Disruptive Innovation for Smart Life Experiences

The image is use to deceive the senses and the intelligence by means of the illusion (Platón)

Let us imagining for a while we were “teleported” into the “Year 2050” …close your eyes and try to “imagine “how it looks like. Think about it for a minute. We can imagine a futuristic picture of the world, but all our pictures looks different. Our imagination is restrict by our education, knowledge, background, and social environment. However, our creativity has no limits.

Now, try to reimagine the past as it was many centuries ago…but with the knowledge from today…it could be something like a: “Virtual Ancient » scenario. Think about the ancient society’s needs and demands, the citizen’s skills, without internet, smartphones, tablets, social media… This could be a script for a science fiction film…or a new storytelling for a Virtual reality immersive experience.

We are living in a new digital century, where immersion and technological dependence condition our lives and the society´s development. A “Smart society” in which the power of the image and the recreated illusion predominate. Through television, movies, mobile devices, smartphones, gadgets, video games and now the immersive reality, we are the permanent object and destination of messages through millions of images and subliminal sensations that ends in one way or another, setting guidelines, and trends. In short, a different way of understanding present, past and future reality and of interacting with it.

Throughout history, human has used the image as an element of communication. The creation of maps, communication routes, recreation of inventions and illusions … have served man as a tool for development and technological evolution «Leonardo Davinci»

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation of things, whereas all experiences are from the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past, which can be project it into the future as realistic images. Reimagining the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior.

Nowadays, Immersive technologies allow us to bring human to unimagined paradises, to reconstruct ancient spaces, worlds and invented realities. Allowing us to experiment and interact with them as if we were living in a figuratively imagined reality.

The development of communications infrastructures, smartphones and RV and AV devices at affordable prices are dramatically revolutionizing application sectors and user environments. Related to the world of culture, tourism and education, the opportunities for massive use of these technologies, is nowadays a reality. What contributes with high value to the society, developing accessible applications and contends that are available to global community.

 The opportunities that open up around us, for the promotion of cultural tourism or high benefit, and its dissemination and approach of knowledge at the global level are enormous:

To put in value the cultural heritage of the humanity through its recreation, recovery and conservation

• Incorporation of RV and AR as tools for study, analysis, evaluation, reconstruction and visualization, bringing knowledge to the community in a simple and intuitive way
• Create promotion centers, with tools that are easy to interpret, manage and accessible, accessing content of high value and in a fun way, where different communities and groups of knowledge can interact and contribute value and experiences in network. Edutainment
• Promoting and disseminating tourism through the recreation of spaces and unique and spectacular environments, immersive and interactive spaces, combining past, present and future, as if we are in a time machine, as a call to on-site visits.

From its earliest origins, humanity has always sought to augment the story-telling experience, whether with arts expressions, music, theatrical performance, machinery or technological innovation. Virtual and Augmented Reality are simply the next step on this curve: a means of authentically bringing ideas to life and creating a realistic narrative that others are not only able to imagine, but can truly experience for themselves.

I have been working with Virtual Technologies for many years in different areas of knowledge and application, but specially focus on education, cultural heritage preservation and tourism promotion. It was fun, but tough to share nonacademic communities, because the cost of technology, infrastructures and broadband availability. Now everything is changing very fast due the smartphone ecosystem and the high-speed broadband infrastructures development.

Virtual Reality has long been moot as an educational tool. From SmartEducationLabs we are promoting different initiatives like: My Smart Destinations (Tourism Promotion & Education), My Smart Classroom (Education)…and many other. We already used the technology to create immersive learning ‘experiences’ for citizens, learning and knowledge communities, and we are exploring many life experiences about the possibilities of creating virtual disruptive ecosystems.

In addition to many others projects to come along this exciting year.

Carlos J. Ochoa Fernández ©