A new digital divide?

Is there a new digital divide looming on the horizon? The launch of the Apple XR divice will irreversibly kickstart the long awaited era of mainstream consumer AR wearables. The world population is going to be divided into two groups: people with AR glasses and people without. But as more competitors enter the market, there will be a divide within the community of wearers of AR glasses too.

There will be big differences in the capabilities of the devices, limited by form factors but also limited by patents granted to a number of Big Tech firms. These limitations will mean that AR users will become advanced or less advances semi-digital beings when wearing their AR wearable. And because soon we willl presumably be wearing these devices more and more frequently, it has an impact on our daily lives.

To know beforehand what your enhanced life could look and feel like, you can have a look at the numerous patents that sketch out our future precisely and visually. But not so fast. We're often welcoming patent announcements with great enthusiasm, imagining that those innovations will one day enrich our lifes, but many of those depicted AR scenarios might not become your reality. You might experience the opposite. You might end up with the clumsyness of not being able to use some features or future skills or ways to operate an interface. Simply because your hardware provider didn't manage or want to arrange (pay for) the required patented feature(s).

Having a more comfortable life simply because you've the money to arrange it isn't something new. It has always been like that. But in a non AR enhanced world at least some minimal levels are arranged for all of us. There are public services, public transport. There's a public broadcaster, we have public spaces. How will that be in the AR era when a semi-digital reality has become our default living space? What will be the services and features we can all experience and connect with?

Patents filed in the past will have a profound impact on what we'll able to do in the near future, and what not. In many fields a discussion about patents pops up often. People feel frustrated when medical products are beyond their reach because of high prices, and the absence of alternatives. As with a lot of technical (hardware) products, companies in these industries claim that they cannot innovate when there's no patent system to protect their accomplishments. Which is true for the medical field, because it indeed requires an investment in time (and thus money) to get to results.

In the world of IT it's different. Developing hardware is time consuming, but one could argue that for a lot of software, the bulk of time is usually not spend on thinking about an idea or concept.

Is it about the technical 'how' then? Did the puzzle on how to implement something took an enormous effort in time and money? Nowadays in the age of chatGPT just speaking out loud what you wish for could give you what you want in seconds. That cannot be compared to the production process in the medical world. Is it time for yet another attempt to change the patent laws, or at least deal with some areas of 'innovation' differently?

With the upcoming radical changes in our society it's truly a different situation. Software products running on our AR glasses will not simply be tools you can choose to use or not use, they'll be part of you functioning as a semi-digital entity in a semi-digital world. There's no escape, no off switch. You're going to need digital products to do what you want to do.

To avoid a future in which some regular day to day activities can not be performed, some action need to be taken now. The sooner the better. If changing the patent system might take too long or is not going to happen at all, then let's think what can be done while complying to current patent law. Is there a way to safeguard the future life we want to live? Akin to the way Magic Leap produced an insane amount of future sketches, should we also frantically start imagining freely about our future and document this in patent filings? And who's the 'we' in this? Organise it officially or bottom-up? Or let artists take up this role, using their wild imagination? In this effort we can exxagerate, like artist Jeremy Bailey did. But focussing on more basic activities might be better. Or are we too late already?

Fortunately, as a lawyer has informed me, if an activity is becoming a general necessesity in our future semi-digital life, the patent filing will not stand in front of a court. But still, having the risk to end up battling for each tiny ultra obvious or silly interaction patent is not what you want, not as a bussiness and not as an individual.

Is it required to file official patent applications? Are explanatory sketches a necessity? Or can a dated youtube video of someone using a fictional future feature be enough? For example, I've been experimenting with subtle head gestures to control an AR scene around me, with the purpose of having a control mechanism that can be used in public space (that's relevant if we're going to be wearing AR glasses 24/7).

But perhaps this gesture mechanism has already been patented, somewhere on some world continent. Finding the answer to that question requires an insane amount of research. But should I care? I should be free to make things, play with it, and use my creations myself. When making bussiness out of it, I would run into problems. With a tiny (or empty) patent portfolio, I would likely to be crushed by a big tech giant or I would be presented with a deal to give away a percentage of my profit. But that would not happen if there would be no profit at all, if I would be sharing my creation as an open source script. So what we need is a library mechanism for these scripts and an implementation to find and activate these scripts on your personal semi-digital self.

That could be a solution for the problem sketched in this article, except when such a DIY system would itself be patented and unavailable...