Augmented Reality - The Cure for Consumerism

“By all accounts, Prime Day was a massive success for Amazon, seeing massive revenue and profit growth year-over year.” It has almost become a post-Prime Day tradition for Amazon to announce record sales, and you would have been able to find some variation of that statement since the massive online retailer launched the “holiday” in 2015. In 2021, some analysts were disappointed that they estimated sales rose “only” 7% (note that even such an apparently disappointing figure represents an increase of hundreds of millions of dollars). Meanwhile, the latest hard figures released by the company show that they release over 50 metric tons of CO2 in a year, about as much as 13 coal-burning power plants. In a society that is increasingly aware of the impacts of climate change, how do we rectify our seemingly insatiable hunger for consumer goods with the need to reduce the damage we’re doing to the environment? What if I told you the short answer was: “we don’t need to”?

As ingrained as consumerism has become in culture, it faces headwinds in the coming decades from many angles. Technology is increasingly being integrated into the things we buy with the Internet-of-Things projected to balloon to 21 billion devices by 2025. The materials crucial to these devices, however, are not evenly distributed around the world. Politically, this is concerning, as it could possibly give outsized power to countries with large reserves of materials like copper and lithium. Ethically, consumers are growing more aware of the downsides to globalization and movements like “economic justice” and “fair trade” have been gaining steam. And environmentally, most people agree that the path we are on is, to put it simply, unsustainable.

Whereas plenty of movements have sprung up to try to steer society away from consumerism, there is an alternative: Augmented Reality (AR). A close cousin to the more well-known Virtual Reality (VR), AR has started to gain recognition the same way VR did: through video games. Niantic’s Pokémon Go has arguably done more to bring AR into the mainstream than anything else, but for the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines AR as “an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information.” Basically, whereas VR seeks to transport you to a whole new world, AR tries to layer information or digital projections onto the existing one. Think the virtual world of The Matrix for VR vs the heads-up display of Iron Man’s helmet for AR.

Where Augmented Reality can transition from a technology for gaming to – all hyperbole aside – a planet-saver lies in the way companies are taking the first fleeting steps towards using it more practically. In 2013, Google introduced the Google Glass, a pair of eyeglasses that used the lenses to overlay information and images onto the real world and received commands through the wearer using natural language that was picked up by the integrated microphone. While the product flopped spectacularly on the consumer market, it has been resurrected as an Enterprise-only product. Similarly, Microsoft released the HoloLens head-mounted display in 2016 to general yawns from consumers but it too has found a niche with businesses. At a high level, the products work by first figuring out what the wearer’s perspective is, and then projecting the Augmented Reality on top of that – if a virtual object is sitting on a real desk, the headset needs to know what angle you are looking at the desk from to know how to rotate the object before displaying it. This has proven useful in some areas of enterprise such as product design, as it both speeds up and reduces the cost of product prototyping. When nothing needs to be physically manufactured to be iterated upon, the design teams can work faster.

To search the internet for an image of one of these products reveals something rather bulky (even Google’s Glass attempts to shed weight by reducing computing power and battery size) and indeed, the ‘dorkiness’ is a huge hindrance to them going mainstream. However, think of them like the first-generation brick-like cell phones. As is inevitable with technology, the power and battery-life will grow while the size will shrink.

To be functional as a true daily-use AR device, technology needs to progress in two main areas: display and processing power. For the display, it would need to be able to display images with high quality in two areas: resolution and refresh rate. The challenges here are little more daunting than a typical TV or computer monitor.

In terms of resolution, ‘4k’ is the current industry standard with ‘8k’ on the horizon and 1080p hanging around as a budget option for most consumer types of displays. All of these numbers try to represent how many pixels are being crammed into an image. The higher the number, the sharper the image (with 4k and 8k being higher than 1080p as the ‘k’ is meant to represent ‘thousands’). In traditional televisions, the need for an ‘8k’ display can be debatable. Based on the distance most people sit from a TV, and given the current size of the displays, some people can have a difficult time telling the difference between ‘4k’ and ‘8k’ with other display capabilities like color accuracy and brightness playing a larger role in perceived picture quality. Given how close an AR headset’s display would be to the wearer’s eye, however, we still have several more generations of resolution technology to go before increasing the number pixels would have questionable benefits.

Refresh rate, simply put, is how many times a display updates an image per second. This is commonly perceived as the ‘smoothness’ of an image with a higher number getting closer to reality where the image is ‘updated’ as many times as our eye can process it (this isn’t quite how the human eye works, but for the sake of simplicity, we can pretend it’s a very fast camera). For many years, 60hz (the image is completely redrawn 60 times per second) was the only option, although in recent years, display manufacturers have pushed forward with 120hz, 144hz, 240hz and even 360hz displays. While the necessary refresh rate for an AR image to feel ‘real’ is debatable, 144hz can be loosely considered a minimum here.

Lastly, there’s also the question of power efficiency: to generate these images on a display that can be plugged into the wall, almost no mind is paid to how much power they draw. Obviously, for a small headset, power efficiency would be paramount. Phone displays can provide a hint at a way forward on this front, but more work would need to be done on this front as the more we dial up resolution and refresh rate, the more power draw will be impacted.

Assuming the fledgling AR headset industry can mature, however, and we’ll eventually have the display technology necessary, thus leaving just one more advancement: the processing power it takes to calculate and generate these images. Currently, that level of computing power would require using the cloud which raise insurmountable privacy concerns; processors will have to take another generational leap to bring the image processing back into the device itself. Even before we advance too much further in these technologies, however, AR suggests some intriguing possibilities in our day-to-day life.

Imagine replacing all the physical artwork on your walls with digital representations that were visible as long as you were wearing your AR device? No holes in walls to spackle over when you move out, no frames to dust, and selecting a new picture would be as simple as swiping through your phone’s photo gallery to select a replacement. As the technology matures, you get to what is arguably the biggest resource hogs in the modern home: televisions. At an average of 2.5 per household according to Nielson, televisions are ubiquitous and environmentally costly to manufacture, power and dispose of. Imagine if all the trouble caused by that theater-sized screen in the modern living room was replaced with a small set of glasses people wore. The wearer would select where their ‘television’ should be displayed, and as long as they were wearing their AR device, would see just like the we do the real things today. We rarely physically touch our televisions anymore with remote controls and smartphone apps taking the place of old turn knobs, so this item is ripe for AR replacement. The AR ‘television’ would never break down, never become obsolete, and would be fully customizable: size, color, or if we want to start getting really imaginative, even shape could be easily changed on the fly without ever contributing to the growing problem of e-waste.

Taken to the extreme, living spaces would be spartan utopias that could transform to whatever the resident wanted simply by putting on their glasses. Think even larger: why bother building billboards that can be eyesores and have environmental impacts, when you can just transmit the ad the same way a webpage does? It has the potential to be a truly transformative technology that impacts our lives in ways this article only scratches the surface of.

There are obviously many finer details to be worked out along the way – how would I grant you as a visitor to my home permission to view and use all of my AR possessions? How would we secure what would be an attractive target to hackers? Can I have a different set of artwork on my walls for throwing a party vs having my parents visit? – and even larger societal impacts such as the loss of manufacturing jobs that made all those goods being replaced. This perceived economic impact would likely be the technology’s greatest hurdle to overcome, but through every recent revolution of the job market – industrial, technological, internet – the economy has shown that whatever great advancement we make that eliminates jobs will also create new ones in fields we can’t imagine ahead of time. Compared to the alternatives that all demand steep, unrealistic sacrifices in how we live, AR presents an opportunity to simply shift how we “own” and still reap the rewards of a minimalist lifestyle.

If society embraces this technology, there will be benefits and drawbacks we cannot foresee, just as the impacts of smartphones would’ve been unthinkable even 20 years ago. But aren’t the crazy, unimaginable technologies the ones we eventually can’t live without?