Generative Art
Joanna Peña-Bickley
CognitiveExperience.Design | Design Dossier
THE MIRROR WORLD
building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it's complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.
Inside the mirrorworld, agents like Siri and Alexa will take on 3D forms that can see and be seen. Their eyes will be the embedded billion eyes of the matrix. They will be able not just to hear our voices but also, by watching our virtual avatars, to see our gestures and pick up on our microexpressions and moods. Their spatial forms—faces, limbs—will also increase the nuances of their interactions with us.
The mirrorworld will be the badly needed interface where we meet AIs, which otherwise are abstract spirits in the cloud.
For the mirrorworld to come fully online, we don’t just need everything to have a digital twin; we also need to build a 3D model of physical reality in which to place those twins. Consumers will largely do this themselves: When someone gazes at a scene through a device, particularly wearable glasses, tiny embedded cameras looking out will map what they see. The cameras only capture sheets of pixels, which don’t mean much. But artificial intelligence—embedded in the device, in the cloud, or both—will make sense of those pixels; it will pinpoint where you are in a place, at the very same time that it’s assessing what is in that place. The technical term for this is SLAM—simultaneous localization and mapping—and it’s happening now.
EVERYTHING CONNECTED TO the internet will be connected to the mirrorworld. And anything connected to the mirrorworld will see and be seen by everything else in this interconnected environment. Watches will detect chairs; chairs will detect spreadsheets; glasses will detect watches, even under a sleeve; tablets will see the inside of a turbine; turbines will see workers around them.
REQUIRED READING: WIRED
the next major paradigm shift that will unfold over the next two decades. This shift layers the digital world that exists today, like Internet of Things, 3D models, SLAM, and digital mapping, onto our physical world.