Problem: Consuming digital information requires disconnection from the world sensorially: looking down at our phones, putting in headphones, being pulled into a screen, etc. Perhaps the cover of Wired magazine from March 2019 has some insights.
Solution: As Wired describes in their cover story,
The mirrorworld—a term first popularized by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter—will reflect not just what something looks like but its context, meaning, and function. We will interact with it, manipulate it, and experience it like we do the real world.
At first, the mirrorworld will appear to us as a high-resolution stratum of information overlaying the real world. We might see a virtual name tag hovering in front of people we previously met. Perhaps a blue arrow showing us the right place to turn a corner. Or helpful annotations anchored to places of interest. (Unlike the dark, closed goggles of VR, AR glasses use see-through technology to insert virtual apparitions into the real world.)
Eventually we’ll be able to search physical space as we might search a text—“find me all the places where a park bench faces sunrise along a river.” We will hyperlink objects into a network of the physical, just as the web hyperlinked words, producing marvelous benefits and new products.
This business will proactively begin to build Mirrorworld products to take advantage of this next revolution in technology. As I imagine, it will “empower technology beyond the screen.” Similar to how Pokémon Go expanded the bounds of video games (as Wired describes “Pokémon Go’s alpha version of a mirrorworld has been embraced by hundreds of millions of players, in at least 153 countries. Niantic, the company that created Pokémon Go, was founded by John Hanke, who led the precursor to Google Earth”) and Microsoft has been innovating in AR through HoloLens (and competes directly with Magic Leap), this business would attempt to normalize and produce even more AR devices.
The idea of a Mirrorworld with digital twins of everything is not necessarily new: “NASA engineers pioneered this concept in the 1960s. By keeping a duplicate of any machine they sent into space, they could troubleshoot a malfunctioning component while its counterpart was thousands of miles away. These twins evolved into computer simulations—digital twins,” Wired describes.
For the Mirrorworld to work, all of these digital twins must be perpetually connected through some underlying infrastructure or digital network. This business would work to create the next network (6G? 7G? GG?) for enabling the future of digital twins. They would create the glassware required to create high-tech fiber optic cables (similar to Corning Glass), the customer base to sell these services (similar to Verizon), and perhaps even the packed hardware and networks to utilize these services (similar to T-Mobile or AT&T). A vertically integrated company for the coming digital twin revolution would be a clear unicorn company (though it would probably also include quite a bit of capital or debt financing).
Monetization: S
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)