Something very similar to world 3 is now real and increasingly influencing how we live, says George Djorgovski, co-director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech. It’s called the internet.
It’s the first morning of Science Foo camp, and I’ve chosen a session called “virtualisation of science and virtualisation of the world”. In fact – fittingly for a meeting being held at Google headquarters – how we deal with life increasingly lived online turns out to be one of the main themes of the day.
Djorgovski reckons that before long, being online will soon mean (among other things) not staring at a computer screen but being immersed in 3D virtual reality.
He thinks this will be key to how we’ll make scientific discoveries in the future. Forget graphs – two dimensions are totally inadequate for dealing with the vast amounts of data pouring out of everything from high-throughput genome sequencing to atom smashers like the Large Hadron Collider. We’ll need machine intelligence capable of analysing these huge data sets, he says, as well as ways to visualise and interact with the results in three dimensions.
Such technologies will surely revolutionise education too, with virtual learning replacing the traditional lecture. Djorgovski wants scientists and researchers to get more involved with this process now, pointing out that so far, advances in 3D technology are all coming from the entertainment industry: “We can’t let the video game industry drive the future in what’s the most important technology on the planet. There has to be more to it than spilling blood and slaying dragons.”
www.newscientist.com
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