KEVIN KELLY, AUTHOR, OUT OF CONTROL: The next generation of platforms is a "mirrored world," driven

A mirror world would be mankind's greatest achievement.

Editor's note: As AR technology evolves, we're on the verge of a big new platform. Recently, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control, wrote again after a five-month break to review the new AR driven platform from all angles. This, he argues, is a mirror world that is now emerging. It will be mankind's greatest achievement, creating new wealth for billions of people, new social problems and countless opportunities. Now, there is no expert to create this world, and you are not late. Originally titled "AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform -- Call It Mirrorworld", compiled by 36krypton, hope to inspire you.

Every December, Adam Savage, the host of the television show "Mythbusters," releases a video looking back at his "favorite things" from the past year.

In 2018, one of the highlights of his video was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality (AR) glasses. After noticing the hype surrounding the device and the "teasing" it received, Savage described what he felt when he tried on the headset at home and in the office.

"I turn it on and I can hear the whale," he said, "but I can't see it. I looked for it all over the office. Then it swam past my window -- outside the building! The glasses scanned my room, and it knew that the window was an entrance, and it made the whale look like it was swimming around the street outside the window."

What Savage sees on the other side of his glasses is a glimpse of the Mirrorworld.

The mirror world is not quite there yet, but it is coming. Soon, every place and thing in the real world -- every street, every lamp-post, every building and every room -- will have its full-size digital twin in a mirrored world.

Currently, only a small part of the mirrored world can be seen through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual pieces will be stitched together to form a shared, persistent, parallel world.

The writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map that would look exactly like the territory it represented.

"Over time," Borges writes, "the Society of Cartographers produced a map of the Empire that was the same size as the Empire and that matched every point on the map."

We are now building an almost unimaginable 1:1 map that will become the next great digital platform.

GoogleEarth has long hinted at what this mirrored world might look like.

My friend Daniel Suarez is the most popular science fiction writer. In his latest book, "Change Agent", a fugitive escapes along the coast of Malaysia.

His description of the roadside restaurants and scenery accurately described what I'd seen on a recent drive there, so I asked him when he'd been there.

"Oh, I've never been to Malaysia," he smiled sheepishly. "I have a computer with three monitors on it, and I turn on Google Earth. Several nights I 'drove' along the Malaysian highway AH18 in Street View."

Suarez, like Savage, sees a rough version of a mirrored world.

It's already under construction. Deep in the research LABS of tech companies around the world, scientists and engineers are racing to build virtual places that cover real places.

Crucially, these emerging digital landscapes will feel real; They will demonstrate what landscape architects call locality. Street View images in Google maps are just surfaces, flat images stitched together.

But in the mirror world, virtual buildings will have volumes, virtual chairs. There will be the comfort of the chairs, the texture, the gaps and so on of the virtual street, all of which will convey a 'street' feel.

Mirror worlds, a term first popularized by David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, reflect not just what things look like, but what they look like, what they mean and what they do.

We interact with it, manipulate it, experience it, just like we do in the real world.

First, the mirror world is what we see as a high-resolution layer of information overlaid on the real world.

We might see a virtual name tag hovering over someone we've met before. Maybe a blue arrow shows us the right place to turn. Or useful comments anchored in interesting places.

Unlike the dark, closed glasses used in virtual reality (VR), AR glasses use transparency technology to insert virtual phantoms into the real world.

Eventually, we'll be able to search physical Spaces like text, such as finding park benches at all places along the river facing the sunrise.

We will hyperlink objects to physical networks, just as we did on the Internet, which will yield extraordinary benefits and lead to new products.

The mirror world will be unique in its own way, and will bring its own surprises to us.

Its strange dual nature, which blends the real and the virtual, will lead to games and entertainment in ways that are now unimaginable.

Pokemon Go simply demonstrates the platform's almost limitless ability to explore.

These examples are trivial and simple, and they amount to some of our earliest, lame guesses about the early days of the Internet, like Compu Serve (its first email service in 1989) or the early days of AOL.

The real value of this work will come from the trillions of unexpected combinations of all these primitive elements.

The first big technology platform is the web, which digitizes information and submits knowledge to the power of algorithms; Later, it was controlled by Google.

The second largest platform is social media, which is mostly on mobile phones. It digitizes people, subjecting their behaviour and relationships to the power of algorithms, controlled by Facebook and WeChat.

We are now at the dawn of a third platform, one that will digitize the rest of the world.

On this platform, everything and places will be machine-readable, depending on the power of the algorithm.

Whoever dominates this third platform will be one of the richest and most powerful people and companies in history, just as those who now dominate the first two platforms are.

In addition, like its predecessors, this new platform will bring capabilities and resources to thousands of companies in its ecosystem, as well as more than a million new ideas and questions that were not possible before machines could read the world.

Second,

There are already a number of apps around us that offer a peek into the mirror world. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the magical power of the virtual and the real more than Pokemon Go.

When Pokemon Go was released in 2016, people around the world basically wandered around their local parks chasing the cartoon characters.

Pokemon Go is now accepted by hundreds of millions of players in at least 153 countries. Niantic, the company that created Pokemon Go, was founded by John Hanke, one of the creators of Google Earth.

Today, Niantic is based on the second floor of the Ferry Building, along the San Francisco pier. Wide floor-to-ceiling Windows overlook the bay and the hills beyond. The office is filled with toys and puzzles, including an elaborately designed boat-themed escape room.

Hanke said that while AR opens up many other new possibilities, Niantic will continue to focus on games and maps as the best way to take advantage of the new technology.

"Games are where technology is born, and if you can solve a problem for a player, you can solve a problem for someone else," Hanke added.

Games, however, are not the only places where mirrored world fragments appear.

Microsoft is another big contender in augmented reality besides Magic Leap.

The company has been making HoloLens augmented reality devices since 2016. Once turned on and on, HoloLens maps the room you're in.

Then you can manually navigate the menu that pops up in front of you to choose which apps to load. One option is to hang a virtual screen in front of you, just like on a laptop or TV screen.

Microsoft's vision for HoloLens is simple: It's the office of the future. No matter where you are, you can insert any number of screens in front of you and work from there.

According to venture capital firm Exception, "80% of the global workforce does not work at a desk." Some of those workers who are not at their desks now wear HoloLens in warehouses and factories, making 3-D models and receiving training.

Tesla recently filed two patents for the augmented reality technology it uses in factory production. Trimble, a logistics company, makes a safety helmet with HoloLens built into it.

In 2018, the U.S. Army announced it would buy up to 100,000 improved models of the HoloLens headset for what it does outside the office: stay one step ahead of the enemy on the battlefield and "increase lethality."

In fact, you're more likely to wear augmented reality goggles at work than at home. Even the much-maligned Google headset is creeping into the factory floor.

In a mirror world, everything has a "twin".

NASA engineers first proposed the concept in the 1960s. By keeping a copy of any machine they send into space, they can troubleshoot faulty parts from thousands of miles away. These evolved directly into computer simulations -- digital twins.

General Electric, one of the largest companies in the world, makes machines so complex that if they fail, they can kill people: generators, nuclear submarine reactors, oil refinery control systems, jet turbines.

To design, build and operate these giant devices, GE borrowed a trick from NASA: it started creating a digital twin for each machine.

For example, the jet turbine serial number E174 may have a corresponding digital version of E174. Each of its parts can be spatially represented in 3D and placed in a corresponding virtual location.

In the near future, this digital twinning may become a dynamic digital simulation of an engine. But this full-scale 3D digital twin is more than just a spreadsheet. Its size, size and texture make it look like an avatar.

In 2016, GE redefined itself as a "digital industrial company" and defined it as "the convergence of the physical and digital worlds." In other words, it is building mirror worlds.

Digital twinning has improved the reliability of industrial processes using GE machines, such as oil refining or manufacturing equipment.

For its part, Microsoft has extended the concept of digital twins from objects to entire systems.

The company is using artificial intelligence to "build an immersive virtual replica of what's happening on an entire factory floor."

What better way to troubleshoot a giant six-axis robotic rolling mill than using a virtual machine of the same size? Repairmen can see virtual machines in the real world.

He can look at parts that might be faulty. Experts at headquarters can also share views in augmented reality and guide maintenance personnel to work with real parts.

Eventually, everything will have a digital twin. This is happening faster than you think.

Home goods retailer Wayfair displays millions of products in its online home catalog, but not all of the photos are taken in a photo studio.

Instead, Wayfair found it cheaper to create a 3D, lifelike computer model of each item. You have to look very closely to tell it's virtual. When you visit the company's website today, you get a glimpse of the mirrored world.

Now Wayfair is looking to place these objects in the real world. "We want you to shop for your home from your home," said Steve Conine, a co-founder of Wayfair.

The company has released an AR app that places 3D objects in a room and holds them in place as you move. With one eye on your phone, you can walk around virtual furniture to create the feel of a 3D scene.

You can put a piece of fictitious sofa in the study, can change the position that places ceaselessly, change the fabric pattern of sofa. What you see is very close to what you get.

When consumers use the service at home, they are "11 times more likely to make a purchase," said Sally Huang, who runs an AR-like app at Houzz, an online home improvement platform.

This is what AR venture capitalist Ori Inbar calls "moving the Internet from the screen to the real world."

To deploy a fully mirrored world, we don't just need a digital twin of everything; You also need to build a 3D model of the real world to place those objects.

Consumers do this largely on their own: When someone gazes at a scene through a device, especially wearable glasses, tiny built-in cameras scan out to map what they see.

Cameras only capture pixels, which doesn't mean anything. But artificial intelligence embedded in devices, in the cloud, or in both places, will make those pixels meaningful; It's going to pinpoint your location, and it's going to assess what's going on there.

The technical term for this is SLAM -- simultaneous localization and mapping -- which is rapidly evolving.

For example, startup 6d.ai has built a platform to develop AR apps that can identify large objects in real time.

If I took a street photo with one of the apps, it would identify each car as a separate car object, each street lamp as a tall object different from the nearby tree objects, and the storefront as a flat object behind the car -- dividing the world into meaningful order.

This order will be continuous and interrelated. In the mirror world, objects are connected to other things. The digital window will be on the digital wall.

This is not a connection made by chips and bandwidth, but a connection made by artificial intelligence with scenarios. As a result, mirror worlds will also create the long-heralded Internet of Things.

Google Lens, another app on my phone, also offers some insight.

It is already smart enough to recognize the breed of dog, the design of a shirt or the type of plant, among other things. These features will soon come together.

Smart glasses when you look around your living room, the system will record them one by one, to tell you there is a picture mounted on the wall, there are 4 kinds of color wallpaper, the vase is a white rose, the ground has a quaint Persian carpet, next to have a good room, your new sofa can put it there.

And then it says, "Based on the colors and styles of the furniture you already have in your room, we recommend a sofa with a certain color and style. You'll love it. Can we recommend this cool lamp?"

AR technology is the technical foundation of the mirror world; A newborn toddler will grow into a giant.

"Mirrored worlds immerse you without taking you away from the space. You still save