daily specials for that restaurant and then over here there's somebody walking down the street and it has their Twitter handle over their head and then there's you know like the hotel rates for a hotel down the street and all this stuff is right there on your phone which is pretty amazing but

I guess I hopefully you have to opt in for your Twitter handle to like be shown in an app like this but that's a really good example of an entire variety of apps which is just basically like that overlay of information additional information about the world around us as we're moving through it yeah and I could see a world where and this is what I told our mutual friend because he was just like what applications could you see what could be cool I was like I could get I guess I could see like if you go to the Museum of Natural History

you could load up anyone from Jerry Seinfeld to us to us to be your dosage for the day we could dress like Teddy Roosevelt we could yeah or you could just point your camera at someone and it dresses them is Teddy Roosevelt because that's a thing if that's not a thing it's about to be next week I'm sure so I can see applications like that historically walking around a neighborhood getting information instead of

through the trouble to read the plaque by the statue yeah for sure there's also one there's one for Pompey that somebody built that's where you hover over the ruins and you look at your screen and it shows you what the building looked like before Pompeii was destroyed yeah that's kind of cool yeah so there's a lot of you know really great applications already for learning about our world my prediction is that is what our worlds is going to look like when you're walking down the street or walking around a historical site or walking anywhere

you're going to be inundated with information like that and I think you will be able to curate it yourself where you select say you know if your Instagram user and you don't really use Twitter well it wouldn't show you people Twitter handles it would show you their Instagram handles or if you if it knew you were looking for a hotel hotels.com would would show you rates but it wouldn't otherwise like if it was in the city that you live in or something like that like you it will be ultra

tailored to the to the individual yeah they would never just feed you content that you didn't want to see automatically right exactly no one no one does that no healthcare is obviously a big big field for a are because you can do practice surgeries that aren't just generic you can do it very specific to the person there are maybe the situation is like somebody could come in and have a wound and they could

point a camera or you know your phone a phone I guess I would imagine a hospital have something a little more advanced but maybe not I don't think you need it I think you just need a smartphone I just think it would Gussy it up at least so you didn't feel like all right what use is your fortune did you set that down on a food tray on an airplane I mean like is it then clean but it would look at the wound and it would send a message that says you're screwed or yes or your

great yeah the the yeah one of them one of the diagnosis is you yeah but reading about this I was like I guess I'll go look up images of wounds for a little while and I did did you really sometimes I can't help myself whenever I see the word wound if I'm researching all this be like let's go see what's a moon pictures look like now I'll do that and then only I was just like why do you do that yeah it's like picking at a scab or something it's tough not to well and I also argued this just happened

the day I was like you know it's that same curiosity that like is why Josh and I do what we do for a living yeah the same one that also kills cats left and right what are some other great applications if your have sensory impairments that is huge yeah yeah I want to give a shout out real quick here because I got this from this article called 39 ways augmented reality can change the world in the next five years and it's by yet see wiener on Thrive Global I'm medium it's a lot of words I just spit out but they all make sense

eventually if you type them into Google and yet see wiener I guess asked like 39 different people what they thought about the future of AR and stuff that's like just around the corner and this was one of them yeah if you think about if you have partial vision and it can actually help you to see you know it can make things pop more and more edges more visible it's you know it's not going to restore Vision obviously but it can actually help out partially sighted people yeah or if you have a hearing impairment

permanent you can say walk around and it'll say oh there's a train coming because it hears the sound of a train and no flash on your screen maybe a picture of a train or just the word train or something like that there's a lot of applications for that that will basically cures not the right word but that will make living in you know the world so much easier for people with disabilities that it's just that's a really exciting thing to and and dropping

in is also excited well that's probably is as much as the military's funding will push this technology forward retail will be at least as big a contributor as well and it already is like some of the coolest VR apps around or ones that that help us consume better yeah I mean I definitely see this happening all around us and in the near future even more and more you walk into a store you're shopping for a couch let's say and

you can you can see what that couch might look like in your home or if it fits through your door or in your space yeah or when the glasses look like instead of trying them on right they don't have them in the store you can virtually try them on yeah and you don't even have to leave your home either to another way to do it is like you can just hold your phone up and you can you know look at the space where you want a couch to go and select that couch and it'll show up and you'll be able to see what it looks like in that space yes and I'm sure it will be

be complete with suggested purchases and add-ons right you'll just be able to like click it like you see and purchase it and it'll show up at your house and you might also want this ottoman in this throw rug right the yeah you're right about I'm talking about yeah for sure yeah but the the idea that all of this that our world our augmented world in the not-too-distant future is going to be very personalized that kind of comes through to one of those those people that yet see weiner spoke to

by the way yet see weiner has one of the better names of all time if you haven't anything you see weiner spoke to somebody who said you know this is going to be really personalized so this AR world that you're experiencing if you go to a restaurant that a friend recommended they might have left like a recommendation for a dish for you to eat just scroll down the wall no one else would be able to see it because your friend left it for you but this is this is like the kind of personalization that that will have or if you walk into a store rather than like

Taylor dad's coming up in your in your web searches like tailored ads will come up in your field of view where it's like hey we heard you were talking about this Depeche Mode album well it just happens to be right there even though nobody buys albums anymore go buy it because this is a terrible example but you get what I'm saying for that's what the ad will say you get what I'm saying all right let's take our last break here and we will talk a little bit about some of the potential pitfalls and hurdles facing

they are stuff you should know Josh and sharp stuff you should know let me tell you about Pete Who Loved hockey and always wanted to play in the NHL Pete played since he was 3 and begged his mom to let him stay on the ice why some nights he even slept in his hockey skates Pete practiced and practiced until one day when he was 40

Seven Pete realized he just wasn't that good so he threw his skates in the trash but then he heard how Geico proud partner of the NHL good save him money on car insurance so he switched and saved a bunch so it all worked out

okay Chuck so Asus which makes all sorts of tech hardware and stuff they released a phone recently called the Zenfone AR yeah and it is basically made for augmented reality it does all the other stuff that a phone does but it has like an extra a bit of hardware and software that makes it like a ace augmented reality and one of the things that has onboard is Google's Tango software and Tango is basically like an AR sweet it has

things like amazing motion detection area learning do you remember how we talked about markerless AR where it's like oh that's a river oh that's a walkway like it's really really good at that at determining markerless objects to figure out what needs to be projected where and it's a really amazing phone as far as a are goes the fact that it's out there really kind of shows like people are really pouring money into this this idea this AR

our idea and eventually that is why I think it's going to hit yeah and it does in phone looks it's not it's not so clunky it's like a regular smartphone and just in the top and the center has a little bit of a hardware situation right but it seems like it could probably still just fit into your pocket nicely right it's not super bulky nothing on your forehead nothing on your forehead yet but that's the thing though you still need a phone and

most people not most people but over 3 billion people close to you know inching towards 50 percent of the global population has a smartphone of this point right so that's not an issue not the biggest issue but there are some challenges and they are basically boiled down to hardware and bandwidth bandwidth is a really big deal right now until 5G is like fully integrated it's just really tough to meet the

and with needs of a are right now on a day-to-day basis yeah and like the kind of a our that we're talking about where it's called Always on augmented reality where you're just walking through the world and there's just digital that digital layer is everywhere yeah really mixed to so that it's really interacting with reality in a very believable way that is extraordinarily bandwidth hungry whereas like walking down the street and streaming a YouTube video in HD require something like

like five or six megabytes per second of bandwidth yeah and something like 30 to 50 milliseconds of latency which is lag time between when your phone sends a commander server and then receives the info back that's that's that's about what it takes to watch an HD movie to streaming HD movie but with with augmented reality apps it's that's nothing like you wouldn't get anywhere with that know you'd need about a hundred per second bandwidth and a latency of 1

second and they think 5G could solve this problem hmm but we'll see I think that it definitely well I think I mean they're talking about like an average download speed of a gigabyte a second in peaks of like 10 gigs a second which is way more than enough for an AR in a our app so I think 5G really will help move a are long but you still you said it early we still have that

problem with Hardware yeah the phone like the phone holding your phone up in front of you is no way to move through the world but that's basically what you have to do if you want to take part with augmented reality well Google said we have an idea how about Google Glass and everybody said that's a terrible idea get that thing out of here yeah this was six years ago I remember Jonathan Strickland I think he was sent some hmm in his defense I don't think he purchased them but go quickly definitely he really wore him a lot if I remember correctly

actually yeah they that did not work out and one of the big problems was they didn't have it fully worked out before they said hey do you want to go ahead and try this thing out they should have probably worked on a little longer but the Prototype was released as the product and they thought that this would just get such a claim that it's going to be the next big thing and then we'll work out the Kinks as the money comes flooding in right and that didn't happen because people didn't like the idea of people walking around with

a camera honed on everything or themselves know those a that's a big one and it still is today I mean privacy is an enormous problem with with augmented reality because to be a part of it like you had your your your either your wearable or your phone or whatever has to be taking in the world around it and that very frequently includes people and it's like you said maybe there will very soon be an augmented reality app where if you look at somebody there suddenly

dressed like Teddy Roosevelt that's probably pretty innocuous but also maybe it takes their clothes off and it shows them naked right there standing in front of you and all of a sudden you're leering at them and they know what you're looking at and that is an enormous invasion of privacy plus also with as much stuff as we share on social media all that stuff can be cobbled together to appear pretty amazing profile of you and if all of that comes up when you look at somebody when somebody comes into your field of vision

and while you're wearing an augmented reality wearable or something that's an enormous invasion of privacy too especially if the person has an opted in for that to be shared that's right and they are here's the real scary thing they're talking about a are contact lenses that you wear on your eyeballs right where this is just the world you see at all times they're not clunky glasses they're not headsets you wouldn't even know that someone has he's in necessarily and the problem now is it can't

provide a power source which means that they have not figured out a way to make them run on human tears right even tears or blinking surely there's a way to make them work from blinking you know what I mean well yeah I could see that you just got a blank a lot yes so there was something that we ran across that I think if you ask me this is why a lot of people are going to start using things like augmented reality wearables are

implants or something like that there's going to be what's called or there could be I should say I don't mean to say gonna cause it's definitely not a foregone conclusion but there could be a like a career arms race is how I've seen it put where somebody who has like this implant or who has gone out and bought these contact lenses or whatever is going to be a much more productive employee than somebody who still goes to the trouble of typing out you know how to you know an internet search

thing for information and they're doing it the old school way right they're going to get left behind and when you're talking about things like livelihood people are going to say well I need to go get those contact lenses do I need to undergo that surgery to get that implant so that I can keep up in today's job market that is what's going to get everybody into the world of a are ya and there are also clearly just day-to-day physical pitfalls like walking into traffic or driving off a cliff hmm because you're wearing

those wearable while you're in a car or something like that I would think that some of those are going to start coming with like you won't be able to operate it if it's moving you know over certain miles per hour or something I don't know how they're going to need I don't know man I do not know I do know that one of the issues that was raised about that though is the ability to hack into stuff like that and I mean if we're if we're just completely Reliant and trusting of our apps are virtue or a our app still like kind of take us through

in place to place we might stop thinking for ourselves and just kind of follow them blindly if you don't use ways but ways is very well known as good as it is for leading you on some real like dingbat side yeah side trips sure to save you like a half of a second yeah and I follow him like very rarely in my like okay wait where are you taking me and you'll scroll ahead or whatever look at the turns you know and text instead you just follow it and you know you have to look over

over sheepishly at the people who just watched you get off on a spur and then get back on and really not get anywhere that's a really great example but imagine if that leads you off of a cliff or something like that and that happens people literally have walked off cliffs playing Pokemon go because they weren't paying attention to the real world around them yeah and this isn't exactly a are but my again Emily's uncle came to see us and he has he's a drone guy and he had a setup where you could

why the Drone up and then he put a headset on me and then I could see through the drones camera hmm so the drones 200 feet in the air and then I can look around and operate the camera cool is if I was up there and I could not get that headset off of my head quickly enough yeah well that's another thing too I think that's another reason why that 5G is going to have to take places like this thing needs to be as smooth as possible if people are just going to walk around throwing up everywhere I would did make me sick I just

it's just not my thing man I was like I want to be in the real world I don't want to wear a headset and look at something projected I think I think that that is I think that will definitely be a thing Chuck or there will be like they'll be a whole movement of you know back to reality types where rather than Back To Nature will be back to reality where people are like no we yeah we just want to experience reality as it is then other people would be like how can you ever say what reality really is you know what is subjective Consciousness you lose

and then they'll say you're right we might as well just get digitized you got anything else I got nothing else well let's revisit this one in five years okay let's do a Lil Wayne 2024 if you want to know more about augmented reality go online and start finding apps and see what you think you'll love it there's also a pretty good article on how stuff works you can check out to it since I said that it's time for listener ma'am

this is called a disagreement about drunk or treating okay we had a very minor spat which I know yeah one yeah I thought so it's you hey guys been listening since 2016 and consider myself a devotee I have marveled for some time about how good-natured good-natured you are toward each other even when you disagree slightly on some of the controversial topics I think it's important skill to have especially in the midst of device of Ages after over three years of listening to your dulcet tones

over your masks finally began to slip the most unlikely of episodes truck or treating yeah I thought that the disagreement over the presence of apple-bobbing it trunk or treating this is going to boil over but being the consummate professionals you are you swiftly moved on I did find the momentary annoyance in your voice is hilarious though and it just goes to show you to take that you take every episode very seriously despite the seemingly laid-back manner in which you deliver your Pearls of Wisdom have long been waiting for a conflict between the two of you

because I found your on Mike relationship very funny and the fact that the first sign of an argument came when discussing a child's Halloween event is the most stuff you should know thing that has ever happened it means laugh out loud it's awesome so that is from London Alex and London thanks Alex you should go back and listen to the Barbie episode we had a little spat in that one too if I remember correctly and I will say this is not a grass watering grass level Vindication but we got at least one email from a guy that said Archer

retreating has fall festival stuff too because yes that's fine he said because the kids it would take them 15 minutes to visit the cars and that's not long enough right so in this case truck or treating is a feature of the larger Fall Festival but apple-bobbing has nothing to do with truck or treating let's just end this okay let's do it all right well if you want to get in touch of this like Alex from London did you can go on to stuff you should know.com and check out our

or Social Links you can also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.com stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio is how stuff works for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows

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