| POKEMON GO, IS THE FUTURE IN SLOVAKIA?, FEAR OF ROBOTS, ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES "Augmented Reality" Comes to the Real World There are a lot of big claims being made for the future of "augmented reality," the idea of taking "virtual reality" out of the headset and superimposing it on objects in the real world. But it has been slow to become commercially viable, and virtual reality and augmented reality firms have had to find various strategies to hunker down while they wait for the technology and audience acceptance to reach critical mass. But now suddenly, thanks to a flagging 1990s gaming brand, augmented reality is breaking into the mainstream. "Pokemon Go represents one of those moments when a new technology—in this case, augmented reality or AR, which fuses digital technology with the physical world—breaks through from a niche toy for early adopters to something much bigger. The idea behind the technology is to overlay digital imagery on a person’s view of the real world, using a smartphone screen or a headset. "In the case of Pokemon Go, players traverse the physical world following a digital map, searching for cartoon creatures that surface at random. People look through their smartphone cameras to find Pokémon. When an animated creature appears, they toss Pokeballs at it until it is subdued." What I find most interesting about this story is how difficult it is to predict the future. The downside of virtual reality was supposed to be that it would tempt us to cocoon ourselves within an imaginary digital world and stop going out into the real world. But the effect of Pokemon Go has been the exact opposite. --- Where Is the Future? As the saying goes, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. And that includes geographical distribution. One trend we're beginning to see is the rise of small countries that embrace future technology and start-up culture in an attempt to get to the future faster than the rest of the world. So where is the future? It might be in Slovakia. "Following four decades of state-planned economy, entrepreneurship had a slow start in Slovakia after the 1989 fall of communism when many left the country of 5.4 million to pursue education and job opportunities in western Europe. After transforming itself into an automotive hub--with about a million cars a year rolling off production lines at factories owned by Volkswagen AG, Kia Motors Corp, and Peugeot SA--a reverse 'brain drain' is taking hold. And they are bringing foreign expertise with them." And the future is definitely in Estonia. Jurica Dujmovic provides an overview of Estonia's leadership in start-ups and technology and offers this conclusion. "While there are many lessons that the US and the rest of the world can learn from Estonia, these are especially important: A country must be willing to adapt and change the infrastructure of both the government and the economy if needed, and to continually optimize them. A nation needs to understand that a change of mindset should be thorough and start with the young. An education system should be designed in a way that doesn’t cripple young minds, or overburden them with too much irrelevant information. And, finally, if you want entrepreneurship to thrive, it is necessary to remove bureaucratic and technical obstacles at all levels." --- Today at RealClearFuture
There's plenty more at our main page, including speculation about whether robots will replace us, and whether that would be a bad thing: The Quest for the Next Human-Computer Interface
What Elon Musk Doesn't Get About Self-Driving Cars
Money Flows Into Batteries For Buildings, Power Grid
Fear Not Malevolent AI Robots
Robots Won't Replace Humans, They'll Transform Work
Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad? Check it all out. --- The Evolution of Humanoids The robots may not be coming to destroy us any time soon, but they are getting closer to science-fiction in one respect: a Japanese lab has created a "musculoskeletal robot driven by multifilament muscles." See it in action. The fact that it's built onto a model of a human skeleton just sends us a little closer to Uncanny Valley. --Rob Tracinski
Editor, RealClearFuture Follow @RealClearFuture on Twitter. Send comments, recommendations, and submissions to rob@realclearfuture.com. | 
