How to Mainstream Spatial Computing?
What is common between TikTok, Spotify, and Kindle? Infinite content, they have more content than one can consume in a lifetime. They did not start off this way, but built their content library over time with user adoption and cumulatively created a snowball effect. Users demanding content, more content attracting new users (who demand more content) and so on.
That’s the path to large scale adoption for the creation of a new category. Each of these media formats moved from niche to mainstream with an army of content creators contributing anywhere between an hour (to create a 15-second clip) to a few decades (ask any Game of Thrones fan). The army formed when the process of content creation became as easy as press-and-hold a button to record an audio/video, generate voice scripts of notes put together in a prose format, or typing on a keyboard (old-school). The structure and the ideation process takes far longer than the final output, and this process does not change for any kind of content. The same rules apply for all the new content one needs to create for mainstreaming 3D worlds.
The next generation of content creators:
Today, creating the 3D worlds are still largely in the realm of a highly skilled workforce executing many repetitive tasks (applying heuristics and fuzzy logic) manually and inefficiently. And as any skill, picking up this skill requires time, money, and effort thereby reducing the number of people creating the world of 3D to a select few. We definitely need this group of individuals (skilled professionals) to get the beautiful Hollywood movies or Triple A games. But that’s a tiny percentage of the world population and the rest of us mortals are completely cut-off. All we need is something that takes very little time to master, that can run on the devices I have handy, and the process of creation is quick.
What high-skilled professionals do - there are very specific sectors (think Hollywood or Triple A games) that need the high-skilled professionals to achieve the pinnacle of storytelling.
- High on detail and richness,
- Substantial time spent on each and every aspect of the environment.
- Example, the tiger in Life Of Pi movie took 1 year to make with 150-people team, and 260TB of servers.
Have a look at old photographs, the faces become more and more serious the older the photographs are. Because the entire exercise of photography and videography required high skill and clicking photos was no laughing matter. It was offensive to smile infront of the camera. 3D content is in that phase today, and it will change with time to be more accessible.
And this is the opportunity to create the next generation of content creators who will translate information in videos, written, or drawing formats into 3D interactive experiences provided the hardware and software both are easy enough to put together. This enables anybody with simple computer skills to put together educational content to advanced digital replicas of smart cities - all using the same tool.
Concluding with the example below, the last image (of augmented reality) was the easiest to create (I know because I created the entire experience). We started with the 3D model, but applying the educational content in an interactive manner was as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation about the digestive system. The others have taken much longer to create because of the available knowledge or detail that one needs to put in (in case of a video).
There is a huge need for this skillset today in view of the large amount of written and image content available and the need for translation into an immersive environment. And with 3D ready devices in the market, the skills and the tools that address the translation problem will be highly valued.
