Welcome to the future
OUR LOOK AHEAD TO WHAT WILL BE BIG NEWS IN 2024
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
If 2023 was the year that artificial intelligence entered the mainstream, 2024 might well be the year it actually becomes useful.
I have not really been much of a fan of what the current crop of AI chatbots have been capable of – we have seen from experience that the responses of services like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have not been as reliable as they should be.
Of course, progress in this arena is exponential, and the coming months should see these chatbots become more useful.
A much more interesting area of AI progress has been the emergence of generative AI systems like Adobe’s Firefly – this is a service you can ask to create something using text commands and it will oblige in the best way it knows how.
Adobe’s Firefly is integrated into its professional graphic design software – apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. You can describe an image or illustration to the app and it will create it for you – it can be hit and miss, but like the chatbot AI systems, it’s getting better.
Of course, ethical debates surrounding the use of AI will rage over the coming months, and the hope is we end up in some kind of middle ground where AI is only ever used in service of human endeavour instead of replacing it.
APPLE VISION PRO
When Apple launches a product into a new sector, it isn’t just the tech world that sits up and takes notice. Everyone is interested.
That’s usually because, while the iPhone-maker is rarely the first to market in a sector, it waits until it can do something better than anyone else. And almost always succeeds.
The buzz about Apple’s first mixed reality headset – the Vision Pro – is already building ahead of a planned launch sometime towards the beginning of 2024.
The headset will only be available in the US initially, but will be “coming to other countries later” in 2024. And it’ll be expensive at $3,499 – that’s around £2,750.
So I don’t think Apple thinks it’s going to sell a lot of units. The device will be popular enough to invest in further, and component prices will fall so that a more affordable version will be possible. That’s how Apple rolls.
We first saw the Vision Pro in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. It’s a battery-powered headset that provides both a virtual and augmented reality experience.
One of its unique features is an outward-facing display that shows a digital rendering of the wearer’s eyes - cameras on the inside of the headset allows that screen to replicate whatever the wearer does with their eyes so that a connection with the outside world is established. The screen is not see-through, and the wearer sees the outside world (in natural dimensions) captured through cameras on the outside of the device.
In augmented reality mode, then, the wearer sees items placed into their view of the outside world – so app and video windows appear to hover in their immediate surroundings and can be resized and moved as the wearer wishes. They can interact with apps using their eyes and handgestures.
In virtual reality mode the wearer can replace their realworld view with a virtual environment of their choice - so, for example, they can make it look to themselves that the giant video screen they are watching a film on is erected on the surface of the moon…
Demos have appeared compelling, and the few who have had experience with the device have described it as magical.
Given Apple’s track-record it’s very hard to imagine the thing will turn out to be a dud… and on the brink of 2024 the prospect of getting to see and try the Vision Pro in person at some point over the next 12 months is probably the thing I am most excited about.