US Calling: Future is here with holograms, headsets and Rayban Meta Smart Glasses that can speak, Elon Musk’s Neuralink hope for paralytic patients, and the war on ‘wokes’

• The Present: A person hunched over a screen,
• The Future: A person wearing a headset with motion sensors or smart glasses, both with built in AI assistants.
• The Present: A conference with people around the table,
• The Future: Holograms and Avatars and AIs on a table in the metaverse.

The Present: See something nice, pull out your cellphone take a picture, and mail it.

The new Present in a month with Meta smart glasses, look, click and send without pulling out a phone or using your hands.

Meta Quest 3: Mixed Reality Headsets

Meta Quest 3 brings the first mainstream mixed reality headset that allows you to blend the physical and the digital – no battery pack, no wires. Precision control through hand trackers that allow touch screen like control. It shows physical space at 10 times more pixels, snapdragon XR2 Qualcomm processor, pancake lens, 40% thinner, more comfortable, better display and optics and the world’s best content library. Your room turns into an immersive home theatre.

Fully Immersive Games are the Future

Watch Cricket or the NFL like you had a box overlooking the wicket or sitting courtside respectively in any game from your couch.

Holograms and Avatars

Don’t attend that Conference, or Meeting across the Globe in your private jet. Be there through your Hologram or Avatar. In the future most physical things like paper, media, art workstations will be embodied as a hologram.

The headsets ship on August 10 next year for $499 and can be ordered right away. These are much cheaper than Apple Vision Pro at $3499.

EMU, Restyle and Backdrop on Instagram

Instagram users should be delighted with Expressive Media Universe (EMU) images built into chat on all the apps and coming to Instagram in about a month to create customized stickers on the fly. Restyle will help to literally restyle your pictures with a few taps while Backdrop will change the background after sculpting your image.

Meta AI is trained and raring to go

Meta AI is a basic assistant for Messenger, Instagram Direct and WhatsApp that can talk to you. It will be built into both the Quest headset and Meta Smart glasses. A whole family of AIs have also been trained using real personas.

Rayban Meta Smart Glasses that can see and speak

Experience and capture the moment in HD video without having to pull out your phone. 8X images with 32 Gigs memory translates into 500 photos or 100 videos stored on the glasses. Next year a software upgrade will make them multimodal- just look at something and the glasses will identify it. You can livestream from your glasses, seamlessly share photos – just say, ‘send a photo to …..’. And watch truly immersive videos with surround sound. This comes in a Charging Case with upto 36 hours of use. It’s launching on October 17.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink starts human trials only patients with paralysis

Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink has received the approval to begin recruitment for human trials of its brain implant for patients of paralysis. Neuralink will use a robot to surgically implant a brain-computer interface (BCI) in the brain region that controls movement. It will enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone via the BCI. Patients with cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may likely qualify for the study, which will take about six years to complete and thus commercial use is distant. Right now this is to rehabilitate patients. However going forward this will enable devices to treat conditions like obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia. Fast forward a decade or two and BCI’ could be the new iPhone we all vie for every year.

We are already connected to our phones with an invisible umbilical cord, and that pang you feel when you realise you’ve left your house without your phone, is very real. Once our thoughts and emotions are directly interfacing with machines – it begs the question if people will be able to escape the censorship of their thoughts. China is already monitoring its citizens through phone tracking, internet surveillance, and a comprehensive network of cameras using digital technology. Orwell’s1984 was indeed prophetic ?

WOKE protests in Canada, Defining issue in US Elections

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, ‘I was sleeping, but now I’m woke. A March 2023 USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll found that 56% of Americans said it means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” Examples of being woke include supporting affirmative action, gender-neutral bathrooms, and taking a knee during the national anthem.

One of the biggest targets for “anti-woke” legislation are transgender issues and kids. According to the website Track Trans Legislation, 38 states in the USA have seen anti-trans bills proposed in 2023, including 107 bills that focus on health care restriction for youth and 75 bills that address school/curriculum issues. Protests recently broke out in Canada over sexualising of textbooks, by including LGBTQ content, resulting in protests breaking out in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has declared a ‘war on Woke’ in his bid for the Republican nomination for president and promised never to surrender to the Woke mob”. Indian American Republican candidate for US President, Vivek Ramaswamy has authored the book, “Woke, Inc & Nation of Victims”, a thought-provoking analysis of the concept of “Woke”. A 2022 Harvard-Harris poll, revealed that “wokeness” is not a problem in the abstract, but that 48% voted that “Stopping the teaching of woke ideologies in schools” was one of the defining issues of the 2022 election impacting crime and public safety.

Hollywood writers end strike

With the streaming model affecting their pay and working conditions, Hollywood writers have been on strike since May 2. But they ended their strike this week following a labour deal. Before the streaming model, a studio would typically commission 13 or 22 episodes for a season of television. This allowed writers to work for 40 weeks. Currently, studios order six episodes, forcing writers to string together multiple projects making it a ‘gig’ (on demand) economy model. A ‘tentative’ deal with major studios was reached on Sunday, ending a strike that lasted 146 days. The strike has set a precedent for labour relations in a digital future.

(The writer is a former IRS officer presently in the US, she can be reached at https://twitter.com/punamsidhu)