AN EYE ON THE FUTURE

Greg Bruce meets the Kiwi scientist trying to improve on reality

This is the future of live sport: you’re high in the stands at Eden Park watching Kendra Cocksedge feed a scrum for the Black Ferns and you can see, underneath or above or alongside her, any one or more of the following things: the number of tackles she’s made and missed, the distance she’s run, a map of exactly where on the field she’s spent the most time, how fast she’s covered that distance, how much time she’s spent with the ball — essentially all the things you’d see at home — and more — but directly in your field of vision.

The reason you’re able to do this is because you’re looking through eyewear that senses where you are in the stadium and where you’re looking, retrieves the relevant data about what you’re looking at and transmits it directly to your field of vision.

The reason your eyewear is able to do all that is because a huge amount of software is embedded in it. That software is developed by a bunch of people working at the cutting edge of a field known as augmented reality (AR).

AR is not new — its breakout moment was probably 2016’s pointless time-waster and scourge of humanity Pokemon Go — but it is new enough that most of us, and even those working in the field, don’t yet have any idea how dramatically it might change the way we experience the world.

At the cutting-edge of AR is University of Otago scientist Stefanie Zollmann. Last month, at an awards dinner at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, she was one of five women approached by Australian actor Magda Szubanski, who wanted a photo.

Zollmann and the others had all just received $25,000 as part of the annual L’Oreal-Unesco For Women in Science Fellowships, an award recognising early career female scientists who are leaders in their field and have the potential to change the face of science.

A FEW years ago, Google created a type of eyewear that might have made a whole lot of AR applications possible and practical. It was called Google Glass. It failed, possibly because it wasn’t very good or because it was too far ahead of the software that could have made it great.

The ability to see digital information directly on top of the real world is so rich in possibilities. Sport was a natural area for Zollmann because, prior to taking up her position at Otago, she was working as a developer for Dunedin-based company Information Associates, which, among other things, developed the ball-tracking software that revolutionised cricket, making possible the umpiring review system, now used worldwide.

There is so much information available on our digital devices, ways in which AR could change the world around us, Zollmann says. “It’s sometimes a bit hard to make use of this and what we try with augmented reality is basically to look into ... how to explore this information in a more natural, more integrated way.”

ALL IS not necessarily well in the world right now. Perhaps the most important question for people working at the cutting-edge of technology is not how it’s going to change the world but how it’s going to make it better.

“It’s a very challenging question,” Zollmann says. “If you’d asked me two or three years ago I would have said people are getting connected worldwide and are able to share ideas, and knowledge is getting combined. We can talk about all this information, everyone can download information, research papers, everyone can read studies and get a deeper understanding of what’s happening, how things are working. People are getting much smarter, combining knowledge.”

That began to change when it became clear, via the Cambridge Analytica scandal, revelations of interference in the US election and the generalised dissemination of massive amounts of fake information and news through social media, that the internet had become far from the source for good we once assumed it would be.

What we need now, Zollmann says, is some way to rein this in so that freedom of information again becomes the tool for betterment it once promised to be.

“I think there’s just this really amazing opportunity. Humans can combine so much knowledge. We have to take care that this is not going in the wrong direction, that this amazing combined knowledge shouldn’t be influenced or changed by single people or organisations.

“As humans, we need to look into how we can avoid this. There are researchers and others looking into this but I think the public needs to be more involved. I know it’s tough because there’s so much happening and it’s hard to just keep up with your daily lives but I think we really need to look into how we can avoid this amazing chance turning into something bad.”

ALONG WITH her partner and fellow scientist Tobias Langlotz and their 1-year-old baby, Frida, Zollmann has travelled to universities around the world, places not necessarily well-equipped for dealing with babies. She says she’s had difficulty finding change tables, that parents’ rooms are sometimes locked and that even when institutions are supportive, people sometimes assume she is the travelling housewife to her partner, the scientist.

Today, only 28 per cent of scientists are women. The L’Oreal Unesco For Women in Science programme aims to bring attention to this persistent imbalance and to do something about putting it right.

“When I was studying, there was a very low ratio of women,” Zollmann says. “It was always a bit hard because you had to look very hard for role models. I wanted a career but I also wanted a family and a nice life but I couldn’t see too many other women where this was working.”

Speaking publicly about what she’s doing, then, is important: “Talking about being a female scientist, showing that we are here and people think this is a normal career path. We were at the Girls in Science forum. There were 500 girls, and we were able to talk to them about our careers, saying, ‘It’s not all straightforward, not everyone knows after high school exactly what they’re doing, and you don’t need to be a total nerd.’”

In a world in which we have access to increasingly enormous quantities of information about people who are ignorant, malevolent or selfimportant — or all three — what could be more important than giving a voice to people who know what they’re talking about and are trying to make a difference for good?