One decade ago, the number of devices connected to the internet exceeded the number of people on the planet for the first time. A decade from now, researchers at Stanford predict the number of connected devices today (50 billion) will increase tenfold. Most of today’s devices contain multiple sensors (your smartphone has about 20), heralding 2020 as the dawn of the Trillion Sensor Era. And paving the way for a world predicted by sociologist Neil Gross in the pages of Business Week back in 1999:
“In the next century, planet Earth will don an electric skin. It will use the internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations…These will monitor cities, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies – even our dreams.”
Amazing to think how matter-of-fact the science fiction of yesterday sounds today. Particularly when you consider how many mind-blowing advances needed to converge to get us to this place. Creating an “electric skin” for our surroundings – and teleporting our senses into the augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) world that is spacial computing – requires mind-bending accomplishments in a few critical areas:
READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY ANN NYGREN IN THE SUMMER 2020 EDITION OF GAMING & LEISURE MAGAZINE.