future problem solving digital realities

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• PP2 Digital Realities

Digital Realities

Welcome! In this course, you’ll explore the topic Digital Realities, which is Practice Problem 2 in the 2022-23 competition season. By the end you’ll be able to use these skills to tackle any problem that comes your way!

Please Note: If you have purchased this course, you need to log into your account using the My Account link in order to access the course.

This course will begin with an overview of the problem-solving process, and some resources to get you started on your research for the topic of Digital Realities. The following lessons will break down each step of the process, teaching you to:

• Identify Challenges
• Write an Underlying Problem
• Develop Solutions
• Establish Criteria
• Fill out the Evaluation Matrix
• Develop an Action Plan.

You’ll use a practice Future Scene throughout the course, check out scoring guidelines, and build knowledge of the topic and the problem-solving process.

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Tourism not only benefits host locales but those on holiday. Travel enriches their lives, expands their understanding of people and cultures, while also serving as a respite from daily life. The economic stability of such destinations depends on the sustainability of their tourist trade. As the popularity of such destinations grows, international corporations and developers typically flock to these growing places, trying to capitalize on the financial possibilities. There is money to be made in building hotels, restaurants, and in developing an area’s growing tourism industry. As outside groups seek to attract tourists and the revenue they generate, locals often struggle to maintain their location's unique appeal and ability to support local venues. As this build-up occurs, local people can have their cultures exploited, lands destroyed, and their local businesses put in jeopardy. As the tourism sector grows and expands, we are seeing the expansion of the Special Interest (SIT) market - tourists wishing to match their vacations with their interests (e.g., ecotourism, wellness tourism, event tourism, ancestry tourism, etc.). How will changing forms and trends of tourism impact tourists and hosts alike? How can the advantages of expanding tourism be balanced with the protection of destinations?

Today nearly half the world's population lives in an urban area. By 2050, that number is expected to reach 70% due to this increase in Urbanization. Urban areas and their large populations often hold power over governance, economic development, and international connectivity beyond their immediate regions. With proper planning, urban centres can provide educational and economic opportunities to residents not found elsewhere. However, they can also easily give rise to slums and increase income inequality. With growing footprints, cities are also struggling to provide basic needs, essential services, and safety. Future urban planners must address tough questions: What qualities in society should be valued most? What is fair and equitable? Whose interests will be served first? Planners must balance the speed of decision-making with the need for thoughtful, well-considered programs for development. As urban areas expand, how can we develop areas that are efficient, resilient, and inclusive?

Antarctica, the highest, driest, coldest continent, has no permanent population and is governed by a collection of agreements between fifty-four countries. The Antarctic Treaty System designates the entire continent and surrounding waters for scientific endeavours, bans military activity, and promotes environmental research and preservation. Although Antarctica remains the most remote place on Earth, it is highly regulated and heavily impacted by activities around the globe. Parts of the continent are polluted by sewage, discarded machinery, fuel products, and rubbish. Antarctica is thought to be rich in minerals and resources, though an 'indefinite' ban on mining is in place through 2048. Antarctica also holds over 60% of the Earth's fresh water in an ice sheet that contains 90% of the Earth's total ice volume. As global temperatures rise, these are breaking apart and melting faster, endangering local wildlife and entire ecosystems. Without a consistent population or a sovereign state, Antarctica possesses a unique space within political, economic, and environmental crossroads. How can Antarctica be sustainably utilized yet simultaneously preserved to best benefit our global population?

Our transport needs, desires, and realities are rapidly changing due to global growth and increased connectivity. As modes of transportation continue to evolve, increasing levels of complexity and efficiency are pursued. What role will autonomous vehicles, cars, airplanes, ships, etc., which operate without human intervention, play in this pursuit? Their development continues to increase exponentially with advancing technological capabilities. Since all scenarios are not programmable, autonomous vehicles must learn and react. They do this by surveying their environment with multiple sensors and utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to process vast amounts of data. Autonomous vehicles can deliver on demand, refuel, park, and store themselves. By creating a network of these vehicles, entire systems of transport could become autonomous, controlled by a central AI. How will the efficiency of autonomous vehicles affect the development of transportation, on land and sea, in the air, and possibly space? How will autonomous transport cope with unexpected risk situations and ethical decisions? In what ways will autonomous transport impact jobs, industries, infrastructure, and lifestyles?

Tourism Urbanisation Antarctica Autonomous Transportation Currency

Tourism Urbanisation Antarctica

Electronic devices are often replaced with the latest version at an alarmingly fast pace. These constant upgrades add to E-Waste significantly impacting the environment and reducing natural resources while consumer demand is being met. Tens of millions of tons of such materials are discarded every year worldwide. Electronic products are full of hazardous substances such as toxic materials and heavy metals that can threaten humans, plants, animals. One method of disposal often employed by developed states is to offload e-waste to low-income countries for resale or demolition. This offloading places developing nations at greater risk of exposure to toxic chemicals and materials. Meanwhile, the high rate of device upgrades in developed countries has significant consequences for both people and the environment. What impact does planned disposal have on the amount of e-waste? What incentives can be developed to promote software upgrades for existing devices? As the appetite for ever-increasing technological devices continues, what are the implications for how we dispose of these devices? How can more effective and ethical responses to recycling and disposal policies be encouraged to protect human life and the global environment in the future.

Technologically, virtual reality is widespread and expanding its application through augmented, enhanced, mixed, and other forms of digital realities. The options and opportunities for its application appear boundless through the integration of 3-D images, gaming, computer-assisted instruction, equipment simulators, and entertainment platforms. The imposition of holographic images over real-world views have applications ranging from education, archaeology, and engineering, to sports training, video games, and artistic expression. The utilization of augmented reality technology is already making significant changes to the manufacturing industry. What other industries will it revolutionize? The inclusion of haptic, visual, and auditory overlays can be both constructive and destructive to users. New opportunities are provided to individuals with disabilities. New treatments are made available to the ill. How will enhanced reality impact human interactions? Digital reality is constantly evolving with advantages for all fields. How will we deal with the fiscal, educational, and psycho-social issues that might arise?

Machines were developed to assist with dangerous and difficult jobs. At present, unskilled human labour is being replaced with robotics more quickly than at any time in history.  Advancements of such machines move technology closer and closer to lights-out manufacturing. In countries with robust national safety nets, these changes are viewed as inevitable, and they have begun to explore new human employment concepts. Robotic workers often provide for human safety as in the case of bomb disposal. Laborers are fearful of how these looming employment changes and uncertain of how their work life will proceed. A robotic workforce's effects go beyond manufacturing as university-trained individuals such as lawyers and accountants are already being impacted by automation. What will the human workforce of the future look like? Will specialized training and education be needed for a combined human and robotic workforce? What will our future work force look like? How will our future economy be impacted by robotics in the workforce?

Consumerism has promoted a 'throw-away' society – one in which people do not keep things for very long, preferring single-use and disposable items. This societal approach leads to overconsumption of short-term items instead of durable goods that can be repaired. Widespread social influencing often encourages people to focus on the consumption, ownership, and display of material possessions to mark an individual's social status, identity, and standing. This impacts the environment, lifestyles, and distribution of wealth. Consumerism stretches the world's limited natural resources. Production is dictated by consumer demand, and businesses try to provide consumers with a growing number of options, including branded goods, to stay afloat. Many products are often fads or are adapted and modified regularly to entice consumers to buy the upgrades despite already having durable ones. Constant upgrades are sought to achieve greater social standing through material possession instead of meaningful acts. How can societies value all their members while allowing for - and encouraging - individual perspectives and desires? What are the appropriate balances between local values and global aspirations for consumers?

E-Waste Digital Realities Robotic Workforce Throw Away Society

E-Waste Digital Realities Robotic Workforce

In many parts of the world, freshwater is in short supply. Water is often pumped for miles, streams diverted and reservoirs and dams are constructed to provide for the growing populations in dry areas. As water levels drop and aquifers decline, people become more concerned about preserving their water resources. More than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water services, and more than 4 billion lack safely managed sanitation services. Differing governmental and commercial demands must be balanced so that communities have enough safe water for their needs. As available water supplies deplete, adjacent areas begin to battle with water contracts and water rights. How might the right to access clean water be achieved? How will regulations shape the future of access to water? How will water scarcity shape society?

The world is now more urbanized than ever before, and more and more people are flocking to live in large cities. Singapore was once known as the ‘Garden City,’ now it is being promoted as the ‘Garden in the City’ as new buildings incorporate trees and other greenery in their designs. Many quickly growing population centers are more environmentally aware as they expand the living spaces for their citizens. This awareness is not just a case of saving the environment and reducing emissions; it is a matter of necessity for creating healthy cities. Buildings can be designed to conserve both energy and water while improving the indoor and outdoor environment. Advancing technology is changing how architects are incorporating sustainable living practices into buildings. Light-based modulated sunlight, improved insulation, enhanced ventilation, eco-friendly building materials – are a few of the ecologically-preferred innovations changing the face and function of buildings. Some buildings now incorporate wind turbines to provide the necessary energy to power the building. Will these developments solve the problems they have set out to address? Will these change the way cities work and the way people live in them? Will these changes improve safety during natural disasters or introduce new problems?

Insects - human's best friends and worst enemies. We are surrounded by more than a million species of insects. Without them, humankind couldn't survive. Some insects destroy crops and carry diseases. Mosquitoes, which carry diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, Ross River, Zika, and West Nile viruses, kill and maim more people each year than any other animal. Others do essential jobs like pollinate blossoms, aerate the soil, decompose dead plant material, or eat other harmful insects, making them essential to the food web. As weather patterns and temperatures change, the distribution and habitat of many insect species are likely to change dramatically. The numbers of bees around the world have been radically reduced due to disease. How does the reduction of some species and relocation of others impact health, agriculture, and horticulture?

Over 1,900 insect species have been identified as suitable for human consumption and animal feed and could assure food security. Incorporating insects into the human food and medical supply indicates the ever-growing importance of insects in the world. Will insects and their products, such as genetically modified mosquitoes or manuka honey help to fight diseases? Will toasted grubs, fried crickets, and other edible insects become important global protein choices?

Mining is a long-standing means of gathering a wide range of resources vital to aspects of everyday life. The growing demands of mined materials continues to see the mining industry expand at an incredible pace. The technologies in use today and projected for the future are more minerals intensive than ever before. While technology has made mining both safer and more environmentally sensitive than any other time in history, environmental and other risks remain. Yet without the collection of these important materials, the cornerstones of society like buildings, machines, and communication would not be possible. With environmental protections varying greatly from country-to-country, how can the world collaborate on the best way to extract and share geological materials? With mining as the foundation of countless communities, how will they be impacted by the changing landscape of mining? In the future, are there new areas that might be mined for resources?

Millions of children around the world participate in competitive youth sports every year. Involvement in organized sports teaches many essential life skills – teamwork, confidence, the value of hard work, and discipline. While some competitive sports promote activity and a healthy lifestyle, others build skills such as mental agility. The hyper-competitiveness of youth sports raises concerns that children are pushed too hard to win and succeed. The sports options for youth are also evolving, as competitive e-sports emerge. Competitive sports can heighten aggression, pressure to win, and put children – who are still growing and developing – at risk for injuries. In many places, increasing costs of club sport-memberships and insurance exclude those who need social interaction and fitness the most. The costs of maintaining and running facilities can also limit the accessibility for youth. How much should we push young people to participate in competitive sports? Do the benefits of structured competition outweigh the costs of over-competitive behavior and possible injury? How does participation in sports impact the well being of youth and their families?

Traditionally, clothing and accessories have all been developed to fill basic needs. They provide warmth, protection from the elements or injury, and even serve to attract attention. Recently, the industry for wearable technology has transformed the way we think about clothing and accessories. Wearables have rapidly expanded to include heating elements, internet connections, watches, body monitors, and more. As more people grow accustomed to wearables in their daily lives, the possibilities for what the technologies can do are virtually limitless. They already monitor vital signs, send information to medical professionals, and even give individuals the ability to soar like a bird in personal flight suits. Smart sports uniforms can now reduce and identify injuries by regulating body temperature, supporting muscles and tendons, and gauging the force of impact. Attire with virtual reality functions is currently being developed to push this sector even further. How will wearable technology enhance or jeopardize real-life experiences and connections with others? Where in the world could wearable technologies allow humans to survive? What advantages or disadvantages are inherent in the inclusion of technology in our clothing and on our bodies?

Humans have always impacted the environment. Over time, the effects have increased as industrialization, urbanization, deforestation, processing of natural resources, the burning of fossil fuels and more technologies have developed. Examples of human’s impact on the environment are everywhere.

Feeding the world’s growing population has adverse environmental effects such as overgrazing, deforestation, and agriculture-induced soil erosion. Water pollution from pesticides and fertilizers impacts the quality of water available for specific populations. Clearing of land and overfishing result in loss of biodiversity and disturbances to ecosystems. Industrialization and urbanization cause the release of toxic solid, liquid, or gaseous waste materials and are the catalyst for serious environmental hazards. Water pollution as a result of poor disposal of sewage wastes, solid wastes, and other industrial wastes, may spread diseases and create an unfit environment for human activities. Industrialization has also increased consumption of natural resources for the production of goods, leading to a significant loss of nonrenewable resources and excessive waste. Activities like mining and dam construction cause habitat destruction. Trends like “fast fashion” contribute to why the fashion industry is the second-leading cause of pollution in the environment. What are our challenges moving forward to create a balance between basic human needs and our need to preserve or create an environment that is fit for continued quality human existence and growth?

What if your doctor could diagnose you before you experience symptoms? Using information from an individuals’ genetic and molecular profile, researchers have begun to create patient-specific treatments with a level of precision never before seen. Personalized Medicine enables healthcare providers to use a patient’s cells to combat precisely identified diseases at an unprecedented pace.

Researchers at universities, biotech companies, laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies are continually making discoveries. Doctors and other healthcare professionals continue to explore how these discoveries can help patients and increase our knowledge about diseases. The pharmaceutical industry is developing medications that tailored to an individual patient’s genetic makeup. The costs of genetic tests are decreasing as their availability increases. Even with better affordability, how accessible will individualized advanced treatments be? Will insurance companies cover them? The increasing specificity of personal health information raises many concerns about the protection of personal data. How will Personalized Medicine account for the impact of external/environmental factors on an individual’s health?

Most people dream of visiting new and exciting places to experience culture, cuisine, and local entertainment through travel. Transportation technology makes it easier and faster than ever before to get from one country to another although travel can be very expensive and time-consuming for many people. Heightened safety concerns often mean changing security requirements and government screening processes for crossing borders.

Some experts believe that technology may begin to replace in-person travel. VR-AR-MR (Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality / Mixed Reality), are immediate, involving, engaging and immersive types of entertainment that can accessed anywhere in the world. This could cause travel to boom if people, having used these technologies, want to experience the world “for real.” People may be increasingly comfortable in both worlds: the physical real world, and the digital world that is constructed instantly and repeatedly to fit what each person wants and chooses, using immediately responsive networks.

How will the time, technology, and expense associated with travel impact the future of international travel and tourism?

Approximately one-third of our lives is spent sleeping. For nearly a century, scientists have been able to record brain activity and see the dynamic changes during sleep. Lack of sleep can affect brain function, especially memory, language, and emotional balance. Physical effects include fatigue, stress and health problems including heart disease and obesity. Today, technology on our wrists can measure sleep habits and movements.

Globally, businesses developing sleep aids are witnessing significant growth due to the rising incidence of sleep disorders. This has been exacerbated by the growing senior population. It is manifest in increasing demand for sleeping pills due to stressful modern lifestyles and increasing numbers of initiatives by various health organizations to increase awareness about sleep disorders. Sleep medications often have undesirable side effects and patents of major sleep drugs expire. Wakefulness aids, stimulants and prescription drugs such as coffee, energy drinks, benzodiazepines and even illegal drugs are gaining in popularity as a perceived solution to the need to perform effectively despite sleep deprivation.

How might our over-scheduled lives and increased digital presence disrupt natural circadian and sleep patterns? Can the benefits of sleep be replicated? What new technologies might be available to help people monitor and adjust brain wave activity during sleep? Will scientists discover more about the genes that enable functionality with less sleep?

Gamification isn’t just about leisure time digital or other games. Gamification applies the theories of game development that make games so alluring and creates sustained attention. Players and teams win points and rewards by completing designated tasks. Minecraft, for example, has been used by teachers for everything from computer science to social sciences to creative writing. Fitbit and tracking apps on the iWatch are increasingly popular and encourage competition – with yourself or with a group.
Gamification helps users focus on tasks that might normally be boring, and the process might be applied to fields such as customer loyalty, education, health, recreation, job training, self-improvement, household chores, fundraising, and activism. Gamification is being used by corporations to make marketing interactive, but it’s also being used to benefit individual health and well-being.

Is there a relationship between gamification and tech addiction? How might gamification impact education and learning, inside and outside formal schools, or even in the workplace? What are some of the ethical implications, particularly around user privacy? What role will companies have in the creation of tech products to “hook” their users or the use of gamification as an educational tool? Can gamification enhance human interactions?

Nearly half of the world’s population (more than 3.5 billion people) live in poverty. Of those 3.5 billion people, 1.4 live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $US 1.25 per day.

Across the globe, many people struggle to have and sustain basic needs such as food, clean water, basic medical supplies, and adequate shelter. Some people are forced to leave their homes to travel to other places or countries to find menial work to send money home to support their families. Due to poverty, many people are unable to access education. Some adults deliberately suffer from malnutrition so that their children can have the food that is available. Children in severe poverty are often orphaned or they have been sent away because their parents cannot afford to care for them. Healthy food can be very difficult to come by for the poor due to lack of financial and monetary resources, meaning that they depend on cheap, unhealthy foods to sustain their lives.

What can be done globally to assist those suffering from extreme poverty? How can we reverse this trend in order to decrease the adverse impact of poverty on future generations?

A spacecraft in orbit? A biosphere on extraterrestrial ground? Private and governmental organizations are already planning missions to set up research stations or even colonies on the Moon and Mars. Many see opportunities to learn more about our solar system, leading to a better understanding of Earth and ourselves; others question whether such missions are even feasible. One private agency is already seeking volunteers for a Mars mission. Space ventures provide an impetus for advancing knowledge and technologies with applications in space, as well as on Earth. Entrepreneurial and scientific opportunities abound to explore, to mine, and to engineer under distinct conditions. Pioneers will need to plan for a sustainable long-term stay, which will require vast investments of people, money, and other resources

Drones are among the most hyped products for aviation enthusiasts in recent years. Although originally developed for military use, drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be cool gadgets used for recreation. They can also be powerful tools for commerce, scientific research, agriculture, entertainment, photography, transportation, disaster relief, search and rescue, surveillance, and policing. UAVs can carry payloads and can be controlled remotely by a human operator or by an onboard computer. Basic drone models can be operated with little skill or training. Regulations on the use of UAVs are already in place in nations around the world, but technological advancements and expanded applications may outpace their regulation. While UAV use is growing exponentially, concerns are also escalating. Privacy intrusion, airspace violation, criminal use, surreptitious military operations, accidental crashes, terrorist threats, and other issues have raised alarms.

What does the future hold for UAV technological advancements and accessory enhancements? Will access to UAVs be equitable? How will the pending prevalence of drones in our daily lives affect society overall, especially in areas of personal rights and safety?

Hunger remains a concern in the developing world, and the resources required for food production are limited. About one-third of food produced globally is lost or wasted, leaving millions of people hungry and valuable resources squandered.

Food loss refers to a decrease in food for human consumption during production, post-harvest, and processing stages. Causes include poor harvesting techniques, weak infrastructure (markets, transportation, storage, cooling, packaging), contamination (bacteria, fungus, insects), and corruption. In addition to reduced availability, food loss contributes to higher costs, hurting farmers as well as those who cannot afford to buy their food.

Food losses that occur at retail and consumption stages are called food waste and refer to behaviors such as discarding edible food. Quality standards based on perfect appearance, misused “best-before-dates,” and careless consumer attitudes contribute to waste. Food waste is more common in the industrialized world, while food loss is a greater concern in developing nations.

Can food loss prevention combat hunger and raise incomes in developing nations? Can food waste be decreased without sacrificing quality or safety? What roles might technology or regulations serve? What are the economic, environmental, psychological, and societal implications? Can we improve global food security while meeting the needs of diverse consumers?

With exponential change and fast-paced trends in society comes an increase in stress. Stress can be physical, mental, or emotional. Living conditions, as well as societal and personal expectations, can lead to higher levels of stress-related hormones. In some parts of the world, people find it difficult to cope with longer work hours and less leisure time as they attempt to meet society’s perceived expectations. Social media is a constant presence, delivering both subtle and overt pressures.

Most people experience stress, but individuals respond differently. Stress can be a useful motivator in the face of challenges or danger, but negative impacts can result from excessive stress. Medical and psychological problems can emerge or be exacerbated. Scientific data show that physical activity and relaxation techniques are samples of ways to reduce these negative impacts.

What are the personal and societal impacts of stress? Do different countries and cultures deal with stress the same way? How can we promote healthier lifestyles that help people to cope with stress?

Each year, approximately 52 million people suffer from infectious diseases around the world.  Seventeen million deaths per year result from these diseases. With affordable global travel and more people living in cities, infectious diseases may spread rapidly across the globe.  How can the spread of infectious disease be controlled?  How can the health of people around the world be safeguarded?

Toxic materials are everywhere: heavy metals in electronics, flame retardants in furniture and clothing, pesticides in our food, and harmful chemicals in plastics.  Poisonous chemicals are linked to cancer and birth defects.  Although certain chemicals are known to be hazardous, current regulation systems allow them to continue to be brought into homes via many products.  How can we become better aware of the dangers associated with toxic wastes?  What will happen if we increase our reliance on these materials? 

Philanthrocapitalism is a form of philanthropy in which entrepreneurial ideas, practices, and wealth are used to tackle global challenges. As the divide between rich and poor increases around the world, the number of billionaires is growing. Some of the planet’s wealthiest people have become philanthrocapitalists, pledging to invest time, energy, skills, ideas, and large amounts of money towards worthy causes. This may have a positive impact on the people, groups, and causes that are chosen for support, but there are questions about this form of philanthropy.

Will the efforts of philanthrocapitalists actually lead to deep, sustainable results? How will their causes be chosen? Do individual philanthrocapitalists have the expertise to address the world’s most significant problems? Will this model of philanthropy present conflicts of interest as it influences the priorities, donations, or behaviors of average people? Does philanthrocapitalism transfer the power and responsibility of social change away from governments and charitable organizations to an elite few? How might philanthrocapitalism benefit or harm the generations of the future?

Biosecurity is a worldwide, cross-border problem. With the number of noxious pests, plant diseases, genetically modified crops, and displaced species increasing around the world, monitoring and controlling the movements across national borders is becoming increasingly difficult. Environmental changes may exacerbate the problem by altering the range of habitats and upsetting the natural balance. Equally difficult and a major concern is the implementation of measures to reduce the effect of these current issues on native flora and fauna as well as serious damage to exports. Even though a number of countries have stringent safeguards in place already, smuggling or lack of knowledge makes policing biosecurity difficult. Some countries have little or no policy for restricting the movement of plants and animals across borders. Customs officers can make some positive impact, but they are limited by the constraints of their job and the porous nature of many borders. Besides, what seems like necessary safeguards to some are seen as unnecessary constraints on trade and economic growth to others. How might development in new technologies assist in regulating and monitoring biosecurity issues? How can countries cooperate with each other in dealing with cross border contamination?

Education is considered to be the pathway to an informed, future-focused population. In many countries, education is publicly funded by the central government or by state governments, with options for privately funded schools. In some countries, school funding/regulation is largely local and tied to property taxes. Other countries struggle to fund education at all. In addition to differences in funding, other economic and social factors contribute to educational disparities: family earnings, health status, gender, political participation, and social class.

Who should provide educational funding? Should intervention occur in communities or countries where social factors influence the quality of educational opportunities? Already, some international programs such as International Baccalaureate or international exams like Cambridge and PISA claim to give a fair indication of educational achievement around the world, but do results help or harm educational equality? As connectivity spreads around the world, how will universal access to interactive and personalized networks of education evolve? Will access to these virtual networks equalize opportunities in the future?

The genes of organisms can be altered using biotechnology techniques. New genes can be inserted into plants and animals to create new varieties and breeds or to lessen certain genetic activity such as susceptibility to disease. Since 1970 GM has helped produce greater numbers of crops with higher nutritional value and has been prominent in animal agriculture. Critics claim there are serious ethical, ecological, and economic issues with GM techniques. For example, GM crops can cross-pollinate with non-GM crops creating unpredictable characteristics in plants. Bioherbicides and bioinsecticides can be added to crop seeds, but are not always effective. Resistant weeds now infest 75 million acres of land across the world. Domesticated animals are being genetically modified to produce proteins that have applications for human medicine – proteins to control blood clotting or kill cancer cells, for example.

What will be the long-term impact of genetic modification of plants and animals? If plants and animals are genetically modified to resist current pathogens, will new, more resistant pathogens develop? Already, GM has led to international controversy and trade disputes, protests, and restrictive regulations on commercial products containing genetically modified organisms.

The developments in the use of technology in the medical field have been dramatic in recent years, covering both issues of medical treatment and the delivery of medical services. For instance, the use of advanced electronics in the production of prostheses and other organ replacements has given some sign of the possible extent of technology application into the future. With greater technology advancements, very expensive and specialised disposable items are being used during surgical and medical treatments.  It is suggested that in the near future an inability of access to these technologies for public or poorer private patients will lead to a resurgence of more basic reusable equipment being favoured.

With more advanced devices, there may also be problems with medical workforces, as company representatives  may be the only people specifically trained to use the technology, rather than medical staff. Medical robots may be replaced by sentient beings or robots comes into play, as well as patients a inspected by virtual doctors  Patients may also be able to ‘print’ their own drugs at home, bypassing the pharmacy system. All these developments have and will have implications for government regulation, the cost of healthcare (and who pays for it), as well as the impact on social relationships and community-based service employment that, in this decade, is the main form of employment.

Identity theft is a form of stealing someone’s identity. Most often, identity thieves steal personal financial information, buy things for their own gain, and pay for none of it. Frequently, identity thieves gain access to personal information through business and government databases that are not secure. Dates of birth, full names, bank account details and identification numbers are part of the information sought by identity thieves. Stolen identities can be used to fund other crimes such as illegal immigration, terrorism, or drug crimes. It can be extremely difficult to find and prosecute identity thieves as they are often from different countries than the individuals whose identities they are stealing and they obtain personal details online.

Victims of identity crime can be held responsible for crimes committed using their identity and may have to fight for years to clear their names. In addition to the damage done to individuals, identity crime costs governments large amounts of money every year. Great collaboration between global governments and organizations will likely be needed to combat identity theft in the years to come. Individuals and businesses will also need to protect themselves. <br>How should individuals and organizations work together to protect identities from theft? How will identity thieves adapt their practices as more time and effort is invested in protecting identities? What information will be the most valuable to thieves in the coming years and decades?

Farmers, pet and animal owners, and scientific researchers have many different ways of treating animals in their care. Fewer than 30% of countries have animal welfare laws, and existing laws are not always enforced. Researchers assert that it is important to be able to use animals in research to test drugs and new medical procedures that can help both people and animals. Sometimes endangered animals are kept in captivity at a high cost in order to protect their limited populations. Animal shelters are often filled with feral animals or those that have been abandoned by their owners. Wild animals in many parts of the world come into conflict with human activity.

In the future, how might research impact human understanding and treatment of animals? Are zoos useful educational tools or unethical exhibitions? Are certain animals entitled to more rights than others based on cultural or intelligence differences? How can humans be better stewards in the treatment of animals? Who decides the appropriate treatment of animals and their role in society?

Language is the soul of a culture. The survival of a culture may depend on the language used for rituals and to describe cultural ideas, beliefs, and understandings. What is the impact on culture when its language disappears? By some estimates, of the six thousand languages left on Earth, 90% are expected to disappear or be endangered before the end of this century. In New Zealand, government and community initiatives are trying to revive the language of indigenous people, but even so it is in a precarious state. Many indigenous peoples around the globe don’t have support to prevent their language from disappearing. Will anyone be able to read the rich literature embodied in the disappearing languages in the years to come? What oral traditions will be lost? What responsibilities, if any, do governments, institutions, and communities have towards preserving endangered languages?

Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters are big news when they occur. Front-page news and internet feeds bring us the details of staggering statistics and images of loss of life and property. Recovery work such as rebuilding homes, infrastructure, and businesses go on even when the news moves on to the next big story. The human factor such as recovery from emotional, mental, and physical stress is a painful and difficult journey for survivors of natural disasters, often taking many years after the disaster strikes. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) often proves inadequate especially since it is often developed only after a disaster. Government agencies, insurance companies, charitable organisations, celebrities, and individual volunteers respond with immediate help, but long-term support can be difficult to sustain. How can relief efforts be best utilised, coordinated, and sustained to assist survivors? How can the people, communities, and countries that are affected by a disaster begin to recover from their losses and cope with their changed lives? How will the impact on psychological and physical health be managed?

The world today is increasingly interdependent with the advent of interconnectedness. The Internet brings individuals living in diverse places together for innovative opportunities in global collaboration. Physical space may no longer define a workplace. Many local and international corporations are able to employ people without them having to step out of their homes or countries. Developed countries outsource jobs to other countries where labour may be cheaper and labour laws less regulated. How might a more global workplace affect local and national economies? Some firms downsize their workforce in favour of automated systems that require less human input. These changes create a pool of workers who, besides being out of work, are often unprepared for other jobs. How might employers develop innovative ways to work globally? Is the growing trend of working globally online benefiting current workplace trends? How might this affect the world economy? What economic or educational changes might better prepare governments, businesses, and workers for a global workplace?

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Second Life, wikis, blogging, tweeting - all of these words have entered our lives in the last few years. The impact of Web 2.0 and the rise of associated social media have changed our lives in many ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

Regimes have fallen because of the use of social media; careers can be jeopardized due to past and present social events posted on social media; people all over the world are able to collaborate in real time to work and to play. Some people think social media has a detrimental effect on people’s social lives; others believe it is a new and exciting way of socializing and developing relationships.

How might social media continue to impact our lives? Who will monitor the truth and accuracy of social media? Will social media lead to increased social isolation or enhanced global collaboration? Is there a need for controls, monitoring, or restrictions on social media? Do the positives outweigh the detrimental effects? Does any government have the right to legislate the use of social media by its citizens?

An increased interest in food and health has occurred around the world. Many questions have been asked on this topic: Where are food products produced? How? Why? Who produces food products? How far have these products traveled? How long have they been stored? How is food tracked from “farm to table”? A huge number of food products are now chemically-enhanced and processed. Foods may be labeled as “natural flavors,” but these do not necessarily come from the original product. Strawberry flavoring, for example, may have started out as a bacterial protein. Are preservatives safe? How might the addition of flavor enhancers, vitamins and minerals, phosphate additives, and sugar and fat substitutes affect our overall health? What are beneficial reasons for using processed foods? What processed foods should we avoid? Genetic engineering is still under study and remains controversial. Nanotechnology represents the latest high technology attempt to infiltrate our food supply. Do these new technologies pose serious new risks for human health?

Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. Selective messages are used to produce an emotional rather than rational response from the audience. Common media for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, and posters. Propaganda shares techniques with advertising and public relations.

With growing trends in communication, how will propaganda be spread in the future through digital media? How can wealth of individuals, groups, or countries advance a particular agenda? In a number of regional and global conflicts, including both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Balkan Conflict, and more recently the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, propaganda has more typically referred to political or nationalist uses of these techniques. Examples of these techniques include the following: instilling panic, appealing to prejudice, creating a bandwagon, demonizing the enemy, stating half-truths, and providing a scapegoat. Propaganda usually exists on both sides of a conflict, but is often perceived as negative in nature. What are some positive examples of present-day propaganda? What are some negative examples of present-day propaganda?

Through the use of performance enhancing drugs, personal trainers, speed-enhancing swimsuits, technologies for body and brain, people can enhance their potential in physical, emotional, and cognitive abilities. As time goes on, humans will be offered even more ways to enhance their potential in unprecedented ways: cybernetic body parts, memory-enhancing or erasing drugs, technologically advanced sports equipment, and/or humans/computer interfaces, etc. Will the definition of “human” change? Many ethical issues surround these advances: Should sports people be able to enhance their performances in any way they like? Should parents be able to choose IQ or mood boosters such as drugs or brain implants for their children? What impacts might exist with the disparities between the “haves” and the “have-nots”? How far might the human brain and body be pushed? To what extent can we “perfect” the human body? What “enhancers” do we have presently? What are the dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the lives of human beings

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New Digital Realities – Blending our Reality with Virtuality

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Katrin Wolf is a professor for Human-Computer Interaction at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Previously, she held a professorship for Media Informatics at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and at Berlin University of Art and Design. Her research interests lie at the intersection of human–computer interaction and interaction design, focusing on how to make novel technologies more usable and useful. To date, Katrin’s research has focused on technologies and domains including mobile and wearable systems; virtual, augmented and mixed reality, as well as interactive exhibitions.

After her PhD, received from T-Labs at Technical University Berlin, Katrin has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Stuttgart 2014-2015, where she worked in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab headed by Albrecht Schmidt. Her work experience includes research visits/internships at the Social NUI Group at University of Melbourne, INRIA (Bordeaux, FR), Glasgow University (Glasgow, UK), CSIRO (Sydney, AUS), and HITLab (Christchurch, NZ) as well as working as interface designer at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Katrin published in the most competitive conferences of her field including ACM CHI, ACM TEI and ACM MobileHCI. She is actively involved in the research community. Most notably, she was General Chair of the German conference on Mensch & Computer (MuC) 2019, Student Research Competition Chair of CHI 2019 and 2020 as well as Program Chair of MUM 2018, AHs2019, and TEI2021.

New digital reality as a spectrum of technologies and experiences that digitally simulate and extend reality in one way or another across different human senses has received considerable attention in recent years. In particular, we have witnessed great advances in mixed reality (MR) technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology, which provide enormous potential for application domains like training, simulation, education, entertainment, health, and sports. However, also other forms of digitally enhanced reality (XR) supports novel forms of immersion and experiences while generating, visualizing and interacting with digital content either displayed in fully-immersive virtual environments or superimposed into our view of the real world, and will significantly change the way we work, travel, play, and communicate. Consequently, we face dramatic changes in interactive media creation, access, and perception. In this special issue, we solicit work that addresses novel interaction design, interfaces, and implementation of new digital reality in which our reality is blended with the virtuality with a focus on users’ needs, joy, and visions.

1 Introduction

We live in a complex world, in which physical and digital environments, media, and interactions are woven together. The lines between natural and artificial, reality and virtuality, human and machine intelligence seem to blur. We observe that those originally distinct semantic differentials are no longer clearly distinguishable. Instead, they form a continuum in which these two aspects define the endpoints, but the much larger area is given by a mixed space in-between.

Let us consider some examples of such blended or mixed spaces: About 300.000 years ago, our world consisted only of natural surroundings. Then, the Homo sapiens started to produce artificial objects ranging from stone tools, the wheel, to calculators. Nowadays, most objects in our urban areas are artificially made by humans, and even naturally appearing objects are often artificial ones or at least partly artificial. For instance, even natural trees have been typically planted and pruned by humans, and thereby they move along the continuum towards more artificial objects.

Next, in classical computer systems (based on binary representation), data is encoded in fundamental units called bits, where each bit represents a distinctive state, which is either 1 or 0. With this technology, human intelligence has already been simulated in some tasks (e. g. image recognition or speech analysis and synthesis) and sometimes even extended for other tasks (e. g. numerical data processing) by computers. However, we observe a shift from this classical model of computing towards other approaches such as quantum computing. Here, data is encoded into quantum bits (qubits), which can represent a one, a zero, or a coherent superposition of both states simultaneously. The probabilistic approach of superposition together with quantum entanglement, which allows qubits to affect the state of other qubits, promises enormous performance improvement for several complex tasks. Again, with qubits, the area between 0 and 1 can be considered as a continuum.

Another example can be found in virtual reality (VR), which has gained enormous attention recently. VR denotes an immersive computer-generated multisensory stimulation, in which users can dive into a fully artificial reality. Again, VR can be seen as a semantic differential to the real world. However, other techniques such as augmented reality (AR) or augmented virtuality (AV) combine virtual and real objects in a coherent and consistent space – denoted as a reality-virtuality continuum – along which the different mixed reality (MR) technology can be described.

These new digital realities with an increasingly blended space of mixed realities require new paradigms for the interaction and communication between humans and technology. One major goal of HCI research is to support humans in using technology so that they can solve their tasks in an effective, efficient, and satisfying way. In this context, the analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of future human-computer interactions (HCI) play an essential role.

2 A Brief History of New Digital Realities

Digital transformation and new digital realities affect nowadays almost every aspect of our daily lives and will further shape how we work, learn, communicate, and live in the future [ 13 ]. In particular, two emerging technologies with the potential to have a long-term impact on human-computer interaction are VR and AR. One of the first fictional descriptions of Virtual Reality occurred in 1935 by the American science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In the story, a professor invented a pair of goggles that enabled “a movie that gives one sight and sound [...] taste, smell, and touch. [...] You are in the story, you speak to the shadows (characters) and they reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.” [ 18 ]. With his explanation, Weinbaum perfectly describes a psychological state known as telepresence, which is key in defining Virtual Reality [ 15 ]. The invention of VR, which denotes the generation of completely synthetic environments using computer technology [ 9 ], dates back to the 1960s when Morton Heilig patented one of the earliest examples of immersive computer-generated environments, the Sensorama [ 5 ]. The motivation here was to make people feel like they were in the movie simulating a motorcycle ride through a city environment and letting people see the road, hear the engine, feel the vibration, and smell the motor’s exhaust. While the Sensorama was a static device in which people had to put their head into, Comeau and Bryan created 1961 the first head-mounted display (HMD) called the Headsight, consisting of two video screens, one for each eye, as well as a magnetic tracking device. Around the same time, Ivan Sutherland envisioned the Ultimate Display as a “room within which the computer can control the existence of matter” [ 16 ]. In 1968, it was Sutherland who created the first partially see-through head-mounted display (HMD) [ 16 ] known as the Sword of Damocles, which is widely considered to be a precursor of current AR technology. Though having its origins in the same decade as VR, it took almost 30 years before AR emerged as an independent research field (for an extensive historical background of both VR and AR see [ 3 ]). In contrast to immersive VR technology which fully replaces the view to the real world with computer-generated content, AR aims at enhancing real-world views by embedding additional virtual content [ 2 ]. Both technologies became particularly popular in the gaming and entertainment sector [ 12 ]. According to the Gartner hype cycle 2015 [ 17 ], both technologies already passed the phases of technology breakthrough and the peak of inflated expectations, and are estimated to reach mainstream adoption by 2025. In the report of 2019, both VR and AR were even excluded from the list of emerging technologies because, according to Gartner, they already reached a mature state [ 13 ]. However, related technologies such as immersive workspaces, for instance, for online meetings, or AR clouds for sharing virtual content, have entered the innovation trigger and will further boost AR and VR technologies.

A more differentiated analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both technologies led to a set of customized applications beyond the entertainment industry. VR can immerse users in environments, which represent a different place or time while being isolated from the real world. This can be beneficial for applications such as therapy, military training, and design review [ 6 ]. In contrast, AR technology is preferable to VR systems if users are required to see and interact with their real environment, for example, for navigation, maintenance tasks, and computer-assisted surgeries [ 12 ]. Regarding the virtualization of real-world objects, VR and AR are only two stages within a continuum, which was introduced by Paul Milgram in 1994 [ 9 ]. While purely real environments (REs) and completely virtual environments (VEs) mark the extremes of this continuum, a range of Mixed Reality (MR) environments, i. e. spaces that combine real and virtual elements, lies in between. Whitton et al. [ 19 ] describe fundamental challenges to enable such MR environments, including the merge of real and virtual scene elements, the tracking of physical objects, as well as the simulation of plausible virtual-physical interactions. If the MR environment is predominantly real and only single physical objects are embedded, the overall state is denoted as AR. As opposed to this, Augmented Virtuality (AV) refers to a primarily VE to which some amount of real objects has been added [ 9 ].

Though Milgram’s continuum provides a basis for the continuous virtualization of an environment, it is limited in the sense that it only considers augmentation, i. e. the addition of virtual content, as a possibility to increase the virtuality of objects. Related research projects, for example, by Broll et al. [ 4 ], demonstrate that REs can also be modified by (partially) removing real content, resulting in a Diminished Reality (DR) state. Analogous to the correlation of AV and AR, Diminished Virtuality (DV) is the equivalent to DR as it refers to a predominantly VE, from which some of the virtual elements are removed and replaced by visualizations of real-world objects. While augmentation and diminishment are opposite to each other on a conceptual level, they both increase the overall virtuality of the affected objects. This is because technologically the diminishment of real-world objects also requires the superposition of virtual content, which in this particular case represents the portion of the scene that was previously obscured by these objects. Instead of adding virtual or removing real content, an alternative to achieve such a (partial or full) virtualization is the modulation of existing objects, for example, by using image filters in order to highlight specific features, or by virtually transforming visual properties of the physical object.

To integrate augmentation, diminishment, and modulation into a comprehensive taxonomy, Mann et al. [ 7 ] introduced an orthogonal axis to Milgram’s continuum, called Mediality. However, we argue that modulation of REs also decreases the amount of unaltered real objects, and therefore can be understood as a third path to increase the virtuality of such environments. Consequently, we extend Milgram’s continuum by two additional paths between reality and virtuality resulting in (i) augmentation, (ii) diminishment, and (iii) modulation of physical and virtual elements within an environment. The three operations should not be understood to be mutually exclusive since they can be applied simultaneously to different parts of a physical object to increase its overall level of virtuality resulting in new digital realities in which reality and virtuality are blended for novel forms of HCI. Hence, we will live in new digital realities in which physical and virtual objects are blended together. However, physical objects are not limited to the traditional augmentation, modulation, and diminishment, but all objects can change their state along the RV continuum, i. e., also virtual objects might materialize, for instance, by digital fabrication or 3D printing technologies. Furthermore, real, mixed, and virtual objects can interact with each other in a physically plausible way. And finally, humans will be able to seamlessly experienced blended spaces without requiring them to switch the display technology. The blending of reality and virtuality will eventually become our new digital reality.

3 About this Special Issue

The previous sections described the main ideas of blending reality and virtually into new digital realities. The following section will briefly introduce the different articles being part of this special issue and explain how they blend with this trend. The articles that are part of this special issue demonstrate, for example, how researchers can understand the current state, learn from specific contexts to improve the current state, explore novel interaction concepts, and look at visionary approaches for the next generation digital realities.

3.1 “How can I grab that?” – Solving Issues of Interaction in VR by Choosing Suitable Selection and Manipulation Techniques

The selection and manipulation of objects in Virtual Reality face application developers with a substantial challenge as they need to ensure a seamless interaction in three-dimensional space. Assessing the advantages and disadvantages of selection and manipulation techniques in specific scenarios and regarding usability and user experience is a mandatory task to find suitable forms of interaction. This article presents a taxonomy allowing the classification of techniques regarding multiple dimensions. The issues are then associated with these dimensions. Furthermore, the article analyzes the results of a study comparing multiple selection techniques and presents a tool allowing developers of VR applications to search for appropriate interaction techniques and to get scenario dependent suggestions based on the data of the executed study.

3.2 The Shared View Paradigm in Asymmetric Virtual Reality Setups

Asymmetric VR applications are a substantial subclass of multi-user VR that offers not all participants the same interaction possibilities. In an educational scenario, for example, learners can use immersive VR HMD technology to inform themselves at different virtual exhibits. Educators can use a desktop PC for guiding learners through the exhibits and still paying attention to safety aspects in the real world. In such scenarios, educators must ensure that learners have been informed about all virtual exhibits. A common visualization technique that supports educators is to render the view of the learners on their desktop screen referred to as a shared view paradigm. However, this straightforward visualization involves challenges. For example, educators have no control over the scene. This article investigates five alternative techniques to approach the shared view paradigm and visualize the gaze of users (‘view visualizations’). Furthermore, the authors propose three techniques that can support educators to understand what parts of the scene learners already have explored (‘exploration visualizations’).

3.3 appRaiseVR – An Evaluation Framework for Immersive Experiences

For the diverse VR application areas, it is essential to understand the user’s condition to ensure a safe, pleasant, and meaningful VR experience. However, VR experience evaluation is still in its infancy. This article takes up this research desideratum by conflating diverse expertise and learnings about experience evaluation in general and VR experiences in particular into a systematic evaluation framework, which is called appRaiseVR. Therefore, the authors conducted two focus groups (bottom-up approach) with experts working in different fields of experience evaluation (e. g., Movie Experience, Theatre Experiences). After clustering the results of both focus groups, the authors conflated those results and the learnings about experience evaluation stemming from the field of user experience into the final framework (top-down approach). The present framework appRaiseVR offers high-level guidance for evaluators with different expertise and contexts.

3.4 Mixed Reality based Collaboration for Design Processes

Due to constantly and rapidly growing digitization, requirements for international cooperation are changing. Tools for collaborative work such as video telephony are already an integral part of today’s communication across companies. However, these tools are not sufficient to represent the full physical presence of an employee or a product as well as its components in another location. This article focuses on Mixed Reality collaboration in manufacturing and quality assurance processes. It presents a novel object-centered approach that compromises Augmented and Virtual Reality technology as well as design suggestions for remote collaboration. Remote collaboration prototypes using HMD-based as well as tablet-based AR are developed for the context of quality assurance. Visualization procedures as well as role based interaction methods to support the collaboration in design processes are presented. As a result, key areas for future research are identified and a design space for the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality remote collaboration in the manufacturing process in the automotive industry is described.

3.5 Investigating the Relationship between Emotion Recognition Software and Usability Metrics

However various forms of general purpose sentiment/emotion recognition software are available, the application of such tools in usability engineering (UE) for measuring the emotional state of participants is rarely employed. This article investigates if the application of sentiment/emotion recognition software is beneficial for gathering objective and intuitive data that can predict usability similar to traditional usability metrics. A large scale usability test (N=125) was performed for the three modalities text, speech, and face with a counterbalanced within-subject design with two websites of varying usability. Results show that emotion metrics could not be used to successfully differentiate between two websites of varying usability. Regression models, either unimodal or multimodal could not predict usability metrics. This article discusses reasons for these results and how to continue research with more sophisticated methods.

4 Conclusion

This issue presents work on Digital Reality, including VR, AR, and usability measuring using emotion recognition. The presented works show that the future, the way we live, work, and are entertained heavily depend on the advancements in computer science, which help adding to the quality of displayed content, and allow for the creation of photorealistic, vivid, and more life-like VR experiences as well as for integrating digital media and computation in our physical world. The natural interplay of virtual objects and their real environment was already subject to several research projects, which thereby reveal future prospects of Blended Spaces (e. g., the simulation of realistic illumination effects [ 11 ] or shadows [ 10 ] in MR environments). Considering the virtual content separately, the film industry demonstrates algorithms to create computer-generated content that is already close to being indistinguishable from a real video recording.

While the rendering of these graphics still takes a lot of resources in terms of time and computational power, it is reasonable to assume that real-time renderings with an equal quality will be achievable with improving computing systems that support digital reality [ 1 ], [ 14 ]. Beyond computer graphics and technology evolution, New Digital Reality also touches areas of analogue life, especially when technology captures us in the physical world.

Therefore, if we change the way we communicate, play, work, and recognize others emotions, new challenges occur in terms of ethical questions and users’ privacy protection [ 20 ], [ 8 ].

About the authors

[1] M. Borg, S. S. Johansen, D. L. Thomsen, and M. Kraus. Practical Implementation of a Graphics Turing Test. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), pages 305–313. Springer, 2012. 10.1007/978-3-642-33191-6_30 Search in Google Scholar

[2] O. Bimber and R. Raskar. Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. CRC press, 2005. 10.1201/b10624 Search in Google Scholar

[3] P. Cipresso, I. A. C. Giglioli, M. A. Raya, and G. Riva. The Past, Present, and Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality Research: A Network and Cluster Analysis of the Literature. Frontiers in Psychology, 9:2086, 2018. 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02086 Search in Google Scholar PubMed PubMed Central

[4] J. Herling and W. Broll. Advanced Self-Contained Object Removal for Realizing Real-Time Diminished Reality in Unconstrained Environments. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), pages 207–212, 2010. 10.1109/ISMAR.2010.5643572 Search in Google Scholar

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[8] Koelle, M., Wolf, K., & Boll, S. Beyond LED status lights-design requirements of privacy notices for body-worn cameras. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction , pages 177–187 (2018, March). 10.1145/3173225.3173234 Search in Google Scholar

[9] P. Milgram, H. Takemura, A. Utsumi, and F. Kishino. Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum. In Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies, volume 2351, pages 282–292. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 1995. 10.1117/12.197321 Search in Google Scholar

[10] S. Pessoa, G. Moura, J. Lima, V. Teichrieb, and J. Kelner. Photorealistic Rendering for Augmented Reality: A Global Illumination and BRDF Solution. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality (VR), pages 3–10, 2010. 10.1109/VR.2010.5444836 Search in Google Scholar

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[12] D. Schmalstieg and T. Höllerer. Augmented Reality: Principles and Practice. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2016. 10.1109/VR.2017.7892358 Search in Google Scholar

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[15] Steuer, Jonathan. Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of communication , 42(4):73–93, 1992. 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00812.x Search in Google Scholar

[16] I. E. Sutherland. The Ultimate Display. In Proceedings of the IFIP Congress, pages 506–508, 1965. Search in Google Scholar

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Digital reality: The focus shifts from technology to opportunity

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• Author: Fran Devinney. WIRED Insider

Augmented, mixed and virtual reality are finding a home in business, with enterprise adoption of “digital reality” technology outpacing the consumer market epitomized by AR/VR headsets. Google Glass, the eyewear that doubles as a heads-up display was first marketed to consumers, but has since quietly been finding a new home in manufacturing, where heads-up display eyewear lets skilled factory workers keep their eyes on their work, rather than constantly turning to a computer screen.

Deloitte sees five big opportunities for exploring digital reality in the enterprise: connect, know, learn, play, and explore. Connect is about enabling “cooperation without co-location.” For example, engineers sitting in a regional office could see what field workers see as they repair and maintain remote equipment, helping to guide the workers’ actions. Know is about providing “knowledge workers”—a broad term that basically applies to anyone using a computer—access to the information they need at the moment they need it to do their jobs. Learn means leveraging digital reality for training. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles uses AR/VR to train residents in emergency care. Walmart is training approximately 220,000 associates at 200 sites using virtual sales floors and 360 immersive experiences. Play is focused on gaming, storytelling, and live events that leverage AR/VR.

Explore is about using digital reality to bring potential customers closer to products, services, and experiences. Sales—product demonstrations in 3D surround vision—is one of the breakout opportunities for AR and VR. Audi has outfitted showrooms with virtual models to educate customers on its vehicles’ inner workings as well as help them choose and preview thousands of model configurations. A multinational consumer goods corporation lets product-line owners create mockups of store displays to present to retailers. Big equipment buyers can become more familiar with expensive gear, making them more comfortable with closing a deal.

While the perfect digital reality system doesn’t exist yet for these various uses cases—waiting for perfection would be a mistake. The technology is coming up faster than many realize, giving those who get an early start a huge advantage, just as nimble companies did when they equipped their staff with the first personal computers and mobile phones.

Ready or not, here they come “Our virtual reality products originally were targeted at consumers, but by addressing the social aspect and presence, VR can remove barriers that transcend distance and time in ways that can benefit the enterprise,” says Ash Jhaveri, VP of business development at Facebook and Oculus. i Steven Kan, Google’s head of AR/VR global strategy, says “AR/VR works as a platform not because of portability or personalization, but because of its increased intuitiveness.” ii

Three recent breakthroughs have brought AR/VR into viability in the workplace: Transparent interfaces that let users see virtual objects and information projected into their real environment, instead of blocking out reality with a wraparound simulation. Ubiquitous access , meaning wireless headsets that are always connected to the Internet or to enterprise networks and aren’t tethered to a bulky PC or console.

Finally, adaptive engagement in which users can control the data feeds in their virtual environments—for example, keeping 3D disruptions from popping up during a virtual (or real) meeting. AR and VR for work shouldn’t be thought of as putting on a bulky headset and tuning out the rest of the world, but rather having timely information and realistic scenarios projected into your real-world workspace—wherever that may be at the moment.

What this means for IT AR and VR require robust infrastructure. Networks, especially wireless ones, should be high-bandwidth and rock solid. Storage and rendering requirements for digital realities are staggeringly large—10 to 20 times what a similar view in today’s HD format needs. iii A 360-degree view in VR requires storing and rendering each video viewpoint so that as the user turns their head, the video follows them. Cloud storage and processing will likely prove a cost-effective solution, but a modernized data sovereignty strategy could provide huge returns.

Digital reality should also be integrated with core business processes. AR/VR headgear manufacturers are designing APIs that tie core technologies and business processes into digital reality experiences. But there’s an upside: analytics. It is currently possible to track the gaze of an individual wearing a digital reality headset and then, to discern user intent, analyze the data this tracking generates.

One of the challenges facing the technology in the work world: cord length. But battery-powered wireless headsets are evolving, as are the batteries themselves. These systems don’t require additional motion-tracking devices, either, thanks to “inside-out tracking” by which the headset scans its environment to map its own position and surroundings.

Global impact A survey of Deloitte leaders across 10 international regions found that the expected timeframe for digital reality adoption is a bit further out than most other technology trends featured in Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2018 report . But the opportunities to drive organizational efficiency, make dangerous occupations safer, and augment worker skillsets through virtual and augmented realities are being explored in Africa, Australia, and Latin America, in particular.

In Africa and Latin America, mining companies and other high-risk industries are beginning to experiment with the technology to help mitigate safety risks. Australia is already deploying digital reality in the entertainment and retail sectors , while real estate, financial services, and education are exploring opportunities as well . On the European front, organizations are piloting the technology in a variety of contexts, including infrastructure maintenance and retail, although the main barrier to widespread adoption is the low adoption rate of ultra-broadband networks.

Besides cost concerns, Deloitte leaders cite the dramatic cultural shift required to work in virtual worlds—specifically in Africa and the Middle East—and a need to bring new skills into the workforce, particularly in Southern Europe and Latin America.

Where do you start? Holding out for perfection, or waiting until everyone else is using it, could be a mistake with digital reality tech. The pace of innovation is accelerating, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Enterprise use cases are driving much of the development of new capabilities.

Starting today, you can explore the new landscape of digital reality, such as the image capture and mapping equipment or the gaming engines—such as Unreal and Unity—used to create interactive simulations and virtual environments.

As you explore your own organization’s possibilities, take a look around your sector: What are your competitors doing? What business goals are companies in adjacent sectors pursuing through AR and VR? Your suppliers, vendors and partners may be willing to share experiences and provide perspectives, and may even pursue joint case studies and pilot programs.

The popular perception of digital reality is that it’s for recreational use. But like personal computers, laptops, smartphones and the Internet, AR and VR are being developed and already put to use by companies that have seen its potential to transform business at the enterprise level from the start.

Explore Digital Reality further in Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2018 report .

i Deloitte interview with Ash Jhaveri, vice president of business development at Facebook and Oculus, October 30, 2017. ii Deloitte interview with Steven Kan, head of global strategy, AR and VR, Google, September 27, 2017. iii Andy Mills, “Virtual reality drives data center demand for storage,” Enmotus Blog, February 8, 2017.

This story was produced by the WIRED Brand Lab for Deloitte.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Themes about the next 50 years of life online
• 2. Internet pioneers imagine the next 50 years
• 3. Humanity is at a precipice; its future is at stake
• 4. The internet will continue to make life better
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

The comments in the following section are a sharp contrast to the utopian visions of equity and advancement described above. Whereas some see the future of the internet as a great equalizer, others warn that technology can just as easily be used for control and exploitation.

Inequality on the rise: The growing divide between haves and have-nots

The majority of respondents to this study are in agreement that digital life is likely to improve the lives of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder over the next few decades. A large share of those who predicted that internet use will produce change for the worse for most individuals over the next 50 years expressed concerns that an extension of current trends will lead to a widening economic divide that leaves the majority in the dust of the privileged class.

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “The question ignores the growing and disastrous division between poor, disenfranchised populations and wealthy, privileged ones. There may be huge improvements in some people’s lives and negative impacts for many, many more – pollution, toxins from waste generated by electronic media, deregulation of labor conditions for workers in the high-tech industries, deterioration of support systems and social infrastructure and so on.”

Michael Kleeman , a senior fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and board member at the Institute for the Future, wrote, “Because of the economic disparity the new technologies will be used with those with access to more resources, financial and technical. The digital divide will not be one of access but of security, privacy and autonomy.”

Jillian C. York , director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented, “I don’t believe that technology will be a net negative; rather, I worry and suspect that it will make life better for some of us but worse for others. Much of the technology coming out of Silicon Valley aims to serve elites, when we should be aiming toward equality for all.”

Zoetanya Sujon , a senior lecturer specializing in digital culture at University of Arts London, commented, “In my view, and drawing from the growth of global big tech companies and decreased pluralization of global platforms, I believe that in 50 years, the economic and cultural divides between rich and poor, developed and developing nations, technologically advanced and disadvantaged will continue to grow. These divides are serious and already take place within urban centers, between developing and developed nations, and between rural and urban areas, to name only a few sites of division. Thus, for those with capital, including access to new technologies and the literacies that come with them, life will likely involve wearable and ubiquitous computing based on internet and platformed communication…. These kinds of tools will likely be available only to those with the economic and cultural capital to access them.”

John Laudun , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “The next 50 years is going to be great for a percentage of humans smaller than the percentage of humans for whom things will probably get worse. We continue to forget that 75% of the world’s populations are effectively peasants, individuals (living in families, groups, etc.) who engage in subsistence agriculture. Too often when we project into the future we imagine ourselves, people like us or the people we think we see. But there are hosts of groups that we do not see. How will technological advances, and their various implementations, help or hurt them? No one, for example, could have predicted the explosion in micro-transactions connecting villagers to one another and a wider world thanks to the cellphone.”

Christopher Leslie , lecturer in media, science and technology studies at South China University of Technology, wrote, “There will be many opportunities for consumers and entrepreneurs in the internet of the future, but the technology will mostly enhance the businesses and countries that already are ahead. It seems likely that a different kind of networking technology, perhaps truly decentralized and certainly separated from telecommunications companies, will be developed to challenge the inequalities fostered by today’s use of internet technology. The general trend in the technological society to this point has been that more people have received more benefits to their lives. This is in terms of any meaningful metric: health care, education, political participation, sense of self. This will continue into the next 50 years. However, the inequalities perpetrated by the modern use of digital technology will mean that not all people will benefit. The overall trend will be positive, but some ways of life and some categories of people will suffer a detriment that may be extreme.”

John Willinsky , professor and director of the Public Knowledge Project at Stanford Graduate School of Education, explained why he selected the automated survey response that digital life will be mostly beneficial for most individuals’ lives over the next few decades: “I say ‘mostly for the better’ as both praise and critique, because the ‘mostly’ speaks to the continuing inequities in the distribution of the ‘better,’ and – while ‘mostly’ suggests a majority of benefits – it will take a great deal of concern and effort to ensure that that those benefits are distributed with some lesser degree of inequality than previously to more people and, by the same token, more people need to participate in the processes behind that distribution.”

Fernando Barrio , director of the law program at the Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro, Argentina, commented, “The ubiquitous-tech society will imply a better, more enjoyable life for those being part of it. Wearable technology, tech implants, AI-medicine, autonomous robot workers and companions and many other coming technologies will allow humans to reach new limits of what to do and expect. However, the question is, with an ever-increasing income concentration at global scale in almost every country, how many members of the society will be able to be part of the enjoyment of that ubiquitous, hyper-connected, AI-tech society?”

James Scofield O’Rourke , a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, commented, “People will be ‘mostly better off’ in 50 years’ time, largely because of our ability to apply things we already know, i.e., the decoding of the human genome, our understanding of the fragility of our planetary environment and more. The singular exception will be that group of people who have no assets, no education, no opportunity, and as a result, no hope. They will be reduced to dependence on the kindness of neighbors, strangers and the government.”

Elizabeth Feinler , the original manager of the ARPANET Network Information Center and an Internet Hall of Fame member, said, “As the internet matures, I hope the big guys will remember the little guys. As a pioneer, I remember when the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brins and countless other famous and successful entrepreneurs were working out of garages or dorm rooms, often penniless but with a lot of perseverance behind a great idea. Leave room for the next little guy – the one who comes up with a great pair of socks, or produces lovely artwork, or sells that gizmo you can’t live without for $19.95, or develops a security system that works, or cures cancer or Alzheimer’s – to hang their shingles on the internet too. True, one of them may challenge your greatness – it’s the American way – but don’t crowd them out. Just make your own service, product or idea better, and enjoy the challenge.”

Michael Veale , co-author of “Fairness and Accountability Designs Needs for Algorithmic Support in High-Stakes Public Sector Decision-Making” and a technology policy researcher at University College London, responded, “Technological change will improve some of the lowest standards of living in the world today, but beyond a certain point (e.g., provision of basic needs), it is unclear who will benefit. It is likely that technological change will force countries to reconsider how they measure welfare, progress and societal benefit, and this is likely to differ strongly across different countries and cultures.”

Ryan Sweeney , director of analytics at Ignite Social Media, commented, “Technology has the potential to further divide humans on a class level. Those who can afford the technology will have significant benefits from wealth-maintenance to extension of life. Those who cannot afford the technology will likely remain disconnected or will not receive the same level of service as those who can.”

Ian O’Byrne , an assistant professor at the College of Charleston whose focus is literacy and technology, said, “The main challenge is whether or not we have the social, political and educational imagination to adapt and effectively use these technologies. If we do not (and history has shown this again and again), then a relative few will be able to leverage these new powers and tools, while the remainder may be worse off for it.”

A policy director with the European Commission wrote, “Millions of people in the world still do not have access to clean water, education, clean energy, fast and cheap communication and the health and welfare benefits that are associated with that (not to mention economic growth and job potential).”

Peter Asaro , a professor at The New School and philosopher of sci-tech and media who examines artificial intelligence and robotics, commented, “The penetration of the internet deeper into the physical and social world will benefit some greatly, many to some degree and most little or negatively. Most of the benefits will go those who have already benefited from the internet. Some benefits will be derived from aggregating and analyzing the collected data, but few people will see the connection.”

Joshua Loftus , assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University and co-author of “Counterfactual Fairness in Machine Learning,” commented, “I expect inequality to continue growing in each new dimension. For many in the world it will be a long and drawn-out apocalypse. For others it will be an augmented reality wonderland of hyperstimuli and consumption. It will be better for some and worse for others. For non-humans, for example, mass extinction will probably accelerate.”

Simeon Yates , director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Science at the University of Liverpool, said, “I sadly believe that we will see a world of digital haves and have-nots – where the majority have access but utilize a limited set of services (as is the case with written literacy).”

An associate professor of sociology at a major university in Japan responded, “The digital divide will become a more serious problem. Most tech companies will make apps and digital tools for people who easily utilize internet and digital devices and also for English users. This creates an illusion of ubiquitous internet, but the infrastructure will tend to be made for only those people. This could create huge social problems.”

A program director for technology at a U.S. Ivy League school said, “Adoption of technology will be uneven, and the rich will get richer. Surveillance technology will keep the masses from organizing for social and political movements. The rich will get richer.”

Life will not be better for most individuals if current trends expand, extend

A number of respondents expressed concerns over the power of large technology companies, the rise of platforms that offer services in exchange for data and marketing dollars, the potential for growing lack of human agency in the algorithm age, the potential loss of jobs as humans are replaced in workplaces, and other worries over emerging potential negatives of digital life.

Amy Webb , founder of the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at New York University, commented, “In 2018, there are nine companies (which I call the Big 9) that control the future of humanity, because they are building the future of artificial intelligence. Over the next five decades, we will see widespread consolidation in the fields of AI and digital platforms. We’ll trade convenience for choice and find that we have far fewer options for everything, from how fast to drive in our cars to which restaurants we’ll choose for dinner. Our professional and personal lives will be tethered to a provider – likely Amazon or Google – which will maintain and run our smart homes, hospitals, schools, city infrastructure and offices. We will probably see a vast new digital divide: The wealthiest among us will have the privilege to remain anonymous if they choose, while everyone else will submit to continual surveillance for marketing and business intelligence. Importantly, during the next five decades, America will have fallen far behind China, primarily because of China’s long-term, comprehensive AI strategy and its integration into other state-level initiatives. In the U.S. commercial interests are what propel AI, platforms and digital media. The interests of for-profit companies don’t necessarily align with the best interests of democracy, our country or humanity. With significant investment in these fields, there is tremendous pressure to generate commercial products and services, and the speed required doesn’t leave room to ask critical questions about a technology’s impact on individuals, communities or our society. If we do not change the developmental track of AI in the present, the probability of negative scenarios will increase during the next 50 years. Collectively, we fetishize the future. Few are actively mapping longer-term outcomes, and that is a big mistake.”

Anita Salem , systems research and design principal at SalemSystems, wrote, “Without a concerted effort to design these new systems ethically and responsibly with a goal of improving the human condition, we will see a world of increasing power disparity with capitalism and corporations at the top. Worldwide, we already see a rise in authoritarianism, a weakening of democracy and the dominance of transnational corporations. In the United States, we are also seeing a shift in demographics and economics that looks to further weaken democratic ideals of freedom (but not for people of color), identity (a corporation has human rights) and free speech (journalists are the enemy of the people).”

Roland Benedikter , co-director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Eurac Research Bozen, South Tyrol, Italy, responded, “The overall problem is democracy. The internet as we know it has been invented by and within open societies. If there will be a multipolar global order in the full sense, it might be partially nondemocratic, thus lowering basic rights and opportunities as compared to now.”

Simeon Yates , director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Science at the University of Liverpool, said, “I see a much greater commercial role in the digital sphere unless net neutrality can be enforced. As more of the internet is served up through walled garden/gated community platforms and apps – digital places whose access is commercially or organizationally constrained – there are inherent threats to open society and democracy. This is ironically the opposite of the hopes of the internet’s founders and first users. If we want to see an internet for all – for the many, not the few – we need to realize that this will need regulation and policy. I see the internet becoming ever more part of politics and policy on many fronts therefore.”

Jillian C. York , director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented, “I expect to see the world’s platform companies break up, and a more diverse array of platforms to enter the market. This may lead to more silos, but it could also create safer spaces for communication for various communities…. As for laws, it remains to be seen – but I worry that if our democracy continues down the road it’s on, the internet will suffer.”

Danny O’Brien , international director for a nonprofit digital rights group, commented, “My hope will be that these tools will be at the control of individual users, not hidden or concentrated in smaller, more powerful groups.”

Kenneth Cukier , author and data editor for The Economist, commented, “These tools in the hands of the populists and authoritarians of 2018, in 50 years’ time, mean that if safeguards are meagre, a surveillance state is possible. Freedom might be winnowed even if most people feel better off. This could be a horrible irony.”

Andrian Kreye , a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Germany, said, “Current conditions will solidify monopoly capitalism, making it harder and harder for users to escape the grip of the grid and for newcomers to break into the business. The internet as we know it in 2019 is the basic structure for a world based on an AI-driven infrastructure…. User interfaces will be speech- and thought-based, turning users even more into nodes of an ever-expanding network. For most people, these technological advances will increase convenience and ease of use. For corporations using networked AI this will mean a wealth of data and constant contact with a consumer base that can be steered and nudged with increasing ease.”

Jonathan Taplin , director emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, wrote, “At the very moment when the bottom-up networked revolution is affording us the opportunity to disperse power closer to the people, both our politics and our business are concentrating power in fewer hands. We can change this, but we need to act now.”

Brian Harvey , lecturer on the social implications of computer technology at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “Just in this past year, there has been a big increase in popular understanding of who profits from social media technology. If that new understanding leads to rebellion, perhaps the internet can return to the anarchist utopia that was first envisioned. But if it fizzles out, people will still be bought and sold by social media.”

Peter Levine , associate dean for research and professor of public affairs at Tufts University, wrote, “Right now, the internet seems to be eroding journalism as a profession, giving a few big companies and governments (like China’s) more social control, and balkanizing citizens. Those trends may continue, or they may provoke a civic backlash that yields a better internet.”

Mauro D. Ríos , an adviser to the eGovernment Agency of Uruguay and director of the Uruguayan Internet Society chapter, responded, “The internet will reach very advanced technological development but will lose freedom due to economic and political interests over the network. It is possible that the international community will develop a parallel network or establish technical environments on the internet that are beyond the control of governments or organizations.”

[now being]

A professor of computer science expert in systems at a major U.S. technological university wrote, “On the one hand, the future technological changes will lead to positive societal changes, if the political power in control of knowledge is benevolent and progressive. On the other hand, if the political power is repressive (e.g., the Orwellian vision described in his book ‘1984’), then the technological changes will result in significant negative changes, possibly a dystopian society. In other words, technological changes are enablers that can be used for good or for evil. The question of whether they will better or will worsen an individual’s life is not a technological question, but a political one, of how technological advances will be used. My hope is that the political forces will evolve toward bettering individual lives.”

Ramon Lopez de Mantaras , director of the Spanish National Research Council’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, said, “Unfortunately, with the arrival of the internet we did not only open a box that contains good and positive things. We opened a box that is causing lots of problems. We are living in an accelerated pace that leaves us less and less time for reflection. We are on a train running at very high speed that is taking us nobody knows where. Are we happier now than 30 years ago? I do not think so! And when one reads about the social credit initiative in China one should be really afraid. In summary, there will be more stress due to living an accelerated life and real threats to our freedom and privacy.”

Mike O’Connor , a retired technologist who worked at ICANN and on national broadband issues, commented, “I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the planet in general and digital life in specific. The undercurrent of the present day pits earnest volunteers (like me) against ever more sophisticated and well-funded corporations and governments. I believe that 2050 will find us in a dystopian environmental nightmare in which the internet I love has become a devastatingly powerful tool of suppression and mind control. The next 50 years will see the end of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the descent back into a much more authoritarian era. Techniques being beta tested in current politics (e.g., Russian meddling, Brexit, Trump) will be viewed as unsophisticated trial runs of control technologies built by the very best minds – people who are well compensated for their efforts. While I’m a fan of ‘plucky opponents,’ I don’t believe the forces of good stand a chance against the gathering intellectual and ethical darkness.”

Ken Birman , a professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University, responded, “Bill Gates often points out that by any statistical metric you can define, global quality of life and also quality of life in the Western world have risen enormously for many decades now. I see no reason for this to change in the 2050 time period, with one major exception: Some countries, notably China, seem to be viewing the internet as a massive technology for spying on their own population and on much of the rest of the world. Russia seems to view the internet as a playground for disruption. North Korea has used it to extort money and to harass their enemies. So I do worry that research on strong ways to protect security and privacy, and to protect against intrusion, needs a great deal of additional emphasis and investment, to enable the bright future Bill Gates sees and also to protect against this sort of harassment and meddling.”

An engineer and chief operating officer for a project automating code said, “The internet will become a highly regulated and monitored form of communication with its main aim to promote consumerism. People’s use of it in seeming information will be mined to an intimidating extent, putting severe limitations of personal freedoms. People wanting social change, which will mean equity and justice will withdraw from electronic communications. The use of encoding will eventually be made illegal except for those with sociopolitical power.”

An expert in algorithms and bias and assistant professor artificial intelligence at a major European university wrote, “At some moment the question of who owns or controls the algorithms will become the prime question for humanity, and at the moment algorithms will become uncontrollable by humans we will face a whole lot of other questions. Whether that will happen in the next 50 years or earlier, or later, who knows? But, that there is this trend of algorithms replacing/controlling any interaction between humans and the world (and other humans) is undeniable and already happening: Facebook controls much of our social communication, Google manages our lives and information consumption, Twitter mediates our chit-chat, and with the rise of modern smartphones the control of visual information (e.g. Google Lens) is coming. And this is just the beginning. Algorithms will take more control over our lives (health, music preferences, job choices, satisfaction, etc.) and the world (markets, cities, deployment of resources and much more).”

One of the world’s foremost experts in the sociology of human-technology interaction said, “I fear not only an integration but surveillance so that there is a chill on political and social expression. Already you see the start of this kind of regime in China. Social control in exchange for convenience is what I mostly fear.”

What’s going to happen if humans become cyborgs or AI gets smarter than us?

A share of respondents reflected on the potential dark side of recent innovations – a world in which neural implants help connect people’s brains to the internet – and shared concerns about the prospects of technology moving toward and beyond human-level artificial intelligence.

Frank Tipler , a mathematical physicist at Tulane University, commented, “We may see human-level AI within 50 years. Once the human level is reached, AI will automatically take off to superhuman levels. Humans will cease to be the dominant life form in the universe. If humans accept their loss of being the dominant life form, then AI technology can raise human standards of living. If humans join AIs as downloads, this will also be good. But if humans decide to make war or enslave the AIs, it will be very bad. I’m optimistic, hence my answer that internet evolution over the next 50 years will be mostly positive in individuals’ lives.”

Erik Huesca , president of the Knowledge and Digital Culture Foundation, based in Mexico City, said, “The greatest point of tension between humans and intelligent entities (not necessarily robots) will be the values of our current society, privacy and respect for democracy and the diversity of communities and cultures. If systems whose objective is efficiency interact in the social field with humans, there can be seeds for the type of totalitarianism that we are seeing today. The idea of the individual in societies highly linked by networks can disappear. Technologies will be aimed at development of superhumans with genetic modification. (It is cheaper to modify an organism than to produce entities from other materials.) The values of human life will change. The new sciences of life will be the key point of knowledge development.”

Frank Feather , futurist and consultant with StratEDGY, commented, “Thinking ahead 50 years, it is highly likely that DigiTransHumanoids, who will replace humans as a species, will be able to network and communicate directly with each other on a brain-to-brain basis, via the cosmic wavelengths that carry today’s platforms. As such, no platforms will be needed. There may well be a Google-like cosmic platform that prevails if Google itself transforms itself into that platform. We need to understand that each and every technology is an extension of the human species and its abilities – abilities that are vastly underdeveloped. DigiTransHumans will be vastly more advanced in our next evolution, and they will unify this planet and reach out into the cosmos from where they first originated.”

Michael Dyer , an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, commented, “One of the greatest existential threats to humanity will be, not AI, but General Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Our humanity is based in our bodies, not our minds (when comparing ourselves to synthetic entities with similar or greater mental capabilities). Synthetic GAI entities will not be born; they will not grow from children into adults; they will not grow old and die. They will not urinate or defecate. They will not have sex. Change the embodiment of mind and you change what it means to be human. GONE would be the following: Disney movies (since no children), romantic novels (since no sex) and all experiences based on bodily desires (recharge batteries vs. good meal at a restaurant). If GAI is allowed then elimination of humanity will occur, either via general spread of GAI entities or by development of a single, super-intelligence GAI.”

Alexey Turchin , existential risks researcher at Foundation Science for Life Extension, responded, “If there will be life on Earth at all, that is assuming a positive outcome, we will live in the world dominated by global benevolent superintelligence, where there will be no border between VR, AI and individual minds of fleshy humans and uploads.”

Anita Salem , research and design principal at SalemSystems, shared a dystopian post-human scenario, writing, “In 50 years, digital tools, if used at all, will be used for entertainment only. Video and chat apps will be created by the corporate powers to shape opinions and behaviors of the masses and will be widely and publicly displayed. The Dark Web will be alive as a black market and revolutionary system used by the outcasts. Organic/chemical communication systems will be used by corporations for real work and they will form the underlying structure of computing systems. They will be embedded in everything, including humans. This will be the ‘post-human’ era, where the human/machine interface is embedded at birth, invisible and pervasive.”

What if having less work leads to the opposite of the ideal ‘life of leisure’?

A share of respondents shared thoughts about a world with fewer jobs for humans.

Mark Maben, a general manager at Seton Hall University , wrote, “Right now, we are ill-prepared to manage how artificial intelligence will disrupt the nature of work across the globe, both emotionally and institutionally. Humanity has to plan immediately for the loss of literally billions of jobs around the world as AI and automation replace people in all types of work. This means governments must step up to provide for displaced workers through benefits like a universal basic income, health care, retirement security AND guiding people to accept a new definition for what it means to perform meaningful work. Parenting, volunteering, lifelong learning, mentoring, leisure, artistic creation and other pursuits must be raised in stature and acceptance. But the response to economic disruption so far has been nationalism, authoritarian, scapegoating, violence against ‘the other’ and denial of what’s to come. While I believe in the potential for technological progress to improve our lives, I lack faith in our ability to successfully manage that progress for social good. As E.O. Wilson wrote, ‘We have created a “Star Wars” civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’ That’s a dangerous combination, one that presents a real risk for individuals.”

Justin Amyx , a technician with Comcast, said, “It can be potentially catastrophic to low-wage, unskilled workers. Without a plan to do something to mitigate that displacement – of machines taking people’s jobs – poverty may prevent access therefore stifling growth. If we do resolve to account and accommodate for these potential issues there is no telling where technology can possibly go.”

Marc Noble , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “AI, if properly developed, will take over a lot of jobs. A lot of IT positions will disappear; programming will be relegated to a very small number if at all. AI will develop its own language and communications channels that will be faster, more efficient and a lot more secure. The need for old industries and fossil fuels will be sharply curtailed.”

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested a movement toward planned creation of non-technological job positions as work evolves. She wrote, “Distributed computing, embedded into ‘natural’ interfaces, will create a seamless integration of access to networked information and experience in the physical, analog world. The hazard is that the greater the integration, the higher the risks of codependence. I would advocate for physical labor (urban gardens and forests, elder care, child care, local food production and preparation) to be part of the emerging social structure. Free human beings from labor that is meaningless, but give them work with a purpose. Keep in mind that skills like plumbing and electrical work cannot be outsourced and that infrastructure is massively physical and built on stacks of systems that have to work together. We should always have a way to sustain ourselves without networked technologies. Reduce our path dependencies, fragment the supply chains, resist monopoly controls, change the values of the culture toward sustainable and equitable human and animal life. Someday the idea of huge profits and private control of massive wealth will look as grotesque as the idea of heads on pikes and guillotines do now.”

An assistant professor of social justice based in the U.S. wrote that in a world with fewer jobs for humans thanks to networked AI and other transformations, “Technology will end humanity, as people will no longer strive to be the best they can be.”

Who’s really in charge here – humans or automated digital systems?

Concerns over slipping into a world with no real human agency were expressed by some respondents.

Marc Brenman , managing partner at IDARE LLC, said, “The internet will become transparent to us. We will think our way through it, using implanted devices. There will be no privacy. Everything will be remembered, and there will be no forgiveness. Virtual reality will become reality. The very concept of ‘virtual’ will almost disappear. People will be able to distinguish fact from fiction even less than we do today. Unscrupulous people will use this technology to create our obedience. Free will will be eroded. We will surrender even more of our time to bread and circuses, celebrities, puppies and kittens. We will live so long that life itself will be a burden. Machines will do everything better than we can, including creating art.”

An assistant professor of social justice at a U.S. university wrote, “People will become helpless and rely on tech for almost everything. Tech will take over almost all routine activities, but this will not empower most. Rather, tech will serve as a prison.”

John Sniadowski , a director for a technology company, wrote, “To the vast majority of internet users, the internet is akin to making a cup of tea. You simply want to fill the kettle from the tap, switch on the kettle, boil the water and pour it onto the tea. They don’t ever think about the infrastructure that makes that possible. This means that people will adopt any internet that makes life easier without thinking of the consequences.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “I fear that we will end up in an extremely dystopian situation where autonomous AI makes decisions for society with significant disparities between the haves and the have-nots. This is not inevitable, but I think controlled self-learning and self-management is necessary for a beneficial contribution to society.”

A strategy consultant wrote, “People will lose individuality and cultures will die, merged into one Eurocentric mass with threats to trade, aid and international access. Minorities will be corralled and shamed online into silence and acceptance as online speech and media overwhelms typical law. Copyrights will be enforced beyond fair use, leaving entertainment and information heavily blockaded from the poor.”

An anonymous respondent predicted that the public will just tune into entertainment to cope with the new realities of this dystopia others have described, writing, “Oh, brave new world that has such addictive pacification tools available. People will not be better or worse off. They will be distracted from their situation with individualized circuses.”

Corporate self-regulation is seen as unlikely remedy due to market capitalism

The 50th year of computer networking has been one of commonly expressed disillusionment with the current state of affairs online. A large share of respondents to this canvassing say that profit-based enterprises’ domination over the network of networks and thus the world – now and in future – is what concerns them most.

Cliff Zukin , professor of public policy and political science at the School for Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, said, “Looking backward, there are two axioms that have stood the test of time: 1) Information is power and 2) Power corrupts. Fifty years into the future – by then I expect everything will be global and individual at the same time – we either won’t be here, or we will have figured it out. If we figured it out, there will be no independent states, nor much difference between human and robot. All big players will be multinational corporations. Borders won’t exist; countries electing their own leaders won’t exist. We will have a governance structure of the internet determined by those powerful enough to make that happen. In other words, the Empire will win.”

Douglas Rushkoff , a professor of media at City University of New York, responded, “When technological development is determined solely by the market we get some unintended consequences. Barring a major shift in emphasis away from corporate capitalism, the benefits of any technological development will probably be determined by how aggressively one company or another pursues its goals. Some technologies will be less bad, because the manufacturers want to be less harmful. But even those outside traditional venture funding, who attempt to create beneficial technologies, will be subject to the supply chain and platform limitations of the mainstream technologies. So it’s going to be really hard to develop any capital-intensive tools that don’t serve capital over people.”

Christian Huitema , internet pioneer and consultant focused on privacy online, previously Internet Architecture Board president, chief scientist at Bell Research and Microsoft distinguished engineer, commented, “We developed a wonderful communication technology only to see it captured by large corporations and governments. It will take several generations for humanity to regain control…. The ad-funded business model evolved in generalized corporate surveillance. It requires more attention to drive more revenue; AI-driven user interactions are providing that. This AI + ads feedback loop is creating digital drug addicts.”

Seth Finkelstein , consulting programmer at Finkelstein Consulting, commented, “I, for one, welcome our new platform overlords. I see almost no check on the tendency toward monopoly control, or at the very best, oligarchy involving a handful of corporate behemoths. It’s sobering to realize that the very few serious restrictions that exist come from major nation-states (i.e., China’s own desires for internal control). That’s the level of power needed for an effective opposition. Looking at the history of the 20th century, it’s entirely possible that the 21st century will see some massive convulsion similar to the Great Depression or a World War. And the aftermath of that event (presuming civilization still exists) could entail strong antitrust laws that would severely limit the data-mining business models of many of today’s major internet companies. It’d be a horrible way to get that outcome, but if the past is any guide, one of the few ways it would ever happen.”

Walid Al-Saqaf , senior lecturer at Sodertorn University, member of the board of trustees of the Internet Society, commented, “With consolidation on the internet as an ongoing threat to democracy and fairness to citizens, there will be a greater tendency to move to alternative decentralized solutions that aim at empowering citizens more directly as bitcoin did. That being said, I expect a pushback by governments and conglomerates that will fight to remain in power, leading to an inevitable clash of wills. At the end of the day, it will be mass adoption of which technology that will determine who will win.”

John Leslie King , computer science professor, University of Michigan, and a consultant on Cyberinfrastructure for the NSF CISE and SBE directorates for several years, commented, “It is hard to know exactly what will happen with power-reinforcing technologies in a climate that is tending to exacerbate wealth and income inequalities, given the proven influence of wealth and income on the social order. It is not crazy to imagine IT reinforcing the power of an elite that already has a lot of power, especially if that elite tends to be aggrandizing power to begin with. Many IT proponents think that some version of libertarian utopianism will arise to save the day by taking power from ‘the man’ and giving it to ‘the people.’ In my experience, ‘the man’ doesn’t want to lose power to ‘the people’ or anyone else. It is a mistake to think of technology as changing anything. Technology is, at most, one of several powerful forces that shape things.”

Michael Veale , co-author of “Fairness and Accountability Designs Needs for Algorithmic Support in High-Stakes Public Sector Decision-Making” and a technology policy researcher at University College London, responded, “As more and more tasks and interactions move online, political battles will become increasingly about the governance of the internet. The interconnectedness of this policy area means that new democratic institutions will be needed that are more global in nature. Some old-style, exclusive, powerful networks will find new forms online, as a new political elite are ‘digital-first.’ A consistent battle between centralization and decentralization is likely to continue, with AI tools enabling individuals and small firms to make and connect compelling services, and the value-add of a large design and management bureaucracy like Facebook will decrease. Competition rules might be in place to force services to work with each other, and the failure of the ad-supported funding model will mean that individuals are often paying a premium for enhanced access to exclusive networks of people and activities.”

A professor of computing and digital media expert in in artificial intelligence and social computing predicted, “The trends around democratic governance of technology are not encouraging. The big players are U.S.-based and the U.S. is in an anti-regulation stance that seems fairly durable. Therefore, I expect computing technologies to evolve in ways that benefit corporate interests, with little possibility of meaningful public response. As such systems take in more data and make bigger decisions, people will be increasingly subject to the systems’ unaccountable decisions and non-auditable surveillance practices. Soshanna Zuboff’s term ‘surveillance capitalism’ describes this state of affairs.”

A well-known journalist, blog author and leading internet activist wrote, “The future of technology depends on our willingness to break up the digital monopolists and reinstate the antitrust measures that prevent predatory pricing, market-cornering and other anticompetitive actions. In particular, companies must not be able to convert their commercial preferences against ‘adversarial interoperability’ (when a competitor or toolsmith makes a tool that modifies their products and services to make them better for the users, without the service provider or manufacturer’s permission) into a legal right to invoke the state to punish competitors who engage in this conduct.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Neo-liberal economic policies are resulting in increasing inequality and are unsustainable. If current trends continue, we will be living in a frightening dystopia, where personal data is collected and monetized by a small number of giant companies.”

Sanjiv Das , a professor of data science and finance at Santa Clara University, responded, “Technological revolutions improve the world not because they offer cool new toys but because they improve lives with better use of information…. These systems implement control through inequalities in knowledge, which lead to inequalities in wealth. Advances in technology unaccompanied by enlightened politics may delay progress and create turmoil in the short run. It may take a mutiny by a tech elite to move things forward in the right direction.”

Larry Lannom , internet pioneer and vice president at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), an expert in digital object architecture, said, “I am an optimist and I hope all of these advances will, overall, be for the better. But I worry about the ownership and use of ubiquitous computing and network technologies – will they be used to control the masses for the benefit of the few or will the benefits apply to all? It will almost surely be a mix of the two and we should be working today to ensure that the balance of advances will go to improving the general welfare.”

Serge Marelli , an IT security analyst, predicted that the future will bring, “More porn, more advertising, less privacy, fewer users’-citizens’ rights (e.g., right to privacy), more money for big corporations. And politics and democracy will fall short.”

Joël Colloc , professor at Université du Havre Normandy University and author of “Ethics of Autonomous Information Systems: Towards an Artificial Thinking,” responded, “The internet is no more than a tool of business polluted by advertising, and internet users are seen as customers to target with CRM and the place of the trade. This evolution is irreversible. The internet has become a space without ethics where the user is subjected to predators in a lawless, wild world. The netiquette rules must be updated to protect the rights of users and protect them against business spamming, which has become a plague.”

Manoj Kumar , manager at Mitsui Orient Lines, responded, “Advancement of knowledge/information availability has not only empowered humanity; it has also bewildered it. Rights are being abused. Commercial aspects are being hijacked by few strong companies, depriving the rest of fair opportunities. At some point, government and the public will have to rethink the options and ways of limiting their reach. Amazon and Alibaba will need to become more decentralized, less encompassing and less pervasive than what they are today. Google will need to scale back its analytical reaches to provide the freedom of choices…. The proliferation of the services sector is leading to erosion of the infrastructural economy, which is not sustainable. The coming years will require correction to these uncontrolled advancements in the digital world. The excesses of free access, unchained commerce and capital-free digitalization must be checked and the human element enhanced to provide the balance of the digital with human growth so that they are sustainable in the coming century.”

Wangari Kabiru , author of the MitandaoAfrika blog, based in Nairobi, commented, “As we have more owners of democracy through the net … this will result in new super-powers being created – now not nations but individuals and corporations.”

An assistant professor of media studies at a major U.S. university commented, “So long as the political economy of the internet is shaped by surveillance and the extraction of personal data from users who have no recourse, any democratic potential of these new communication technologies will be squandered.”

A professor emeritus at a major U.S. university’s school of information responded, “I remain hopeful, yet I am pessimistic. The U.S. form of capitalism has ‘won’; variations of it have been adopted in virtually all nation-states. It has yielded extraordinary technical innovation and economic development, progress in health care and medicine and overall improvements in living standards. Yet the benefits of this economic infrastructure are unequally distributed among the global population, and currently this benefit inequality seems destined to widen. Without a revolution or upheaval in values and structures, we can posit that AI becomes increasingly embedded in existing corporate/government organizations. With this evolutionary movement, the emergent structures can continue to become more centralized. The increased centralization of power is likely to be manifest as the larger platforms (corporate or government, the boundary may become more porous or blurred) exercise their economic power with greater control of individual choice and behavior. The control might be exerted either through a ‘Big Brother’ model, with more personal intervention at the highest level or a more Kafkaesque model, with AI aiding governance systems to make decisions using complex and hidden algorithms whose origins and evolutionary paths are not evident and can’t be dissected and understood.”

An infrastructure engineer for a leading social network company commented, “The push to monetize every aspect of digital life will continue, potentially causing large disruptions in the way we live. Not all these disruptions will be for the positive, particularly in the areas of human dignity and worth. As humans increasingly rely on social networks to make decisions, they will find themselves unable to resist the ‘mob of the moment,’ which will cause political and social problems far beyond our current ability to manage. These problems may well be met with attempts to ‘regulate’ expression to prevent mob actions from occurring, which could, in turn, lead to less-free societies – the opposite of what was intended in the invention and fostering of these technologies. The law of unintended consequences is likely to show itself in many other aspects of our lives, from sexuality to social order. We are building highly complex systems for one purpose, and failing to realize that complex systems, and their social offshoots, have unintended consequences far larger than anything we can imagine. The backlash to these movements, once the unintended consequences set in, are far greater than imagined, as well. The initial goals are often mixed, causing both a gain and loss in human dignity; the backlash is often mixed, as well. Whether dignity ratchets up or down is an open question at this point, but right now we are seeing human dignity ratcheted down, with human life being devalued en masse. The problem of ‘content wants to be free’ will need to be resolved, as well; if content is free, then the human effort put into creating that content is useless. This would reverse the trend of thinking being more important than doing, and virtual products being more valuable than physical ones. Until the worth of human effort can be balanced against the ability to move and copy information freely, the problem of paying people to create will remain.”

Some express the hope that the troubled times they foresee coming over the next few decades will eventually be overwritten by new social, economic and political processes and forces.

Ian Peter , pioneer internet activist and internet rights advocate, said, “The internet, after a period of utopian visions for a form of media that enhanced freedom of expression and communication, and improved access to information has followed the pattern of most forms of mass media by becoming dominated by a few players. As part of this domination a new financial model has emerged where internet users are the commodity, with their free or cheap usage funded by the use of their personal data for a variety of commercial uses. It is hard to see a change to this model occurring in the near future, and the internet as we know it is likely to continue this pattern for the rest of its lifetime. However, the internet will in time become old media like radio and television: New forms of media will emerge, and they are likely to be disruptive changes rather than some type of incremental development.”

Yvette Wohn , director of the Social Interaction Lab and expert on human-computer interaction at New Jersey Institute of Technology, commented, “Despite the internet being a system that enables peer-to-peer interaction, in the past 50 years we have seen it enable the corporate broker in scales unprecedented. Amazon, Facebook, Spotify and Uber are just few examples of these brokers. The roles of these brokers will slowly change so that they have less power and decentralization will bring back individual and small businesses.”

Sasha Costanza-Chock , associate professor of civic media at MIT, said, “Here I’ll offer an edge-case optimistic scenario. In 50 years, very high-speed symmetrical network connectivity will be freely available to all humanity, served by a mix of satellite, municipal networks and community-controlled cooperatives. For-profit ISPs will be a thing of the past. In a similar vein, key platforms and features of the net will no longer be controlled by for-profit companies. The dominant search engine will be run by the Wikimedia Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations. Social networking sites will be predominantly decentralized, federated, interoperable and powered by F/LOSS (similar to the way email functions, with many different providers, or the option to host your own, that all communicate with one another). Important services that benefit from network effects will be controlled by municipalities; for example, OpenHail ridesharing standard will be mandated by most municipalities so that ride services are no longer controlled by one or two large firms. Airbnb will be largely replaced by OpenHouse home sharing/hostel standards that enable many players in the market. Most importantly, new applications and services, and improvements to existing applications, will largely be developed through co-design methods that include intended end users in all stages of the design process. Co-design, or design justice, will have long since become the standard best practice across all areas of technology design and development. All AI and algorithmic decision systems will be monitored through standing intersectional audits by independent third parties and/or state agencies to ensure equitable distribution of outcomes rather than the reproduction of bias.”

An anonymous respondent said, “It is my hope that platforms/giants like Facebook, Google and Apple take more responsibility for their intrusion into our lives.”

Digital experiences threaten authentic human interaction

A share of respondents envisioned a future for many humans of self-imposed isolation in virtual worlds or personalized online algorithm-avatar-based relationships that seem more attractive than real-world, in-person social interactions. Some are concerned that the many hours people spend in controlled digital environments will influence them in a negative manner.

Luke Stark , a fellow in the department of sociology at Dartmouth College and at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, wrote, “Increasingly ubiquitous digital systems will do a good job of cocooning individuals within personalized augmented reality bubbles, but a terrible job at facilitating durable connections between us. At the same time, those connections will be surveilled, measured, tracked and represented back to us in ways that will aim to make us more economically productive and socially pliant in the guise of ‘wellness’ and ‘community.’ These systems will increase social inequality through their dividuating effects and contribute to environmental degradation through their use of natural resources – a Philip K. Dick dystopia come to banal life.”

John Lazzaro , retired professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of California, Berkeley, commented, “Fifty years from now, we will return to Steve Jobs’ original vision of computers as bicycles for the mind. As someone whose first job in technology was stocking shelves in a Radio Shack, years before the first personal computer appeared in the store, I am lucky enough to remember life before Steve articulated his vision. I then watched the vision’s ascent, and its current fall from grace. Today, as I walk down the street, and see people walking with their attention captured by their phone screen, I wonder how it all went so wrong. The only thing more depressing is the content that appears on their screen, and the cultural impact that the content has on us all. I believe the way forward starts with an acceptance of the human condition: We are an easily addicted species, and our evolutionary survival depended on prioritizing ‘thinking fast’ over ‘thinking slow’ in many contexts. Today, from the application user interface up to the economic ecosystem, platforms often exploit human foibles for profit, just as Marlboro Man and Virginia Slims billboards did in the 1970s. The first step in the journey of the next 50 years is reaching a consensus that an addictive approach to the digital world is not sustainable. And that the profit motive, like discipline, is a means to an end, and not an end to itself (to paraphrase Robert Fripp). Technology options can inform the journey’s second step. On the device level, Mark Weiser pointed us to the right direction with the concept of ubiquitous computing in 1988, and the many iterations of this concept in the decades since provide a good foundation for a world where a computer is not a cigarette. The mature mechanical devices (for example, venetian window blinds) and electro-mechanic devices (for example, electric shavers) in our lives do not foster addictive responses, and have benign business models. If we rethink the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of digital devices in our lives, we can remake them in the same positive way.”

Eliot Lear , principal engineer at Cisco, said, “On the whole the internet has proven to be a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. But it has also isolated us from our local communities.”

Ian Peter , pioneer internet activist and internet rights advocate, said, “We cannot dismiss two key factors in the current spread of internet usage: firstly the addictive and pervasive ‘always-on’ effect of unending access and multiple device usage, and secondly the effects on our capacity for critical thinking of having the ‘information’ we see determined by algorithms whose objective is not to inform us, but to capture or thoughts and minds. The decline of a capacity for critical thinking is a serious side effect of continued addictive internet usage that warrants more detailed scientific investigation.”

Evan Selinger , a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, commented, “Half a century from now, one of the biggest challenges will be what, in our book ‘Re-Engineering Humanity,’ Brett Frischmann and I call the right to be ‘off.’ Currently, it’s extremely hard for many of us to unplug. Unplugging is simply a luxury that most of us can’t afford. As internet connectivity expands to more and more interconnected devices, a robust Internet of Things infrastructure will keep expanding. The expansion will be fueled by a desire to acquire more personal and collective data and the ideal of ubiquitous algorithms acting upon integrated and aggregated big data will become harder to decouple from smart living. In such a world, where will people find protected spaces for thinking critically about whether they are being programmed to behave in ways that diminish their agency and capacity to determine whose interests the unshakable, augmented intelligences really serve?”

Kostas Alexandridis , author of “Exploring Complex Dynamics in Multi-agent-Based Intelligent Systems,” a research assistant professor at the University of the Virgin Islands, said, “In the next 50 years digital integration will become closely integrated with almost every aspect of our lives, from our simple household infrastructure to our transportation systems to our economic infrastructure to our social systems. Digital integration will change norms and institutions the same way that industrialization and electricity was integrated to our societies and global infrastructure in the beginning of the 20th century. From smart devices to smart cars to smart wallets to digital commerce to digital democracies, it is very likely that newer generations of citizens will develop a strong and tightly integrated dependency with networked infrastructure.”

Alper Dincel of T.C. Istanbul Kultur University, Turkey, wrote, “Technology’s first purpose is creating benefits, so apps and programs helping people to consume more. In this point of view, companies are losing their reliability. And we are losing quality of our life. Our life will be like 1990s pop music (not 1980s) with the effects of digital age – less meaningful and more fast.”

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “We will be shocked by the rapid acceleration of destabilizing influences and the rate at which civility can break down. Hopefully it can also be rebuilt with the same forces.”

Robert Bell , co-founder of Intelligent Community Forum, wrote, “I expect ubiquitous high-capacity connectivity in the rich and semi-rich worlds, and vast increases in it for the rest of the world’s people. Riding that connectivity will be learning algorithms that we integrate into our lives without a thought and deliver a vast range of services and information. Our interface with the network will evolve in ways that seem almost fantasy now. How well this turns out for us depends on getting a few things right. We must have a near bulletproof solution for security and identity online, and individual control over online privacy. Otherwise, the ‘pollution’ of cyberthreat, fraud and misinformation will choke off all progress. It is typically a crisis that forces us to confront the damage of such third-party effects as pollution. I have no idea what the crisis or crises will be, but as the network grows toward ubiquity, the potential damage of such a crisis grows with it. The great challenge that will come with all of this is to avoid being overwhelmed by the digital overlay of the physical world. We already see the early stages of it in daily life. I hope that humanity’s ability to adapt its environment to its own needs, rather than letting the digital environment control it, will continue to shield us from the worst effects. If we give people individual choice and the power to evolve rules to guide those choices in the right direction, we will manage to extract more benefit than harm from what we do.”

Dalsie Baniala , Telecommunications and Radiocommunications Regulator of Vanuatu, said, “Digital will divide lives (rich and poor). Rich people will interact with only rich people. Digital life for some people will also create artificial living and happiness. Digital life will cause no more human-to-human interactions but human machine-to-machine. Digital life creates no more human senses.”

Ross Stapleton-Gray , principal at Stapleton-Gray and Associates, an information technology and policy consulting firm, commented, “I suspect that the internet will evolve toward greater robustness and reliability through, in some ways, becoming more opaque, more like a ‘system of (system of systems)’ than the current ‘system of systems,’ and partly through increased demand (for some of this infrastructure) for authentication. I would not be surprised to see it genericize from ‘the Net’ or ‘cyberspace’ or ‘being online’ to just ‘connected,’ with an assumption that unless you were actively seeking to be ‘unconnected by choice,’ you’d always be connected/have connection. Like we plug things into any electrical socket without much caring how the electrons get there, we’ll assume connectivity. I’ve written some on how humans might relate to the Internet of Things , and that vision, that humans, like cars, or buildings, or any other object, will be seamlessly interacting with all of the other things, seems likely.”

Andrea Bonarini , a professor of AI and soft computing at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, said, “People will be less free and they will lose their ability to think and design, as we are already experiencing nowadays.”

Alistair Knott , an associate professor specializing in cognitive science and AI at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote, “AI systems that understand human language have potential for both good and bad impacts on society. The technologies are likely to be developed and used by large transnational companies with the aim of maximizing their profits. The likely effect of this is that people will increasingly fall into the role of ‘consumers’ of entertainment-like apps that encourage political apathy and discourage individualism.”

A professor emeritus expert on technology’s impacts on individuals’ well-being wrote, “Sadly I think we will find ourselves spending nearly all of our time immersed in internet-based activities. We are already spending, on the average, more than five hours a day using our smartphones and in 50 years smartphones will be replaced by smart devices, implants, etc. Relationships will suffer, as will our feelings of freedom. I already see the beginnings of an increased obsession to what is contained in the little box we carry with us 24/7/365 as opposed to the world that is right in front of us. It is Sherry Turkle’s dichotomy of SL (online life, or a ‘second life’) vs. RL (real life). SL appears to be winning already, and we are talking about what will happen in 50 years. It is happening now.”

A researcher and teacher of digital literacies and technical communication at a state university based in the U.S. Midwest responded, “In the future I expect to have network interactions embedded or subcutaneous on humans. We will have more interactions that are done in networked environments rather than in person. We may not even have to speak to a person for several days.”

Toby Walsh , a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and president of the AI Access Foundation, said, “By 2069, the real and virtual world will have blurred into one. It will be impossible to tell them apart. Whilst many will spend much of their time in this digital world, there will be an analog counterculture, celebrating a disconnected and old-fashioned existence.”

A digital accessibility consultant responded, “Augmented reality is likely to become part of the everyday experience. Transceivers in clothes or even under the skin will give people direct access to the internet all day every day wherever and whenever they find themselves. Thus, information will be available at all times and people will be able to control their environments through sending signals. It is unlikely that this will be done through thought alone for some time, but that is likely to come at some stage in the future. This is likely to lead to less interaction between people and certainly less personable interactions as people are likely to interact with information on the internet rather than each other. However, people with disabilities may gain somewhat as they will be able to gain access to information and services through the internet which they cannot do now because of the inaccessible nature of much of our current-day environments.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Connections between people are going to change. I think people will work from home more, having virtual meetings that are presented in 3D. I think this will produce a general depression among people having a lack of connection to others. In general, people will thrive; they won’t have to spend time shopping, commuting and doing menial tasks. But I think we are going to lose our connection to each other.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “The internet will be more and more integrated in our daily lives. However, I see a problem developing. The ability to connect to people all around the world is actually splitting us into smaller groups, not uniting us.”

Constant data monitoring and surveillance is a condition of hyperconnectivity

Many survey respondents pointed out that people are already trading privacy for convenience and perceived security and said they expect this trend to be magnified.

Ken Birman , a professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University, responded, “In the coming 50 years we will surely mature and invest in the needed technology to make this connected world a safer world, too. But today, that deficit stands out, and historians will be harsh when they judge us relative to this one aspect. The harm to entire cultures that oppressive monitoring and surveillance can cause is frightening, and those future historians will be in a position to document that harm – harm that people are actively inflicting today for all sorts of reasons. But I think the good will easily outweigh this harm over long periods.”

A professor expert in cultural geography, American studies and gender and sexuality said, “Unless we soon make policies to regulate data collection, privacy and use as well as the policies and practices laden into algorithms (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and so on)…. I fear we may wind up with a very small elite controlling most of the population.”

A professor of sociology at a major U.S. university responded, “It seems likely that in 50 years there will be very few free spaces left for citizens to engage with one another without corporate or government sponsorship/surveillance. This will have implications for content and, I suspect, make it very difficult for individuals to avoid corporate advertising and government-sponsored messaging.”

Craig Burdett , a respondent who provided no identifying details, wrote, “The greatest challenge facing society is determining how much privacy and autonomy we are willing to cede in exchange for convenience and features. How much of our personal lives are we willing to share? Even in 2018 the internet is nearly ubiquitous in first world countries. Users happily allowed Uber to track them 24/7 in exchange for having a car nearby when they needed it. And we’ve learned that Uber is far from virtuous. New York’s LinkNYC kiosks make Wi-Fi available at no cost in exchange for ad displays. And New Yorkers happily agree to the terms, which include allowing select third parties to contact them ‘with … express … consent.’ What feature will CityBridge offer to entice that consent? By 2069 some form of the internet will be embedded in almost every aspect of modern life. Elon Musk is already showing us how our cars will be always connected and can be updated (or disabled) without notice. And Tesla owners are happily allowing that intrusion in exchange for his cars. Extend that concept to every appliance and device we touch, from our door locks to our refrigerators, and imagine what privacy we might be enticed to give up for a smidge more convenience or efficiency. What if your refrigerator could evaluate and pre-order items before they were depleted, communicating directly with the supplier using your online account? And your front door will automatically know which delivery person (or robot) to allow inside based on the products the refrigerator (or the washing machine) ordered. Imagine never running out of toilet paper, or never again scurrying to the market at 7 a.m. for eggs. Is that sufficient incentive to share that information? I imagine devices like tablets will cease to be primarily standalone appliances. Their functionality will be embedded in homes and offices. The wall of your entryway will have a tablet that automatically adjusts the home to match your individual preferences: from adjusting the temperature in your bedroom to turning the teapot on when you arrive. And your power company will know not only when, but specifically who, is home based on that information. Each of these affordances is available by virtue of making information about your habits available to the device manufacturers. The internet, in and of itself, is benign – like a handgun. But the companies and individuals behind the services are the greatest threat.”

Angelique Hedberg , senior corporate strategy analyst at RTI International, said, “Our digital footprints – intentional, unintentional and simulated – will create troves of data that will be used to model and predict our behavior and as such will be used to maximize product and control by one or more entities. At the individual level this may feel like a loss of control. At the community and relevant transnational levels it will make room for enlightenment. We will benefit from the data of individuals we have never met just as we will be questioned about our own potential because of persons who never existed. The term for the greater good will take on new meaning as we balance personal privacy with human good.”

David Brake , senior lecturer in communications at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, said, “It is very likely that the (relatively) free and open internet that flourished across much of the world in the internet’s early days will continue to be threatened and, I fear, all but overwhelmed by an oligopoly of powerful platforms that will have ‘captured’ the time and attention of most internet users most of the time. Whether they are aware of it or not, almost everyone will live their lives continually being sorted into different categories depending on their behavior, much of which will be in some way digitally recorded, processed and shared. Some will react by attempting to remain constantly ‘digitally vigilant’ but this is not achievable in the long term, particularly as you will remain traceable through your interactions with others. And of course even an absence of digital profile or a carefully curated one sends its own signals.”

Betsy Williams , a researcher at the Center for Digital Society and Data Studies at the University of Arizona, wrote, “Privacy will be largely a luxury of the rich, who will pay extra for internet service providers, services and perhaps separate networks that protect privacy and security.”

David Sarokin , author of “Missed Information: Better Information for Building a Wealthier, More Sustainable Future,” commented, “The world of 2069 will be dotted with ‘privacy spaces’ in our homes, workplaces and public areas. These will be rooms where people can be assured that their words and activities are not being tracked in any manner. Outside of such spaces, our current notion of ‘privacy’ will have essentially disappeared.”

Thad Hall , a research scientist and coauthor of “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “Privacy will diminish further and further as facial recognition becomes more prevalent and people can be tracked through shopping areas and other public places and their personal data from search is linked to their face persona. You walk down the street and you are presented with specialized ads on a small screen in stores as you look at a rack of clothes. Data are used to differentiate between the rich and poor, whites and nonwhites, and biases are built into every customer experience. A person’s ability to be anonymous will cease and ad intrusions will become very common. These trends are likely to have political ramifications. Employers, retailers and others will be able to infer people’s political behaviors – or lack of participation – from data and discrimination will occur, much as it did in the early to mid-1800s, but with greater impact.”

Amali De Silva-Mitchell , futurist, responded, “When they realize the implications of data collection and profiling and tracking under various uses, people will group together to adjust to their value and comfort levels in this regard. This clustering will impact the quality of data and the quality of outcomes using algorithms. We will see tweaking of algorithms and data all the time, but poor ethics or low-quality updates are a real issue. Mobile technology in the palm of everyone’s hand will result in the small minority without it living at a disadvantage although they may have a lot of privacy.”

Bart Knijnenburg , assistant professor of computer science active in the Human Factors Institute at Clemson University, said, “Put the computational power, sensors and connectivity of a modern smartphone into every single object in your life. This is where I think the Internet of Things will go: You can ‘ping’ any object to learn its location (where is my thermos?), its status (is it full or empty?), past interactions (when did I last use it?) and connections with other devices (what brand of coffee did I fill it with and which device brewed that coffee?). It has very powerful applications, but also severe implications for our privacy. Note though that privacy concerns will not stop this future from happening. Privacy concerns have never stopped anything from happening.”

Anirban Sen , a lawyer and data privacy consultant, based in New Delhi, India, wrote, “The next 50 years will have both fights over big data and privacy as well as people desiring to use new apps. How data in different jurisdictions can be used/relied will be a problem and technology will be used to also fight technology. Integration would be holistic, but it would be tough to live un-networked.”

The co-founder of an information technology civil rights program wrote, “The internet will become as ubiquitous as electricity. That means sensors will be everywhere. Governments will engage in surveillance. But the same surveillance capabilities will allow you to get immediate help from 911, for example, with the operators knowing exactly the context of the call and the situation in progress. Moreover, currently 80% of 911 calls are prank calls. That number will go down to zero. There are other examples: If your car goes off the road into a cliff and you’re unconscious, the car will likely inform emergency responders automatically.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Technology, and the evolution of technology, hews closely to long-standing human hegemonies, priorities and identities. We will probably be more dependent than ever on networked technologies (such as autonomous cars and mapping), but we may also be increasingly wary of invasions of privacy and the way that the data we have been donating to large tech firms can be used in service of those aforementioned hegemonies. We will be even more instantaneously connected, and machines will make more decisions for us for our convenience, but I expect that we will also have a ‘reckoning moment’ in which we decide that our digital footprint is as important and protectable – as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for example.”

A principal researcher for one of the world’s top five technology companies commented, “The shape of the future could hinge on whether the world moves toward autocratic rule, as in China and Russia, and now with the U.S. and other governments considering that direction, or whether it extends democratic institutions to meet challenges in a world so complex that the public can’t engage meaningfully with many issues. In either case, privacy will be gone, with our lives visible to governments or corporations that – in the face of pushback such as GDPR – will raise the amount they pay us for full access. Only bad actors will refuse the offers they make; whether we will build systems to let bad actors operate with the current degree of cloaking is an open question.”

A professor of information science wrote, “When I’m feeling dystopian, I see a world that looks a little too much like ‘Mr. Robot’ or ‘Person of Interest,’ with government or private organizations knowing too much about us and having too much control over us. I’d like to believe that interconnectivity could, instead, provide us with more ubiquitous access to information and with the ability to establish connections and deliver services across space and time. I hope that increases in access to information and services will enable a fairer distribution of goods and one that allows those with fewer resources to achieve success in their endeavors.”

An anonymous respondent said, “The future will see our sacrifice of personal freedom as real-time surveillance becomes ubiquitous.”

A professor of artificial intelligence and cognitive engineering from a developing nation said, “There will be a loss of freedom, and anything you or your relatives did or said can be used against you. It cannot be predicted on what criterion you will be singled out for termination, purportedly to ‘save the planet.’”

Miguel Moreno-Muñoz , a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, epistemology and technology at the University of Granada, Spain, expressed hope, writing, “Perhaps a more sophisticated culture of privacy will emerge.”

Misinformation and mistrust must be addressed for positive internet growth

A number of respondents worried over misinformation, security and other concerns. They said that current issues in internet evolution and what seems to be quite an uncertain future will call for new methods of building trust and security.

Benjamin Kuipers , a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, wrote, “We will take for granted that there will be AIs that know an enormous amount about each of us, and we will trust them to protect our individual interests, consistent with the ethical requirements of society. One of the great contrasts between the positive and the negative possible futures will be the extent to which we can trust that available knowledge, and to what extent we can trust those AI knowers. In my ideal future, within the next 50 years we will have found ways to ensure trustworthiness in the infrastructure of knowledge and AI knowers. We will understand that there are ethical principles governing the use of knowledge about each of us as individuals, and the respect we must all have for the collected general knowledge that is a resource for humanity. We will trust that those ethical principles will be followed by the vast majority of people, corporations, robots and states, and that there are mechanisms in place to detect violations, protect us from their effects and sanction the violators. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were among the greatest systems engineers of all time, designing feedback systems, checks and balances to protect our government and our society from the failures of all-too-human leaders, holding power and hungry for more. We need a new generation of great systems engineers, to create new feedback systems to create and maintain a trustworthy society, even with the hugely powerful tools we are creating.”

Theodore Gordon , futurist, management consultant and co-founder of the Millennium Project, responded, “We will have Watson-like capabilities for data and analytic reasoning in our pockets. False or suspect news will be rejected or marked with a skull and bones. The internet seems likely to splinter into specialized networks that communicate with each other. Big data will be a given and important in determining epidemics in health and in ideas.”

Greg Shannon , chief scientist for the CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, said, “Trust will be a critical social asset. Those communities that value and promote trust will have more life, liberty and happiness. AI and IT will allow communities to ensure varying degrees of security, privacy, resiliency and accountability in building trust. Being trustworthy all the time is stressful given that trust is based on competency, dependability, honesty, loyalty, boundaries and sincerity.”

A share of respondents discussed the challenges presented by the constant flow of misinformation and by the potential for massive misuses of data.

Thad Hall , a research scientist and coauthor of “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “The ability of the news media to report facts will be hampered by a cascade of alternate news, with different video and audio of the exact same event. Things as simple as what the president said in a meeting will be constantly up for debate as instant, real-time alternate feeds show something different, presenting a different worldview. There will be greater segmentation of the population and divisions that separate people. People are likely to become more polarized and tribal over the next 50 years. People will be pushed in different directions by advertisers, who will segment us in ways so that people will not even be aware of certain products others use (especially as online sites like Amazon continue to grow greatly). We will receive different news, again exacerbated by the prevalence of fake news that is exceedingly difficult to discern from reality.”

Alan Mutter , a longtime Silicon Valley CEO, cable TV executive and now a teacher of media economics and entrepreneurism at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I hope internet users in the future will have more control over their data, interactions and the content pushed to them, but I fear that the platform companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu and others – will take us in the opposite direction. A safe and satisfying user experience requires far more thought, work and time than the average user can muster. So, we will be at the mercy of the platforms, which have an asymmetrical ability to outwit and outmaneuver any government entities that try to rein them in. The internet will make lives both better and worse in the future. It will provide greater access to information to those who know how to use it well. At the same time, it will push horrific misinformation to people who lack the ability to critically discern what they are seeing, reading or hearing.”

Rik Farrow , editor of “;login:” a publication of the USENIX Association, predicted, “The problem of ‘fake news’ will be solved by news-providers providing digitally signed content, such as photos, recordings and videos, so that news can be trusted.”

A professor of psychology for a human-computer interaction institute commented, “It will be more and more difficult to determine the validity of sources of information, and people will have weaker tools to make judgments for themselves. Perhaps I am discouraged by recent political events, but to me they are a harbinger of more to come. We could look to the past: The National Socialists knew all about controlling information.”

An online communities researcher said , “We will continue to have problems of community and identity online, where malicious actors quite easily pose as others and manipulate people’s opinions.”

Security issues will be an ongoing obstacle

Assuring security in a constantly evolving human-technological system was mentioned by respondents as a moving-target challenge that will be a constant in years to come.

Llewellyn Kriel , CEO of TopEditor International, a media services company based in Johannesburg, South Africa, wrote, “Despite all the assurances security has become the biggest obstacle in the path of all forms of technology. We predicted this 10 years ago, but things have become worse than even we imagined. The Internet of Things will aggravate this many times. AI so far shows no signs of being able to address security – personal, corporate and national. We see this situation simply getting worse as criminal cartels, international terrorists and rogue governments exploit the thousands of loopholes.”

A professor of computing and digital media expert in in artificial intelligence and social computing predicted, “In 50 years we will have at least one large-scale internet-enabled attack against an entire country, lasting more than five days: power grids, banking, transportation, utilities. People will die. This will (at last) trigger a complete rethinking of the internet protocols, and they will be redesigned with security by design. It will become illegal to use nonconforming devices.”

Eugene H. Spafford , internet pioneer and professor of computing sciences at Purdue University, founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, commented, “Crime and propaganda are going to be even bigger problems, as we have no good, global solutions to deploy as of yet. We need to come to some form of consensus on issues such as fact, primary sources and reliability of information. I see a future where there are more likely to be editorial and content controls, and continued Balkanization of the internet.”

Lou Gross , professor of mathematical ecology and expert in grid computing, spatial optimization and modeling of ecological systems at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said, “I see entirely new options for theft and an ongoing battle across linked systems to maintain orderly operations. Because of the linkage of systems this ‘warfare’ has the potential to be highly destructive, and I see major opportunities for insurance companies to enter the fray and provide services to those willing to pay to allow them to maintain an interfaced-lifestyle while having a measure of safety.”

The chief marketing officer for a technology-based company said, “Security and privacy will become a very important and critical subject of discussion as individuals and societies at large realize that the benefits come at a severe cost to these freedoms. The EU is pushing and shaping this agenda with its latest effort for protecting from these technologies via GDPR. We will see how all of these play out. At the moment, key technology platforms do not seem to realize the power and the responsibility. The exchange between the European Union’s Guy Verhofstadt and U.S.’s Zuckerberg nailed this exact subject in their recent interaction . But the biggest problem and threat for humanity emanates from our historical insecurity and craving for power. As infrastructure is becoming more dependent on AI and the Internet of Things, so do weapons of mass destruction will become more focused on how to better attack them with digital weapons.”

Dan Geer , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “This is a question of the whole being different than the sum of the parts. If one is, as I am, certain that only God is perfect, then a digitalized world that is ever-more optimized begs the question of optimized to what end, to whose benefit, to which criteria of perfection? As Donald Knuth said, ‘Premature optimization is the root of all evil,’ and there exist optimizations that are, or soon will be, within our reach yet will be forever premature. When you cannot believe what you hear, cannot believe what you see, cannot believe what you smell, taste or touch, what are you? Soon, my friend, soon.”

Climate change, the internet and the future of the human race

Several experts observed that this attempt to divine features of the future digital world is futile if the planet can no longer support life in 2069.

Judith Donath , author of “The Social Machine, Designs for Living Online” and faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, commented, “Western civilization, pinnacle of individual liberty, has culminated in the reckless and wasteful consumption of the Earth’s natural resources: We’ve polluted the water, paved over the land, cut down the forests, strip-mined the mountains. Confronted with the apocalyptic specter of human-induced mass extinctions and disastrous climate change, we as a species appear to have chosen to do nothing – to continue on the same path that got us here, buying, burning and birthing as if tomorrow simply did not exist. If we – and the myriad other species we share this planet with – are to survive into the next century, the billions of us humans will need to radically change our behavior. It will take extraordinary measures over the next 50 years to get us to eat less, buy less, reproduce less. I see few signs of us moving in that direction in a serious fashion left to our own devices. But now imagine an artificially intelligent government, programmed to re-balance humans and the natural world as painlessly as possible. Though there would be no privacy from the machine government’s ceaseless sensing, it would be a pleasant world. We would enjoy an apparent wealth of choice – the illusion of liberty. In reality, personal agency would be quite minimal, our desires redirected and our behavior shaped by subtle, powerful nudges. It may be the only hope we have left.”

Divina Frau-Meigs , UNESCO chair for sustainable digital development, said, “Environmental issues will be the primary problem everybody will want to solve in the next 50 years. There is no planet B.”

Hank Dearden , executive director at ForestPlanet Inc., said, “My hope is that the more we explore the cosmos, the more we appreciate our precious and fragile planet, and as such use the Internet of Things to monitor and regulate all manner of metrics: oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, biomass (trees), trash levels in the oceans, etc.”

Brock Hinzmann , a partner in the Business Futures Network who worked 40 years as a futures researcher at SRI International, said, “I choose to remain optimistic, although I don’t expect there to be one future for everyone on the planet, and I expect there will be plenty of abuse of the technology to limit freedom. It could also be that many other concerns, resulting from climate change, global migration and geopolitical conflict, will overwhelm issues related to technology.”

Christine Boese , digital strategies professional, noted that the future development of burgeoning cloud technologies relies upon the electrical grid, commenting, “I believe this brilliant system – the internet – is more robust and persistent than anything else the world has created, barring a worldwide failure of electrical grid infrastructure (which is a real possibility). I am more skeptical that humanity will still be around in its present, literate form, to access it! It is carbon-based life forms which endanger the future networked and communicating computer. I have high hopes for blockchain technology, to be used for far more than cryptocurrency. I believe evolving XML schemas will continue to add important logic to our metadata for semantic parsing and sense-making. Aggregated data has promise, but the server farms required to support constant crawling, indexing and processing will require outsize electrical grid support, and human civilization’s declining literacy, its lack of ongoing infrastructure maintenance and disproportionate grid power draws by server farms could endanger the entire system within 50 years. We are becoming dumb, violent Eloi, without our engineering Morlocks.”

Thomas Streeter , a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, said, “The next 50 years will be shaped by human social and political choices in the context of limited global resources. Whether life in 50 years is better or worse (and for whom) will not be determined by technology.”

The founder of a technology research firm wrote, “I always recommend ‘He, She, It’ by Marge Piercy for an understanding of where the internet could go, and she wrote it before the internet existed. I think cars won’t be the same and fully expect that we won’t be riding individual cars in 50 years. If we are still functioning as a planet and all this has to be contextualized within dramatic climate change as well as population increase and the resulting migrations flows, with their concomitant political disruptions. Digital life will leave more people behind as it is created for young people by young people, and in an aging planet, this will not serve us well.”

A British-American computer scientist commented, “I don’t think society in a recognizable form will survive climate change, increasing inequality and the centralization of essential systems to 2069. Increasing centralization of essential systems will reduce society’s resilience in the face of these problems, leading to societal collapse.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “It depends on what the overall state of the world will be then and whether one subscribes to the mantra of continuing progress. Those of us who take climate change seriously and see the continuing failures to deal with it must see the possibility of some very nasty changes, even down to the mass movement of populations and the contraction of natural resources including landmasses. In this vision of the future, fixed infrastructure may be a casualty and the local generation of electricity may be the difference between survival and not. One hopes that this pessimism will turn out to be unfounded but at the same time this sort of economic decline or even collapse cannot be ruled out and its impact on technology will be profound. Ad hoc networks might become the main game in town for example.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Global climate change will continue unabated as long as ignorance and capitalists are allowed to triumph over humanity.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Climate change is going to have a very destabilizing effect on economies and societies worldwide, so it’s difficult to predict how long we will have the infrastructure to support rapid technological advances.”

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Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education, and Talent Development

The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (1990-2013)

Future problem solving program.

Marion Rogalla University of Connecticut Storrs, CT

Imagine yourself observing an enrichment classroom. In the middle of the room, a team of four, 5th graders is arguing about the effects Virtua Tech, a virtual corporation in the year 2056, has on the mind and body of its employees. In the back corner of the room you notice a fourth grader in deep thought. It almost looks as if his head is steaming. As you get closer, he jumps up and says: “Yes! I’ll use the roaches as an endless energy supply.” While you are listening to his ideas six, 11th graders enter the classroom and present with pride business cards created for their cyberphobia group of adults. Amazed by the students’ creativity, problem solving skills, and excitement for learning, you decide to investigate the problem solving model they are using.

The Future Problem Solving Program (FPSP), started in 1974 by E. Paul Torrance, today reaches approximately 250,000 students in 43 Affiliate Programs (coordinated by the international office in Lexington, Kentucky) throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, and Canada. Full time staff members prepare all materials and topics: practice problems, qualifying problem, affiliate bowl, and International Conference. Teams and individuals successful in the qualifying problem advance to the affiliate bowl and bowl winners in each division (i.e., junior, grades 4 to 6; middle, grades 7 to 9; and senior, grades 10 to 12) are invited to participate at the International Conference. Trained evaluators review and compare student work of the same age division on all topics (Future Problem Solving Program Coach’s Handbook, 2001).

To best meet student interests, the selection of FPSP topics is guided by the results of a poll of the students participating in grades 4 to 12 (Torrance & Safter, 1999). Student votes overwhelmingly center around the newest cutting-edge frontiers of humankind. The topic areas of these frontiers seem to change with age. Younger students’ (grades 4 to 6, junior division) preferences center around innovative instrumentation and processes such as solar energy, computer education, pedestrian conveyor-belt travel, intelligent machines, and mass use of electric cars. These topics may be categorized as human control over the physical environment. Students in grades 10 to 12 (senior division) show more interest in psychological frontiers, such as genetics, human engineering, hypnosis, and mind-altering drugs, than younger students. Middle division students (grades 7 to 9) seem to be in transition between interests of junior and senior division students. Their interests are similar to the younger age group. They do not seem to share the introspection of the seniors (Torrance & Safter, 1999).

The wide variety of extra-curricular topics chosen every year provides students with opportunities to find their area of passion. Torrance (1981, as cited in Torrance & Sisk, 1999), found in his longitudinal studies of creative achievement, that adult creative achievement was influenced by students’ experiences of falling in love with something during their elementary school year. Most adults however, including teachers and parents, do not have much information about these frontier topics to teach the background knowledge necessary for solving problems related to these topics. The FPSP coach’s role includes facilitation of learning and the modeling of processes whereby new knowledge is acquired. Students have to be prepared for self-directed learning (Torrance & Safter, 1999). FPSP goals, therefore, center around the acquisition of problem solving skills.

Although the FPSP provides students with opportunities to enhance their awareness of everyday issues and increase their knowledge base, the main goal of the FPSP is to teach students how to think. The development of higher order thinking skills will help students use their knowledge to solve problems. The program focuses on the creative problem solving process and futuristic issues to develop the skills necessary to adapt to a changing world and shape the future (Future Problem Solving Program Coach’s Handbook, 2001). Specifically, the creative problem solving process:

• helps students to improve their analytical thinking skills
• aids students in increasing their creative thinking abilities
• stimulates students’ knowledge and interest in the future
• extends students’ written and verbal communication skills
• encourages students to develop and improve research skills
• provides students with a problem-solving model to integrate into their lives
• guides students to become more self-directed and responsible
• promotes responsible group membership (for team Future Problem Solving and Community Problem Solving)

The Future Problem Solving Program:

• provides students with unique opportunities to enhance their awareness of everyday issues
• models effective processes that can be used throughout their lives
• incorporates the basic skills taught in the classroom by extending students’ perceptions of the real world
• promotes responsible group membership
• encourages real-life problem solving experiences
• promotes continuous improvement through the evaluation process
• offers authentic assessment in the product produced (p. 11)

The FPSP also extends students’ perceptions of the real world and helps them apply the skills learned to real life issues. The experience of implementing a proposed solution is provided through the Community Problem Solving (CmPS) component. Students learn to continuously improve their problem solving skills from the feedback provided in the evaluation process.

Students are expected to apply a 6-step creative problem solving model when solving a problem in each of the three FPSP components: Team Problem Solving, Scenario Writing, and Community Problem Solving. The mastery of these 6 steps is therefore at the heart of the FPSP.

Guided instruction of the 6 steps seems to be easiest within the team problem solving component. The international office of the FPSP releases the curricular topic for all problems before the related Future Scene is given to the participating students. This allows students to conduct in-depth research to acquire a strong knowledge base on the general topic related to the Future Scene. Once the future problem solvers receive the Future Scene, they work through it using a 6-step model, based on the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process (see Figure 1). Students complete a booklet that guides them in a linear, sequential way through the creative problem solving process.

Understanding the Problem (1) Identify Challenges, (2) Select an Underlying Problem, Generating Ideas (3) Produce Solution Ideas, Planning for Action (4) Generate and Select Criteria, (5) Applying Criteria, and (6) Develop an Action Plan.

Source: Future Problem Solving Program. (2001). Future Problem Solving Program coach’s handbook. Lexington, KY: Author, p. 15.

Figure 1. The 6-step model.

During step 1, students are asked to carefully analyze a specific situation given—the Future Scene—related to the general topic. They learn how to use macro and micro analyses to gain a good understanding of the complex and ill-defined situation. Thereafter, they identify the 16 most promising challenges, issues, concerns, or problems imbedded in the situation that needs consideration. The Future Scene describes a fuzzy situation projected 20 to 30 years into the future, a time when the students might obtain leadership roles. Students are required to use the knowledge gained and project it far into the future. In step 2, the students go through the list of challenges, consider possible underlying problems, and formulate a key underlying problem that is neither too broad nor too narrow. Students are required to follow a standard format in formulating the underlying problem they intend to solve throughout the remaining steps. The standard format helps students to focus on one challenge only and proceed with further analysis of the problem as well as a uniform structure that helps evaluators make comparisons across student booklets. In step 3, students are asked to generate 16 varied and unusual solution ideas that have potential for solving the underlying problem. Students, in step 4, generate the five most appropriate criteria for judging the solutions, which they apply in a evaluation matrix to select the solution with the highest total rank (step 5). Finally, in step 6, students write an action plan based on their highest scoring solution idea. The students have to complete the whole booklet within 2 hours.

The Coach’s Handbook suggests and explains tools for generating options—using divergent thinking—such as Brainstorming, SCAMPER, and Morphological matrix. The acronym SCAMPER stands for: Substitute? Combine? Adapt/Add/Alter? Minify/Magnify/Modify? Put to Other Uses? Eliminate or Elaborate? Reverse/Rearrange/Reduce? The Morphological matrix consists of 4 columns and 10 rows. Team members identify four major aspects (people, place, obstacle, and goal) of the topic and/or future scene (one per column) and list (in the rows) 10 elements of each aspect. Then they explore random combinations and make new and interesting possibilities.

For convergent thinking, the handbook includes tools such as: Hot Spot and Paired Comparison Analysis. A Hot Spot is the common element that clusters of promising ideas share. Paired Comparison Analysis is used in comparing one possibility or idea against another idea, one pair at the time, until all possible pairs have been examined. A number is assigned to each pair as the option is chosen and rated for importance, 1, 2, or 3. The ratings for each possibility can be totaled to provide a rank ordering or prioritizing of the options.

The FPSP includes different components: Future Problem Solving (FPS), Community Problem Solving (CmPS), and Scenario Writing (SW). The primary emphasis of the academic year program (October to June) is on instruction with feedback offered to the teams. FPS asks students to solve complex scientific and social problems of the future.

An example of a future scene focusing on a virtual corporation, an approach to solving a local community problem related to the use of technology, and a response to a scenario involving the increasing need for energy are provided on the insets that follow.

One scene, for example, pertains to a virtual corporation Virtua Tech in the year 2056. The scene is based on facts and projections about virtual corporations and their organizational structure with a focus on the dynamics of a corporation existing in virtual space. The scene opens with Aluui, a programmer, who shares her excitement about her prospective work place with her mother via her Holographic Mailbox and explains that her work partners will be from all over the world. “Virtua Tech is run by an impressive executive team, a group of individuals from leading universities, governmental bodies and traditional corporations around the world,” Aluui explains. During this conversation with her mother, Aluui receives a message from Virtua Tech saying that her software program was accepted and 25,000 Digital Monetary Units have been deposited into her account. However, the scene goes on to raise concerns about the operation of this virtual corporation, including effects on the mind and body of employees that are not fully understood. Therefore, concerned nations, industry groups, and Virtua Tech representatives have created an advisory group. This group is asking the International FPS Alliance to direct its very best problem solving teams across the globe to help them examine important issues involved with the operation of this unique corporation. The FPS teams’ task is to identify possible challenges relating to Virtua Tech, formulate an underlying problem, generate solution ideas, and develop an appropriate action plan.

The goal of the project was to educate adults in the computer field and also to eliminate cyberphobia. The team did so by offering complimentary computer classes to the adults in their community because it felt that the amount of computer knowledge obtained by adults was not sufficient for the technological demands of today’s society. The team was very successful in their efforts and was asked to teach office computer skills to the clerks at the Hockley County Clerk’s office. The project brought multiple benefits to the small rural community of Whitharral, TX. Besides decreasing “cyberphobia” among the adult population, it helped to bridge the gap between generations. The CmPSers learned how to research, plan, and adjust a curriculum to fit the needs of their students—from farmers and secretaries to local business owners and senior citizens. The adults created business, cards, mailing labels, and greeting cards. They learned how to use various software applications, save hundreds of hours in documenting expenses, and safely navigate the Internet. With the aid of grant money awarded by Learn and Serve America, the CmPSers plan to expand the class offerings as well as recruit and train new teachers.

Josh sat at his desk thinking and pondering in the darkness. The only thing moving during the blackouts were the roaches. Josh knew he had to find an alternative energy fast. Why were humans so dependent on electricity? Almost everything ran on solar power or rechargeable batteries now (year 2051). Unfortunately, the ozone layer is being depleted more and more each year, which affects solar power. Rechargeable batteries became every hospital’s savior and every asthmatic person’s life improved.

Reaching for his keys, Josh went to the hovercraft. On the ride home, he swerved to miss the tow craft explosion right in front of him. Swooping to street level, he knew he had seen his share of crashes. There are no rules of the road in the air. He thought of how many times he had been here before. Falling fast and low, he wished his craft could run off the glides alone.

“Why not?” thought Josh. “Why can’t we somehow harness the power of movement? Kinetic watches have been around for over five decades. Surely there could be enough power in everyday movements to power a battery. Is it possible to reconfigure kinetic power into a battery as a source of energy? How about using a pendulum-like movement to harness the power into a battery? That way it will let us have less power plants.”

Josh went into the assembly room and found an old rechargeable unit. “I wonder if it will work?” he thought. For the next week, Josh continued to look at his belt attachment. At first, it was every few minutes, later every few hours. He was determined this would work. By the ninth day the rechargeable unit registered enough power. Over the course of the next few weeks, Josh recharged a dozen batteries. His ideas formulated like fireworks, thinking of what he could attach this device to, and how much more power he could generate.

Then the idea struck him like a rocket. YES! I’ll use the roaches. Josh constructed a large circular platform with a rotating basis. It was kind of like a hamster wheel turned on its side. Finding the roaches was not a problem. It was catching them that was difficult.

Josh placed the platform in a large, clear, round tube and added the roaches. Immediately, the roaches crawled and moved to the platform. This turned the platform, creating a way to transform movement, kinetic energy, into a stored source. The roaches ate little, and the old ones were eaten by the others. It took Josh a few more months to perfect his assignment. In the next few years, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts in creating a new and virtually endless energy supply that renews itself.

Training in problem solving skills facilitates situational creativity (i.e., students can be creative within prescribed activities related to a specific topic), whereas CmPS fosters real product creativity. Students in the CmPS identify a problem they would like to solve in their school, community, or state. Then, they use the 6-step Future Problem Solving process to solve the problem, (i.e., to develop an action plan and implement the plan).

The scenario writing component encourages students to use their imagination in creating a futuristic short story based on an FPSP topic. The scenarios must be placed at least 20 years into the future and are limited to a length of 1,500 words.

Selected teams and individuals participate at regional, state, and international competitions. During the 2-hour competition of the FPS component, teams of four students or individuals analyze a Future Scene and complete a problem booklet that guides the students through the 6 steps as described above. The Future Scene relates to the topic the students were encouraged to research prior to the competition. No research materials or notes may be used during the actual competition session. Students have to be very time conscious and pace themselves at each step to complete all steps within the very limited time frame. Following this session, students are asked to persuade others of the merit of their idea. Having a good idea is not enough, one must be able to “sell” it. During a 5-minute skit presentation, students can demonstrate their creative, persuasive, and oral communication skills (Steinbach, 1991).

Scenario writers may also compete against one another. They select a topic for their story from the pool of five FPS topics for the respective academic year, research the topic, and write a short story of a maximum of 1,500 words (Shewach, 1991). Students individually write drafts of a futuristic scenario. Editing and revising occurs under the guidance of a coach, who decides whether to submit the scenario to the contest or not. Winning scenarios are awarded at the FPSP competitions and published thereafter.

Any number of students from one to a whole classroom can become a team of community problem solvers. Students identify real problem situations in their school, neighborhood, or community and use the 6-step model to develop and implement the solution idea over an extended period of time (i.e., 6 months to 3 years). The students’ report describes the full process including the area of concern, action plan, the efforts to solve the problem, and reflections. The evaluators examine the report and display at the competition and interview the students to secure their ownership of the product.

The FPSP provides educators with enrichment activities that can take place in a pullout program, after school program, resource center, or with students in a regular classroom. The high level challenge of the activities is especially appropriate for intellectually and creatively gifted students. Future Problem Solving takes students into new worlds. They gain new knowledge about cutting-edge research and use it in combination with higher order thinking to create original solutions for futuristic problems. Most gifted students love this kind of intellectual challenge. Seeing Community Problem Solvers grapple with real life problems and grow in their awareness of their capability to have a positive impact on the world around them is also gratifying to educators. The most obvious effect of Scenario Writing is improved writing skills. However, all FPSP components help students develop their written and oral communication skills. Improved communication skills and a thorough understanding of the 6-step problem solving model can greatly benefit the students far beyond the program (e.g., in other curricular activities and in their future careers).

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GEORGIA FUTURE PROBLEM SOLVING PROGRAM, INC

  teaching students how to think, not what to think......

Georgia Future Problem Solving Program

Winning Groups 2024

50th Year!!

SCENARIO WRITING

Students write a 1,500 word short, short story set in the future about one of the topics.  The first place winners in each division received invitations to compete in the 2024 International Conference.

Junior Division

First Place            STEM Academy @Bartlett, Savannah; Title: The Misteris Man ; Topic: Antarctica

Middle Division

First Place             STEM Academy @Bartlett, Savannah;  Title: Antarctica's Takeover ;  Topic: Antarctica

Senior Division

First Place             North Oconee High School; Bogart,  Title: Promoting Health and Preserving Environments in Tourist Destinations ; Topic: Tourism

GLOBAL ISSUES PROBLEM SOLVING

Students produced a written booklet following the six-step problem-solving process in response to a future scene about the topic of Autonomous Transportation. The first place winners were invited to compete at the International Conference.

GLOBAL ISSUES TEAM

First Place             Mary Lin Elementary School, Atlanta

Second Place         North Columbia Elementary School, Appling

Third Place            Ben Hill Middle School, Fitzgerald

First Place             Independent team, Carrollton

Second and Third Places        Ben Hill Middle School, Fitzgerald

First and Second Places         North Oconee High School, Bogart

STEP 6 ACTION PLAN

This is a separate award for the written Step 6 Action Plan.   It is judged on:

Impact of the Plan on the future scene charge

Creativity/innovative ideas

Effectiveness of the Plan in solving the Underlying Problem

Futuristic ideas

Thoroughness of the Plan

  Junior Division

First Place              Mary Lin Elementary School, Atlanta

Second Place          North Columbia Elementary School, Appling

Third Place             Mary Lin Elementary School, Atlanta

First Place              Independent team, Carrollton

Second and Third Places       Ben Hill Middle School, Fitzgerald

TEAM PRESENTATION OF ACTION PLAN (live)

This is an award for the “skit” GIPS teams create based on the Step 6 Action Plan from their booklet.  All divisions were judged together. 

All live Presentations were at Ben Hill Middle School, Fitzgerald

First and Second Places               Junior teams

Third and Fourth Places               Middle teams

VIDEO PRESENTATION OF ACTION PLAN

These Presentations were submitted by video and judged separately from the live PAP. All divisions were judged together. 

First Place              Junior team, North Columbia Elementary School, Appling

Second Place          Middle team, Independent team, Carrollton

Third Place.            Junior team, Mary Lin Elementary School, Atlanta

Fourth Place.         Senior team, North Oconee High School, Bogart

Creative CAT Award      

CAT stands for Creativity Augments Thinking and is awarded to the student(s) whose creativity stood out on their state bowl booklet.  Dr. E. Paul Torrance, the founder of Future Problem Solving, was a leading creativity expert and loved cats.  This award honors his legacy.

Junior team from Ben Hill Middle School, Fitzgerald

Coach Award

Freida Thomas Memorial Award

A coach from North Columbia Elementary School, Appling

Problem 

“opening doors to the future”, pp #2: digital realities due no later than saturday, december 17 at the stroke of midnight internet links policy: we strongly advise coaches to screen all publications prior to making them accessible to students. north carolina future problem solving provides links to web sites and articles as a service to coaches. to avoid exposure to news and advertising sidebars, coaches can print the articles for students and distribute. we disavow any responsibility for specific content or links to other sites..

DIGITAL REALITIES: FUTURE POTENTIALS AND USE CASES    ISACA

WHAT IS METAVERSE: A Futuristic Ride to Virtual Worlds

                                                                                   Emizentech

DIGITAL REALITY EXPLAINED IN UNDER 100 WORDS                    Augmented, Virtual, & Mixed Realities in Business                            DeLiotte

TECHNOLOGY DECODED: BUZZWORDS  EXPLAINED IN UNDER 100 WORDS     Click on each picture to learn more                                 DeLoitte

WHAT EXACTLY IS VIRTUAL REALITY?                                   

 The difference between Virtual and Augmented Reality          Engati

HOW THE METAVERSE UNIVERSE MAY LOOK LIKE IN 2030    EconomicTimes                                                                               

THREE TYPES OF VIRTUAL REALITY:

Non-Immersive, Semi-immersive, & Fully Immersive            Heizenrader

VR APPLICATIONS: 23 INDUSTRIES USING VR             Virtual Speech

22 BEST METAVERSE PLATFORMS TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2022

                                                                                          Jatinder Palaha

DIGITAL REALITY: THE FOCUS SHIFTS FROM TECHNOLOGY TO OPPORTUNITY                                                                  WIRED.com

5 TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL CHANGE THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE Check out Extended Reality (XR) & Human Computer Interface  Forbes

FUTURE TECHNOLOGY: 22 IDEAS ABOUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Check out AI Image Generation, Realistic Holographs, & Artificial Eyes   Science Focus

10 MINDBLOWINGLY FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL APPEAR IN THE 2030s                                                                Gizmodo

VIRTUAL REALITY TIMELAPSE (2030-3000+)        Future Business Tech

Check out  TED Talks and YouTube for more research. Think futuristically.

More From Forbes

5 Problems And Solutions Of Adopting Extended Reality Technologies Like VR And AR

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Extended reality (XR) technologies, like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), bring many benefits to us as consumers, and to the industries that adopt them. But we can’t ignore the fact that there are many personal and societal risks that come with XR, particularly at the more immersive end of the spectrum (i.e. VR).

In this article, I address five of the biggest concerns around XR, and outline a safer, more ethical way forward for the technology.

1. Legal concerns

As with any technology that advances faster than legal systems can cope with, regulators and lawmakers are left playing catchup. XR is no exception. As a result, we don’t have clear laws on what’s acceptable and unacceptable in virtual environments – or even which jurisdictions those environments come under.

One of the biggest unanswered questions for me is, can a virtual act be a crime? Say two people are immersed in a virtual environment, and one of them assaults the other in that virtual space. Is that a crime? If we consider video games – where many people enjoy beating up or shooting our fellow gamers – the question seems a bit ridiculous. But XR technologies create a much more immersive experience than the average video game. In our hypothetical virtual situation, the assault might seem very real to the victim. Is it a crime then? What if our two hypothetical people are wearing haptic suits, which allow users to feel realistic sensations that are generated in the virtual world? This could potentially make the assault genuinely traumatic.

2. Moral questions

This conundrum on what should and shouldn’t be allowed in a virtual environment isn’t just a legal question. It’s a moral issue, too. The danger with immersive technologies is they can allow people to act out whatever they want, seemingly without any real-world consequences. Some might say this is fairly harmless, but this crossing of moral boundaries (boundaries that exist in the real world) certainly makes me uncomfortable.

Consider this example: with the way XR technology and accessories are advancing, it will be theoretically possible for someone to render a highly realistic avatar of their neighbor or colleague or friend and then have sex with them in a virtual setting. Should that be allowed? It’s immoral, sure. But is it wrong to commit immoral acts purely in a virtual world? In my view, if something isn’t allowed in the real world (like having sex with someone without their knowledge), it shouldn’t be allowed in the virtual world.

Samsung Is Giving Away A Free Galaxy S24 In A New Promotion

Google makes a new sale offer to pixel 8 buyers, biden could be 1st president since carter to not negotiate sign fta.

3. Access for the few, not the many

There’s also the possibility that XR technologies will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The cost of purchasing XR hardware will obviously exclude many people, potentially exacerbating existing social divisions. One of the things I talk about in my book is how XR has the potential to revolutionize learning and provide enriching educational experiences for children. But if these opportunities aren’t available to all, we risk creating even more elitist education systems.

4. Privacy and security

This is a huge and very complex concern, so I’ll just give a quick summary here. Like most new technologies, XR brings with it some significant challenges related to personal data. Except, in this case, the data can be extremely personal and sensitive, potentially including our most intimate behaviors and thoughts.

Let's take eye-tracking technology – which is already being incorporated into VR and AR headsets – as an example. This brings many advantages in terms of the quality of the graphics and responsiveness. But eye-tracking also enables companies to collect highly personal data on your unconscious responses to visual cues (whether virtual, as in the case of VR, or real-world cues, as in the case of AR).

Patterns in our eye movements show what we’re focusing on at any given time, which gives an insight into our preferences and thoughts, rather like an unconscious “like” button. And that information could be mined by advertisers to serve up related ads. If that seems harmless, how about this: your eye movement data could give away your sexual orientation and, specifically, who you’re attracted to .

5. Health concerns

Users who spend a lot of time in VR sometimes report nausea, dizziness and disorientation – a "post-VR hangover," if you will. This is the result of the brain receiving mixed sensory signals (such as your eyes registering movement in the digital environment, while your inner ear knows you’re standing still in the real world – incidentally, mixed signals like this are why we experience motion sickness on boats and in cars). Some people don’t experience these symptoms at all, while others find even a short VR experience triggers after effects. The effects can, in some cases, last up to a week .

Finding a safer, more ethical way forward

Let me stress that the benefits of XR far outweigh the potential downsides. But to fully realize those benefits, and overcome the pitfalls, we must embed notions like ethics, responsibility, safety, and trust in XR technologies. To do this, we need a global code of conduct for XR, like the codes of conduct that are emerging in the field of artificial intelligence.

In the future, I predict irresponsible XR practices will draw public and regulatory ire. So, from a business perspective, it’s vital organizations take proactive action now to ensure their XR experiences are responsible and ethical. This might include:

·        Ensuring any XR technology is as inclusive and affordable as possible – especially if your offering is designed for educational or societal use.

·        Being open with users about what data you’re gathering, and, where possible, giving them the opportunity to opt out. And where personal data is absolutely vital, you’ll need to take all the same data security measures as you would for any other business-critical process.

Read more about extended reality technologies – including plenty of real-world examples – in my new book, Extended Reality in Practice: 100+ Amazing Ways Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Are Changing Business and Society .

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The role of digital literacy in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality in popular science education: a review study and an educational framework development

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• Published: 20 June 2023
• Volume 27 , pages 2461–2479, ( 2023 )

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• Chu-Yang Chang 1 ,
• Hsu-Chan Kuo 2 &
• Zhengyi Du 3  

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This study aims to bridge the gap between extended reality (XR) and digital literacy (DL) in popular science education and further develop a DL–XR framework. XR includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR, VR, and MR), which has received increased attention and has been used for educational purposes in recent years. However, the studies of XR in popular science education and its impact on students are scant. It is also challenging to find studies entailing XR and DL in education. This study not only offers an overview of the status quo of XR education but also is the first research presenting a referential framework that systematically integrates the many dimensions of XR and DL for future research and educational practices. XR has been extensively used in museums, benefiting users with immersive, authentic, hands-on, and interactive experiences. In the DL–XR framework, based on the variations of “individual-group” and “passive consumption-active creation”, eight dimensions of DL linked to XR are proposed, including “access and understanding”, “evaluation”, “ethics and well-being”, “interaction”, “collaboration”, “creation”, “problem-solving”, and “civic engagement and responsibility”. In the nurturing of DL, evidence revealed that XR is mostly used for learners to access knowledge/information and interact with virtual items; nonetheless, its applications for active creation, problem-solving, and collaboration are seldom prioritised. This study further proposes integrating project-based learning into XR pedagogical practices, which can maximise its impact on learning and empower the learners to achieve advanced levels of DL.

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Augmented Reality in Education

Harnessing the Power of Digital Resources in Mathematics Education: The Potential of Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence

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1 Introduction

The ubiquity and development of technology have urged an increasing number of educators and scholars to advocate using digital devices in educational settings to support teaching and learning. Many countries and governments have thus launched educational technology-relevant policies, programmes, and initiatives intending to enhance learning quality. Technology innovation has the potential to contribute to modern teaching and learning practices (Chauhan 2017 ). However, the premise is that the users (normally educators and students) know how to utilise technologies in education timely, adequately, and appropriately. That is, there is an emerging call to nurture an individual’s digital literacy (DL), which maps out essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to thrive in the digital era (Bawden 2008 ; Ferrari 2012 ). Nowadays, students are regarded as digital natives who are accustomed to using various information and communications technologies. However, digital natives are not meant to be naturally equipped with DL (Ferrari 2012 ; Redecker and Punie 2017 ), as students tend to overestimate their digital literacy, while their actual performance is inadequate (Porat et al. 2018 ). Similarly, Sánchez-Cruzado et al. ( 2021 ) found that educators’ self-perception of digital literacy is low and considered that their digital skills should be strengthened. It is imperative to equip educators and learners with digital literacy so that they can efficiently use digital devices to support their teaching and learning. “Learning to learn” and “learning to teach” with advanced technologies are more important than technological development. To accentuate the indispensable role of DL in education, several institutions and organisations have developed DL frameworks to map out the critical dimensions that individuals should possess to function well in the digital society (Feerrar 2019 ; Redecker and Punie 2017 ). Individuals’ DL plays a paramount role herein, which also makes an emergent call for the discussion and conduction of the current study—to develop a framework for integrating DL and advanced educational technologies.

Among the various new technologies, extended reality (XR), which includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR, VR, and MR), has received increased attention and has been used for educational purposes in recent years. XR motivates users to immerse, engage, and see something unseeable in real life (e.g. microorganisms and ancient animals). The offering of hands-on experience can facilitate the learners to retain knowledge and grasp abstract concepts, especially mathematics and science (Akçayır and Akçayır 2017 ; Erbas and Demirer 2019 ; Ibáñez and Delgado-Kloos 2018 ). However, the studies of XR in popular science education and its impact on students are scant. Popular science refers to the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the public in an understandable way, educating the public and students about the latest scientific knowledge, which becomes crucial during the pandemic when people urgently need the newest knowledge about COVID-19 (Kitsa 2021 ). It is very challenging to find studies platforming XR and DL in education. Although, with the assistance of XR, students can have nascent learning experiences, the role of DL is seldom discussed. Educators and learners with a high level of DL can be beneficial from XR technology much more than those who do not possess much DL (Maas and Hughes 2020 ). That is the reason why the pedagogical potential of XR is still untapped, which also limits students’ learning gains (Zhou et al. 2022 ).

The current study aims to explore the status quo of XR-embedded popular science education, organise and determine the dimensions of digital literacy, and then develop a DL–XR framework. The framework has its theoretical and practical values because most prior scholarly works focused on how XR can be used in classrooms while not proposing a framework to offer design guidelines and untapped potential (Maas and Hughes 2020 ). The framework serves as a foundation for debate, improvement, and refinement, opening a new field in XR-embedded popular science education or even in other disciplines. In the DL–XR framework, based on the variations of “individual”-group” and “passive consumption-active creation”, eight dimensions of DL linked to XR are proposed, including access and understanding, evaluation, ethics and well-being, interaction, collaboration, creation, problem-solving, and civic engagement and responsibility . Students usually are consumers who receive knowledge and teaching materials from XR instead of creators (Hsu et al. 2019 ). Although high-order thinking is prioritised in DL, such as creation, problem-solving, and collaboration (Ferrari 2013 ), scholars and educators rarely design XR-embedded teaching approaches that particularly cultivate these thinking skills (Zhou et al. 2022 ). The many dimensions of DL can be regarded as a reference for educators and learners to use XR effectively in classrooms to enhance the learning quality and users’ thinking skills. This study not only offers an overview of the status quo of XR education but also can be regarded as the first research presenting a referential framework that systematically integrates the dimensions of DL for future XR research and educational practices. The current study addresses the following three research objectives:

To explore the status quo of XR-enhanced popular science education.

To identify the definition and sub-dimensions of DL in XR-enhanced learning.

To establish the DL–XR framework that systematically integrates the dimensions of DL for future XR research and educational practices.

2 Extended reality and popular science education

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that overlays virtual elements onto a real environment. It enables users to view the actual surroundings while computer-generated objects are superimposed onto them, using mobile devices, computers, or projectors. In his work published in 1997, Azuma identified three key characteristics of AR: (a) the blending of real and virtual elements, (b) real-time interaction, and (c) three-dimensional presentation virtual reality (VR), on the other hand, refers to a technology that creates a fully simulated environment in which users can interact with and manipulate virtual objects. VR can be classified into two main types: fully immersive VR and non-immersive VR. Recent studies by Fu et al. ( 2022 ) and Maas and Hughes ( 2020 ) have discussed these distinctions. Fully immersive VR necessitates the use of head-mounted displays (HMDs), which immerse users in a completely virtual environment. Non-immersive VR, also known as desktop/projector VR, allows users to experience three-dimensional or 360-degree environments through screens or monitors.

Building upon the immersive capabilities of VR, the concept of the metaverse has gained significant attention in recent years. The metaverse refers to a virtual universe where users can engage in various activities and interactions, with the potential to profoundly transform human life. Consequently, there has been growing interest in fully immersive VR, which has become a prevailing trend. Researchers have been investigating its practical applications and educational value.

Mixed reality (MR) is a technology that combines elements of both AR and VR. It enables users not only to visualise virtual objects but also to interact with and manipulate them within a hybrid environment, blending the real and virtual worlds (Maas and Hughes 2020 ) (Fig.  1 ).

Virtuality continuum (Maas and Hughes 2020 )

MR is the newest among the three technologies and requires the highest computing power. The application of MR in education is still in its infancy, which merits future exploration to evaluate its pedagogical value (Pellas et al. 2020 ). Constructivism is the most referred theory that explains why XR can contribute to students’ learning (Eisenlauer 2020 ). XR creates authentically simulated environments and objects, allowing students to interact with these virtual items, find knowledge behind the content, and then construct their knowledge (Loscos et al. 2003 ). XR (especially MR) also offers the possibility of virtually social constructivist/constructionist learning, enabling students to collaborate in a real (AR/MR) or virtual (MR/VR) space and construct knowledge through social interaction (Bekele et al. 2021 ; Cheng and Tsai 2013 ). MR has great potential that allows students to interact with people and content and further collaborate with each other to complete tasks in virtual or hybrid settings (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). The interaction and manipulation with virtual items in simulated environments are one of the most powerful strengths of XR technology, providing students with novel and authentic learning experiences (Eisenlauer 2020 ; Pellas et al. 2020 ).

By using the keywords used by the prior review studies (Maas and Hughes 2020 ; Zhou et al. 2022 ), including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), extended reality (XR), and popular science in the search for literature through online databases, including EBSCO, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and ERIC, in total, 79 journal articles were found. To narrow down the scope of analysis, we invited three scholars specialising in educational technology and discussed the criteria with them. The authors and all three scholars agreed with the selection criteria used in the inclusion/exclusion of articles, including (a). Empirical study: The study must collect and analyse empirical data; (b). Use of technologies: XR, AR, VR, or MR technologies must be clearly identified in the study; (c). Learning effectiveness: The learning effectiveness of the study must be evaluated, and the variables used must be clearly defined. After excluding the articles that were not specifically addressed the required information above, merely 19 articles were selected and analysed (Table 1 ).

As shown in Table 1 , in popular science, XR technologies are primarily used in museum education, helping users interact with cultural heritage and acquire scientific knowledge. AR is mostly used (15 studies), followed by VR (six studies), yet only one used MR. Evidently, MR is still in its infancy that needs more empirical studies to identify and verify its pedagogical values. Almost all the studies indicated that XR provides an immersive, interactive, and authentic learning environment and hands-on activities/experiments, which can entertain users and effectively contribute to positive attitudes, affection, and meaningful learning (Damala et al. 2016 ; Neuburger and Egger 2018 ; Errichiello et al. 2019 ; Kennedy et al. 2021 ; Gong et al. 2022 ). Also, XR allows users to interact with abstract or unseeable objects, helping improve their cognitive ability and spatial understanding and consolidating knowledge retention (Sugiura et al. 2019 ; Yoon et al. 2012 ). The affordance of XR seamlessly echoes constructivism learning, providing students with a simulated environment where students construct their knowledge through manipulation and interaction with objects or people. Specifically, in the cases above, the participants’ scientific knowledge was improved (Sugiura et al. 2019 ; Yoon et al. 2018 ), and art/painting and cultural knowledge were enhanced (Clini et al. 2014 ; Ghouaiel et al. 2017 ; Hammady et al. 2020a ).

However, it is found that most studies were conducted in museum settings for the public but not for a specific group of learners. For instance, the research about pupils’ experience in XR-based museums is scant and worth further exploration. Furthermore, according to the different degrees of “individual”-group” and “passive consumption-active creation”, in most XR learning settings, students were “consumers” instead of “creators”, “problem-solvers”, or “collaborators”, which are essential dimensions in DL (please refer to Figs.  2 and 3 for further details). From the perspective of DL, it is believed that the potential of XR is still untapped and using XR to cultivate other higher-order thinking skills is promising and feasible in future popular science education.

Different types of collaboration, creation, and problem-solving in XR-embedded education based on partnership and collaboration variations (analysed and illustrated by the researchers)

The DL–XR Framework

3 The dimensions of digital literacy in XR learning

Literacy refers to individuals’ ability to read and write (Reddy et al. 2022 ); however, with the development of technology, the definition of literacy has kept evolving. Gilster ( 1997 )’s book “Digital Literacy” popularised the use of the term and invoked people’s awareness of the importance of DL, an ability to understand and use information from various digital sources. With the proliferation of digital devices and social media, the definition of DL keeps expanding. Thus, there is a practical and academic need to review the scholarly works on DL through the past years, which helps explore the changing DL and grasp essential dimensions for establishing the DL–XR framework. The strengths and constraints of applying AR, VR, and MR in education should be discussed. It is fair to say that different technologies can provide different learning experiences and contribute to different DL dimensions. By using the keywords of “digital literacy” to search literature through online databases in October 2022, including EBSCO, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and ERIC, and select the articles through the following criteria: (a). The articles should be journal papers, book chapters, or government/professional organisation reports; (b). explaining the definition of digital literacy and its framework; and (c). using a self-developed framework instead of an existing one, a total of 13 papers met the criteria and were included and analysed (Table 2 ).

By reviewing literature regarding XR popular science education (Table 1 ) and digital literacy frameworks (Table 2 ), eight DL dimensions in XR learning settings are categorised, including “access and understanding”, “evaluation”, “ethics and well-being”, “interaction”, “collaboration”, “creation”, “problem-solving”, and “civic engagement and responsibility”:

3.1 Access and understanding

Access and understanding  refer to the ability to find helpful information, understand the meanings, and construct understanding from virtual content. For other technologies, determining the appropriate website and searching for useful information from digital sources is a critical ability in the era of information explosion (Alt and Raichel 2020 ). Users also need to know the capabilities of each platform, so they can choose the appropriate one to get relevant information (Park and Burford 2013 ). XR learning environments are different from computer-assisted learning settings, as students are immersed in a virtual space (MR/VR), or virtual objects appear in the real world (MR/AR). Students have to interpret virtual representations and understand virtual learning materials. At the same time, they must concentrate on learning materials and avoid being distracted from the presented content (Southgate et al. 2019 ). This dimension is closely related to individuals’ photo-visual skills (understanding text- and graphic-based information), branching skills (constructing knowledge from non-linear and non-orderly information), and real-time thinking skills (processing various kinds of stimuli) (Eshet-Alkalai 2012 ).

3.2 Evaluation

Evaluation refers to critically verifying the credibility of information and discerning facts from various digital sources, including XR (Alt and Raichel 2020 ). Students should not only know how to use, receive, and understand digital content from devices but also need to evaluate and use information critically (Buckingham 2006 ). The ability of information assessment is essential for individuals to discern object information from personal opinions. Each information provider has its own purpose and ideological biases. Digital literate users can trace the source origins and compare media content with different sources (Polizzi 2020 ). Students should be taught to critically read every piece of information and understand the purpose of information providers. After critical and reflective consideration, they make their decisions about whether they should believe the information or find other credible information. Also, the rapid development of XR games has raised much concern, as some games include violent and sexual plots, which may negatively influence children’s values and behaviours (Southgate et al. 2017 ). Students must cultivate their critical thinking to reflect on how XR games form their values and thoughts, identify the commercial purpose, implicit meanings, and values behind the games, and further construct their values and knowledge.

3.3 Ethics and well-being

Ethics and well-being refer to ethically and legally using digital devices and taking care of self-physical and psychological health (Feerrar 2019 ; Hsu et al. 2019 ; JISC 2022 ). Due to the infancy of XR technology, the ethics of this technology has not gained much attention. However, some potential issues should be thoroughly thoughts about before happening. Peer-to-peer misuse among students may be a potential issue (Heimo et al. 2014 ). AR allows users to modify objects’ appearances, including looking and clothing, and even zombify others. If someone modifies others ridiculously and uploads pictures or videos on the Internet without the subjects’ permission, this may cause cyberbullying (Heimo et al. 2014 ). Also, students should be informed that when they wear XR headsets, everything they see may be recorded, and their biometrics data (e.g. eye-tracking data and emotional and physical reactions) can be collected by systems (Bye et al. 2019 ). Some XR games include pornographic and violent content, which may implicitly encourage children’s anti-social or violent behaviours and convey inappropriate values (Southgate et al. 2017 ). Furthermore, children are more easily drawn into immersive virtual worlds than adults, hardly discerning reality and virtuality and controlling their emotions and behaviours (Baumgartner et al. 2008 ). The children’s physical and psychological development issues merit experts to work on them. Other issues may emerge when XR is more commonly embedded in daily life, such as equality, data ownership, and surveillance issues (Heimo et al. 2014 ). Before using XR, students should be informed of the ethics and potential risk.

3.4 Interaction

Interaction refers to the ability to interact with people or virtual content when using XR. This dimension is seldom emphasised by other digital literacy frameworks, as other technologies’ functions are unlike XR technology, of which tangible interaction is a nascent and prominent characteristic (Azuma 1997 ; Eisenlauer 2020 ). Before students can collaborate with other people or virtual characters, they must know how to interact with XR systems and people first. The first facet is the interaction between students (human–human interaction). In most cases, students learn in a group with one XR device and receive knowledge from the content; however, they do not collaborate to complete a task or a mission (Bekele et al. 2021 ). They are just “consumers” and “co-users” instead of “collaborators” of technology. The other facet is the interaction with virtual content (human–system interaction). The essential characteristic of XR is that it allows users to manipulate simulated objects and provide a hands-on experience (Eisenlauer 2020 ). This kind of learning method is totally different from other technologies and sometimes is not easy for students (Pellas et al. 2020 ), requiring competency far beyond reading, writing, and understanding online content. Students should know how to interact with virtual items and construct knowledge from the interaction.

3.5 Collaboration

Collaboration refers to collaborating with others in virtual/physical environments. Technology-supported collaboration is a specific form of interaction (not all interactions are collaboration) in which students have a particular task and work together to accomplish it (Borokhovski et al. 2016 ). Due to the different affordances and constraints of XR and different learning tasks, collaboration can be divided into several types. Regarding collaborative environments, AR can only allow students to collaborate in a physical environment, while MR can create a virtual–physical-combined environment for students to work together. However, it is difficult for users to collaborate in VR settings, as VR immerses users in a totally virtual environment and separates them from other users (Bekele et al. 2021 ). Compared to AR and VR, collaboratively manipulating virtual objects in an MR setting (a physical–virtual hybrid environment) is more feasible (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). Two or more people can co-create and co-construct a virtual artefact or collaborate to solve virtual problems presented by MR (Wang and Dunston 2013 ). In these new types of collaboration, students should know how to effectively express themselves, understand others’ meanings, and then construct knowledge in hybrid or virtual environments. Regarding collaborative partners, most frameworks focus on peer-to-peer collaboration, but peer-to-system collaboration is seldom mentioned. With the rapid development of technology and the emergence of the metaverse, it is possible to collaborate with systems or non-player characters to co-create or co-solve problems in the future.

3.6 Creation

Creation  refers to the “production” and “creation” of digital artefacts or content by using XR, including activities to create new and original content and improve others’ ideas (Redecker and Punie 2017 ). This dimension has been mentioned in many frameworks, but the difference between “production” and “creation” is usually unclear. “Producing” refers to generating digital content and editing content in different formats, while “creating” refers to developing original and diverse content and innovatively improving others’ ideas (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2022 ). Some frameworks focus on the former one (Lazonder et al. 2020 ; Park and Burford 2013 ), whereas some focus on the latter one (Alt and Raichel 2020 ; Eshet-Alkalai 2012 ; Hsu et al. 2019 ; Reynolds 2016 ), while some mention both concepts (Feerrar 2019 ; JISC 2022 ). Prior scholarly works primarily used XR for knowledge consumption instead of creation, as XR content creation needs high technological or programming skills (Maas and Hughes 2020 ). Although some XR software allows users to design their own content, such as campus tours or storytelling books, the content cannot be too complicated (Eisenlauer 2020 ; Hsu et al. 2019 ). Thus, finding another type of creation activity to train users’ creative thinking is worth exploring, for example, co-creating with XR systems or non-player characters. In the BlogWall MR game (Liu et al. 2007 ), students input vocabulary into the MR system. Then, the system searched a database according to the vocabulary and created a poem based on the given words. Students could explore and input a much more appropriate vocabulary in every attempt, or they could further refine the poem produced by the system. In this case, students co-created with the MR system in the real world.

3.7 Problem-solving

Problem-solving refers to the ability to solve problems in authentic or simulated environments by involving XR technology. Most frameworks focus on using technology to solve a real-world problem, or users can solve technical problems. For example, in Hsu et al. ( 2019 )’s study, students were required to make simple AR content, such as campus tours and animal life circles. Students found their AR video quality was not good, so they used the Google search engine to scrutinise the problem and creatively solve it. XR can also offer other types of problem-solving, allowing students to enter a hybrid or virtual environment and solve a simulated problem presented by XR systems, although the cases are few. One reason may be that its pedagogical use is still in its initial stage; on the other hand, most teachers do not have programming savvy, so they cannot develop XR content that fits their educational goals (Pellas et al. 2019 ). With the rapid development of XR and the metaverse, it is anticipated that in the future, students can solve a simulated problem with avatars or non-player characters in a totally virtual setting.

3.8 Civic engagement and responsibility

Civic engagement and responsibility refer to knowing own responsibility in a shared and virtual society and bringing a positive contribution to establishing a harmonious virtual environment. DL is no longer an individual ability; instead, it entails being aware of the social well-being and environmental impact of technology (Redecker and Punie 2017 ). Social justice and equity have also become important values for DL (Feerrar 2019 ). The emergence of the metaverse, a cutting-edge technology based on the XR technique, has drawn people’s attention to the intergrowth and co-prosperity of virtual environments. The metaverse is a perpetual and persistent multiuser environment where users can communicate in real time (Mystakidis 2022 ), opening a new form of pedagogical style and may tremendously impact daily life. Although the development of the metaverse is yet full-fledged, it is a prospective field in education. Like other technologies, some essential issues should be considered beforehand, such as data management and intellectual property protection (Hirsch 2022 ). For instance, in Wiederhold ( 2022 )’s paper, when an unfamiliar avatar suddenly appears and touches you without your consent, what we should do and where we can seek help in this kind of harassment is worth further discussion. Establishing global guidelines and regulations for the metaverse is important for ensuring the well-being of avatars in virtual society (Hirsch 2022 ). Students should know they are citizens in the virtual world and must cultivate their civic consciousness to establish a harmonious virtual society.

In most scholarly works, XR is used to demonstrate information or knowledge for users instead of targeting nurturing the users’ higher-order thinking skills. Zhou et al. ( 2022 ) proposed that future scholarly works can explore how to use XR to develop users’ critical thinking, collaboration, and other higher-order thinking skills. Bekele et al. ( 2021 ) indicated that users usually hope to have social interaction, not only interaction with systems when using XR. Furthermore, collaboration, creation, and problem-solving have been extensively emphasised in education in recent decades. Future XR studies may consider designing and bettering a learning environment that allows users to co-create and co-solve problems. Based on the different levels of “collaborative environments” and “partners”, the user’s collaborative styles can be further categorised into four quadrants (Fig.  2 ). In terms of collaboration environments, collaborating in real-world environments means that students can see the real world in the collaboration process. This type can be found in AR and MR learning settings (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). Another side of the continuum is collaboration in virtual environments, where users can see a virtual world. This type of working environment can be created by MR and VR (Bekele et al. 2018 ). MR entails the characteristics of AR and VR, creating real, virtual, or hybrid world working places and a more immersive and interactive environment than AR and VR (Hammady et al. 2020a ). Regarding partners, users can collaborate with real people (whether they turn into avatars) or XR systems.

Human-to-human collaboration in a real-world environment can be embodied by AR and MR, which can create a real-virtual-hybrid environment where users can see each other in the real world and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously (Bekele et al. 2021 ). However, VR immerses users into a simulated world which separates the users from the real world. It is difficult for them to work with other people face-to-face. In most cases, users can only interact (not collaborate) with virtual objects independently (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). Thus, although MR and VR can provide a fully immersive environment, MR has great potential for allowing human-to-human collaboration in a virtual or hybrid setting, whereas VR can only allow remote collaboration using avatars. However, this kind of collaboration is seldom mentioned in VR-embedded popular science education (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). It is predicted that when the metaverse becomes fully fledged, more and more people can work with each other in a fully simulated environment.

Cases of human-to-system collaboration in real- or virtual-world environments are scant, at least in popular science education (Zhou et al. 2022 ). It is highly applicable for AR and MR to fulfil human-to-system collaboration in the real world, in which users can still see the real world when co-creating or co-solving problems with systems. As mentioned, the BlogWall MR game may allow users to co-create a poem with the MR system in the real world (Liu et al. 2007 ). Human-to-system collaboration in the virtual world may be fulfilled by MR and VR, where users can enter a totally simulated world and work with systems, even with virtual characters (non-player characters). The emergence of the metaverse makes this collaboration style likely to happen in the future. When the time comes, people can not only work with people (or avatars) in a virtual world, but they also can collaborate with virtual characters to perform complicated tasks. It should be noted that the four quadrants only show the current affordance of XR and possible limitations of contemporary XR education. With the development of XR technology, its usage may be expanded, and categories may be different.

4 The establishment of the DL–XR framework

By integrating the many dimensions of DL, the affordances of different XR, and the mainstream of XR used in popular science education, the DL–XR framework was developed (Fig.  3 ). The X -axis is the individual-social dimension of DL, from the individual ability to the group dynamic. The first level is “access and understanding”, which is an essential thinking skill and an individual ability for all XR users in all the existing digital literacy frameworks. Once XR users know how to interpret digital content and understand its meanings individually, they start “human-to-system” or “human-to-human” interaction, a prominent dimension specialised for XR technologies. The significant difference between XR and other technologies is that XR allows users to manipulate virtual content, requiring their whole-body gestures. Students should know how to interact with peers and systems; then, they can work with a team to complete complicated problem-solving or content-creation missions in which their teammates may be real-world or virtual users, even non-playable characters. Collaboration, creation, and problem-solving have been emphasised in education. However, they are still scantly explored in the contemporary XR studies.

Differently but interconnectedly, the Y -axis is the development of cognitive skills, from basic to higher-order thinking skills. Once users can decode and understand XR content, their “critical evaluation” skills can be nurtured, which requires users to reflect on what they receive, identify objective messages, and establish their values. This critical and deep-thinking ability is the basis for creativity and problem-solving. Students internalise what they learn and then use the knowledge to create something new or solve problems creatively. The “ethics and norms” and “civic engagement and responsibility” are two affectional dimensions of DL. When students interact with others, they should behave ethically to protect each other from potential risks. Behaving ethically among peers is the foundation for entering the virtual society, the metaverse, a shared virtual society where users can have real-time interactions. As a citizen in the virtual world, creating a harmonious society is everyone’s responsibility.

The framework can help researchers categorise contemporary XR-embedded studies, locate the current situation of their studies, and offer guidance for future research and educational practices. For example, Agostini ( 2019 ) and his team conducted XR-embedded cultural heritage education in the Italian city of Verona, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They applied XR technologies to outdoor heritage education to help primary school fifth graders learn more about Verona and its historic buildings. In terms of AR, students used smartphones and tablets to see 3-D images superimposed on real scenery. They could see the Roman monument, which existed in the Roman time, through the tablets. Besides, students wore VR headsets to see the arena. With VR, students enter an entirely virtual environment to see the ancient arena and its surroundings. Based on the existing AR, MR was also developed to create a time-travel experience in which students could see the existing monument and the surrounding landscape two thousand years ago. After the Verona 1-day tour, Agostini found that students using XR retained more information than the control group, who only had booklets during the trip. Also, the experimental group students could draw 3-D buildings resembling the original ones in their painting homework. Agostini ( 2019 )’s case indicated that XR can be effectively used in cultural heritage education. However, this kind of technology use is primarily categorised in the “access and understanding” dimension (Fig.  3 ), yet other higher-order thinking skills (e.g. creation and problem-solving) are not particularly emphasised, echoing the current use of most XR devices—knowledge demonstration (Zhou et al. 2022 ).

Another example is in Hammady et al. ( 2020b )’s study, describing how an MR touring guide allowed visitors to interact with others. Hammady et al. developed the MR tour guide, the MuseumEye, in an Egyptian Museum in Cairo. With the MR headset, visitors could see the co-existence of genuine antiques and virtual information (historical scenery, animated characters, virtual guide avatar) and listen to the audio narration simultaneously. Visitors could interact with spatial visuals (tapping or rotating visual items). Also, the MuseumEye system allowed visitors to see the same visual information, facilitating communication between visitors in the physical–virtual hybrid environment. According to the visitors’ responses, their interest and engagement increased, and they were satisfied with the communication function of the device. A similar human-to-human interaction MR function can also be found in Bekele et al. ( 2021 )’s study. In the past, the use of XR is mostly located in “access and understanding” and “human-to-system interaction” dimensions. Nowadays, researchers have started exploring the possibility of “human-to-human interaction”. Also, social interactions satisfy users’ desire to communicate with others when they use XR devices. Future studies can go beyond “interaction” and explore the possibility of “collaboration”. Considering the different affordances and characteristics of XR, MR has the greatest potential to empower or facilitate peer-to-peer collaboration for co-creation or problem-solving in a physical, virtual, or hybrid setting (Bekele et al. 2021 ). As shown in the DL–XR framework (Fig.  3 ), the future direction is to develop an XR system in which users can not only interact with others but also collaborate to create and solve problems, training users’ other dimensions of digital literacy.

5 Discussion

Higher-order thinking development and interrelationships building are paramount goals in education. It is essential to seek new opportunities for integrating XR into education, vitalising and optimising the use of this cutting-edge technology to support students’ learning. Based on the literature review of XR popular science education and DL, the study developed the DL–XR framework, which articulates the status quo of XR popular science education, and offers a direction for maximising and vitalising the use of XR in the future. It is fair to say that the mainstream of XR education lies on “access and understanding” and “interaction (human-system interaction)” dimensions, whereas other higher-order thinking and social dimensions include “creation”, “problem-solving”, “collaboration”, and “ethics and well-being”, are hardly discussed (Bekele et al. 2021 ; Zhou et al. 2022 ). To cope with this dilemma, the researchers propose the use of project-based learning (PBL) to shift the users’ work from an individual to a group basis and transform the focus of learning from passive consumption/reception to active creation. PBL refers to a learning approach in which students collaboratively explore a real-world and complicated problem, collect and synthesise information, and then produce a product (e.g. artefacts or reports) to address the issue (Kokotsaki et al. 2016 ; Morales et al. 2013 ). It is PBL that allows learners to apply popular science knowledge in real life, featuring technology-enhanced self-directed/regulated learning, experiential learning, and immersive learning (Fidan and Tuncel 2019 ; Halabi 2020 ), which are all the strengths of XR, allowing learners to actively interact with virtual content, immerse themselves in a simulated world, and construct knowledge by themselves. This concept reflects constructivist and constructionist learning. The former refers to the active construction of ideas and concepts individually, while the latter refers to collaborative construction and creation through group conversation and sharing (Rob and Rob 2018 ), benefitting the DL dimensions beyond “access and understanding”, which is mainly focused in current use of XR. Echoing this, PBL is one of the feasible ways to cultivate students’ DL, including higher-order thinking and communication skills (Hsu et al. 2019 ; Kimbell-Lopez et al. 2016 ; Loizzo et al. 2018 ), changing learners’ roles from “passive consumers” to “active creators”. As shown in Morales et al.’s ( 2013 ) and Southgate’s ( 2022 ) study, by creating VR content, students started peer mentoring and collaboration and formed a knowledge-building community of practice. They had a deeper understanding of knowledge, especially abstract concepts, and expressed their knowledge creatively through VR, showing their digital creativity. The pedagogical concepts of these examples of VR-enhanced PBL happen can somehow be used in popular science education and is worthwhile for further exploration.

The integration of PBL with XR education has pedagogical significance and practical appropriateness. A range of educational programmes have been launched, utilising PBL-integrated XR to develop students’ self-regulated learning, which aims to enable them to become life-long learners (Ministry of Education 2017 , 2020 ). As an example, our research team recently collaborated with a primary school to develop a series of PBL courses that incorporate XR technology. In this particular project, primary school students were given the opportunity to collaborate with students from a school in the UK, with the objective of enhancing their respective local markets. Together, students from both schools designed immersive 360-degree VR experiences showcasing their local markets. Through the utilisation of VR technology, students were able to immerse themselves in different cultural contexts and gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each location. This facilitated an exchange of ideas between children from two distinct regions, focusing on various aspects of market improvement such as layout and decorations. During this PBL, children need to know how to make VR, collaborate with people from different cultural and language backgrounds, and then innovate their market environments. Besides VR, various technologies are involved, such as tablets, online meeting software, and video editors. The activity provides ample opportunities for students to apply knowledge in real life and train their higher-order DL, including collaboration, creative creation, and even civic engagement. Alt and Raichel ( 2021 ) indicated that constructivist activities are helpful in developing students’ DL, in which students can use technology to create digital content (e.g. digital storytelling, digital games, or VR content in this example) involving authentic issues or ill-structured problems (p. 27). They do not just passively receive knowledge but actively create and innovate. From this example, considering the current XR affordances and technical limitations, we can see that XR-enhanced PBL should be complemented by other technologies. Different technologies have their strengths and constraints, which should be identified and complemented by each other, helping learners complete a project.

However, it is challenging to find empirical studies that aimed to combine XR and PBL to enhance students’ learning. How to use XR and other technology in popular science PBL merits further development and research, which allows students to construct and apply knowledge in various contexts, including cultural heritage, museums, and daily life. Thus, it has theoretical and practical significance to explore the feasible approaches to integrate XR into PBL systematically and synthetically to support students’ inquiry and collaboration process. An XR-embedded PBL approach seems to be an important breakthrough to extend and augment the use of XR in educational settings. Future researchers can also improve and refine the DL–XR framework by integrating the core elements of PBL.

Striking a balance between the pros and cons of XR can shed light on its indispensable and irreplaceable power. The frequently reported benefits of XR from popular science education are its immersion, authenticity, concept visualisation, and hands-on activities (Besoain et al. 2022 ; Huang et al. 2019 ; Yoon et al. 2018 ). The critical and central questions are “can the strengths of XR make a more powerful and positive impact on students’ learning than other technologies? And “how to design a course that can maximise XR strengths to support learning activities?” If the current use of XR merely focused on its “knowledge retention and reception”, it may easily be substituted by other low-cost and common technologies, such as mobile phones or videos, even 3D physical objects/models, which can also allow people to see something unseeable and make abstract concepts concrete (Hung et al. 2016 ; Wang 2020 ).

In terms of the impact of XR on learning outcomes, some studies indicated that learning performance was not significantly different between XR-embedded and conventional learning methods (Kaplan et al.  2021 ; Meireles et al. 2022 ). In museums, if XR is mostly used to superimpose information on physical items, this function is very similar to paper-based labels used for exhibits (Zhou et al. 2022 ). XR-enhanced learning is not merely using XR to receive scientific, abstract, and unseeable information, but to use its strengths to support students’ entertaining learning experiences, inquiry processes, creativity, and other digital literacy dimensions (Ibáñez and Delgado-Kloos 2018 ).

It is critical for researchers and educators to identify and justify the specific benefits of XR that cannot be replaced by other technologies and thus embed them into course design (Kaplan et al. 2021 ). It is unreasonable to embed XR in education only because of its novelty and entertaining features while not carefully connecting to learning goals (Fu et al. 2022 ). Innovative XR-embedded teaching approaches, design guidelines, and frameworks should be developed to augment the use of XR and maximise its strengths (Akçayır and Akçayır, 2017 ). For example, XR-game-based learning has been studied recently, which can help strengthen its benefits and better its pedagogical and educational practices (Fu et al. 2022 ; Pellas et al. 2019 ). Also, identifying different technologies’ strengths and constraints can help educators combine these technologies, complement each technology’s limitations, and augment learners’ learning. Future studies can explore how to integrate XR’s special features like playfulness, immersion, and transferability with PBL or other learning theories and approaches.

6 Challenges and future research suggestion

The current study reviewed the use of XR in popular science education from the view of DL, which provides an insightful revelation of future improvement and directions. Currently, the challenge of XR is that its use is primarily located on the “access and understanding” and “human–system interaction” DL dimensions, while other dimensions are still yet exploited. Learners mostly passively receive knowledge provided by XR, but they seldom have opportunities to co-create and co-solve problems. Although MR has the highest potential for developing higher-order DL dimensions, as it allows human-to-human/system collaboration in a real and virtual world (Bekele and Champion 2019 ), we can only find one popular science article using MR, showing that the application of MR in education is still in its infant stage, meriting future exploration to develop its usefulness and evaluate its pedagogical value (Pellas et al. 2020 ). MR is the newest among the three technologies and requires the highest computing power and high-level technological devices (Bekele and Champion 2019 ). The challenge may be finding an economical way of extensively using MR in popular science education, even formal education. This requires constant improvement of the XR techniques and devices.

We also found that in most studies, learners can only use previously made XR content for learning. They do not have the freedom to adjust the content or interface of XR. The difficulty in adjusting the intended content may limit the use and extension of XR, as educators cannot make their own content for their own needs. Also, users cannot adjust the content if the interface is not user-friendly. As shown in Bekele et al.’s ( 2021 ) study, they found that although the MR devices have rich functions and allow peer-to-peer interaction in a hybrid environment, some museum visitors might find interacting with the system difficult. The collaboration between educators, researchers, and technology industries is essential, so the XR content can be practical and meet the needs of educators and users. Researchers can evaluate the effectiveness of XR content and provide further improvement suggestions. Besides, creating no coding and easily made XR is worthwhile, allowing educators in museums and schools to tailor XR content for their specific needs.

To augment the use of technology and cultivate DL, several researchers proposed using PBL, which creates a productive environment for improving knowledge and giving students opportunities to practice and display their DL (Alt and Raichel 2020 ; Loizzo et al. 2018 ). Although PBL is seldom used in popular science education, it is a promising approach in this field involving using XR. The European Commission ( 2019 ) proposed that technologies used in PBL can support students’ DL, as PBL give students opportunities to actively participate in innovation and collaboration activities across disciplines through various technologies. Constructivist activities (e.g. digital content development) and real-life relevance PBL have been regarded as the most feasible way to cultivate students’ DL because students have opportunities to put DL into practice and perceive learning as meaningful and life-relevant. Learners do not just passively receive information presented by digital content (consumers); instead, they actively create, collaborate, and solve problems (creators). We proposed that only using XR in PBL is not practical due to current XR’s technical and content limitations (e.g. students may need computers or tablets to search for information or use online meeting software for online discussion); instead, educators and researchers need to identify the strengths and constraints of XR and other technologies and complement each other, so its learning effectiveness can be augmented.

In terms of the research methodology employed in this study, the authors initially utilised keywords to identify relevant articles. Subsequently, we engaged in discussions with three scholars who possess expertise in the fields of educational technology, XR, AR, VR, and MR to establish the criteria for article selection. Following this, the authors meticulously examined and analysed all the selected papers, and further discussions were conducted with the aforementioned experts to enhance the robustness of the findings. Future studies can consider incorporating advanced techniques to analyse articles. Additionally, considering articles written in languages other than English and from diverse countries and cultures would be beneficial in contextualising and expanding upon the findings.

7 Conclusion

The proliferation of technology contributes to learning and teaching tremendously, urging educators and researchers to prioritise learners’ DL, which is critical for students to use technology effectively and develop their high-order thinking. Among all technologies, XR has gained momentum and has been extensively used in education to provide students with a fresh and immersive learning experience. To better the use of XR in education and explore its future applications, the researchers proposed the DL–XR framework, including eight essential digital literacy dimensions for XR and the metaverse: access and understanding, evaluation, ethics and well-being, interaction, collaboration, creation, problem-solving, and civic engagement and responsibility . To our knowledge, this is the first framework entailing DL and XR and provides a foundation for further discussion and refinement, which entitles the study to its significance and appropriateness. The framework can serve as guidance for future researchers and educators, which articulates the optimistic future of XR and clearly highlights the dimensions of DL that are still untapped. Future researchers, educators, and practitioners can refer to the DL–XR framework and consider whether the embedment of XR can facilitate users’ DL development, especially those dimensions labelled as high-order thinking and group dynamic. It should be noted that although most findings and the DL–XR framework development were mainly based on popular science education literature review, it is believed that the facets of DL and the specific features of AR, VR, and MR can be transferable to other disciplines, which also helps illuminate the strengths, constraints, and future directions of XR learning. The framework introduced in this study can be perceived as a comprehensive blueprint for the prospective integration of XR in educational contexts to enhance digital literacy.

Data availability

The data presented in this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Dr Drew Whitworth and Dr Amanda Banks Gatenby at the Manchester Institute of Education, the University of Manchester, UK. They offered insightful feedback about digital, media and information literacy and future directions for the research. We would like to express our appreciation for the support offered by the 5G New Technology Learning Demonstration School Program.

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• All-in-One WP Migration: Export your WordPress site including the database.
• VaultPress (Jetpack Backup): Automated backups and security scanning.

4. SEO Optimization

• Yoast SEO: Comprehensive SEO management.
• All in One SEO Pack: Automates SEO improvements.
• Rank Math: A fast-growing user-friendly SEO plugin.
• SEOPress: A powerful plugin to optimize your SEO.
• The SEO Framework: An automated SEO plugin.

5. Page Builders

• Elementor: Drag-and-drop page builder.
• Beaver Builder: Flexible drag and drop page building.
• Divi Builder: Visual editing and responsive design.
• Visual Composer: Website builder for WordPress.
• Thrive Architect: Conversion-focused website building.

6. E-Commerce Solutions

• WooCommerce: Comprehensive e-commerce solution.
• Easy Digital Downloads: For selling digital goods.
• BigCommerce: Integrates WordPress with the BigCommerce platform.
• Shopify Buy Button: Embed Shopify products and checkout.
• WP EasyCart: Shopping cart and eCommerce store.

7. Membership and Subscriptions

• MemberPress: Membership site builder.
• Paid Memberships Pro: Unlimited subscription levels.
• Restrict Content Pro: Content protection for membership sites.
• WooCommerce Memberships: Integrates memberships with WooCommerce.
• S2Member: Membership management system.

8. Learning Management Systems (LMS)

• LearnDash: Feature-rich LMS plugin.
• LifterLMS: Create and sell courses online.
• Sensei LMS: Seamless integration with WooCommerce.
• WP Courseware: Drag-and-drop course creation.
• Tutor LMS: A complete, feature-packed LMS plugin.

9. Security Plugins

• Wordfence Security: Firewall and malware scan.
• iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security): Comprehensive WordPress security.
• Sucuri Security: Security integrity monitoring and malware scanning.
• All In One WP Security & Firewall: User-friendly security plugin.
• SecuPress: Security scanning and protection.

10. SMS Notifications and Marketing

• Twilio SMS Notifications: Send SMS updates and notifications via Twilio.
• WP SMS: Send SMS messages to subscribers and integrate with many global SMS gateways.
• YITH WooCommerce SMS Notifications: Notify customers about order status via SMS.
• SMS Gateway Hub: Connect your WordPress site with SMS Gateway Hub for bulk SMS marketing.
• Joy Of Text Lite: SMS messaging for groups and individuals, supporting various gateways.

11. Email Marketing and Newsletters

• Mailchimp for WordPress: Integrate Mailchimp with your WordPress site.
• Newsletter: Create, send, and track newsletters.
• SendinBlue Subscribe Form and WP SMTP: Email marketing and SMTP.
• Constant Contact for WordPress: Grow your audience with email campaigns.
• MailPoet: Manage newsletters, automated emails, and post notifications.

12. Analytics and Data Tracking

• MonsterInsights: Connect your website with Google Analytics.
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics: Display Google Analytics data in WordPress.
• Matomo Analytics: Ethical stats without outsourcing to Google.
• WP Statistics: Comprehensive site statistics and analytics.
• Slimstat Analytics: Real-time analytics in your WordPress dashboard.

13. SEO Local Business

• Local SEO for WordPress by Yoast: Optimize for local SEO.
• WP Google Maps: Create custom Google maps with high-quality markers.
• Business Profile: Display your business’s contact details professionally.
• Schema Pro: Add schema markup for better SEO.
• Local SEO and Business Listings (Premium SEO Pack): Improve local SEO visibility.

14. Forum and Discussion Boards

• bbPress: Forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.
• BuddyPress: Community and social network site builder.
• wpForo Forum: Full-fledged forum solution.
• Simple:Press: Feature-rich forum plugin.
• Asgaros Forum: Lightweight forum plugin for simple forums.

15. Event Management

• The Events Calendar: Create and manage events with ease.
• Events Manager: Full-featured event registration plugin.
• Event Organiser: Event management with complex features.
• Modern Events Calendar: Responsive event calendar and booking.
• WP Event Manager: Lightweight, scalable, and full-featured event management.

16. Affiliate Marketing

• AffiliateWP: Easy-to-use, full-featured affiliate marketing.
• ThirstyAffiliates: Affiliate link management & cloaking.
• Pretty Links: Affiliate link management and URL shortening.
• WP Affiliate Manager: Affiliate management for your products and services.
• Ultimate Affiliate Pro: Comprehensive affiliate management system.

17. African Payment Gateways

• Paystack WooCommerce Payment Gateway: Seamless integration with Paystack for payments in Nigeria and Ghana.
• Flutterwave for WooCommerce: Offers broad payment options across Africa, including Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
• DPO PayGate for WooCommerce: Provides a payment solution for Southern Africa.
• Peach Payments for WooCommerce: Supports payments in South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius.
• VoguePay WooCommerce Payment Gateway: A global payment platform with a strong presence in Nigeria.

18. Database Management

• WP-Optimize: Clean, compress, and optimize your database.
• WP-DBManager: Database management directly from the WordPress backend.
• WP-Sweep: Cleans up unused, orphaned, and duplicated data in your database.
• WP Database Backup: Create and restore database backups.
• Participants Database: Customizable database for participants, members, or anything similar.

19. Translation and Multilingual

• WPML: Create multilingual websites.
• Polylang: Manage multilingual posts in WordPress.
• TranslatePress: Translate your website directly from the front-end.
• Loco Translate: In-browser editing of WordPress translation files.
• Weglot Translate: Translate your website into multiple languages.

20. Custom Fields and Post Types

• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF): Customize WordPress with powerful fields.
• Toolset Types: Custom post types, fields, and taxonomy.
• Custom Post Type UI: Manage custom post types and taxonomies.
• Pods: Create and manage custom content types and fields.
• Meta Box: Create custom fields and meta boxes.

21. Image Optimization

• Smush: Compress, optimize, and lazy load images.
• EWWW Image Optimizer: Automatically optimizes images.
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer: Compress images to improve performance.
• Imagify: Optimize images to speed up your website.
• Optimole: Image optimization and lazy loading.

22. SEO Sitemaps

• Google XML Sitemaps: Generate a special XML sitemap to help search engines better index your blog.
• Yoast SEO: Creates sitemaps and manages SEO overall.
• All in One SEO Pack: Automatically generates XML sitemaps.
• SEOPress: Create sitemaps for Google and Bing.
• Rank Math: Offers advanced sitemap options.

23. Social Proof and Testimonials

• WP Customer Reviews: Collect customer reviews for social proof.
• Testimonial Widget: Display testimonials and reviews.
• Strong Testimonials: A full-featured testimonials plugin.
• Testimonials Slider: Showcase testimonials and reviews slider.
• Easy Testimonials: Add testimonials to sidebar widgets or pages.

24. Landing Pages

• Elementor: Design landing pages with a visual editor.
• Beaver Builder: Drag-and-drop landing page builder.
• Leadpages Connector: Integrate Leadpages with WordPress.
• Landingi Landing Pages: Create and publish landing pages.
• Instapage WordPress Plugin: Connect WordPress with your Instapage account.

25. Popup and Lead Generation

• Popup Maker: Create and manage powerful popups.
• OptinMonster: Popup and lead generation plugin.
• Bloom: Email opt-in and lead generation plugin.
• Thrive Leads: Build your mailing list faster.
• WP Subscribe: Simple and effective subscription popup plugin.

26. Calendar and Booking

• Booking Calendar: Booking system for WordPress.
• WP Simple Booking Calendar: Display availability and book dates.
• BirchPress: Appointment booking and online scheduling.
• Bookly: Automated online booking & scheduling.
• Amelia: Enterprise-level appointment booking.

27. Maps and Directions

• WP Google Maps: Customizable Google Maps plugin.
• Maps Marker Pro: Pin, organize, and share your favorite spots & tracks.
• MapPress Maps for WordPress: Easy map insertion with directions.
• Leaflet Map: Leverages the Leaflet JS library for map displays.
• WP Store Locator: An easy to use location management system.

28. FAQ and Knowledge Base

• WP FAQ: Easily create and manage FAQs.
• Heroic FAQs: Drag-and-drop FAQ management.
• Accordion FAQ: Create FAQ sections with accordion style.
• Ultimate FAQ: Comprehensive FAQ management.
• Knowledge Base for Documentation and FAQs: Set up a knowledge base or documentation site.

29. Real Estate

• WP Real Estate: Manage properties and listings.
• Easy Property Listings: Powerful real estate management plugin.
• Real Estate Pro: Paid property listing and management.
• Essential Real Estate: Comprehensive real estate solution.
• WPL Real Estate: Manage property listings, RETS/IDX.

30. Custom CSS and JavaScript

• Simple Custom CSS and JS: Add custom CSS or JavaScript to your site.
• Custom CSS & JS: Customize website directly with CSS/JS.
• WP Add Custom CSS: Add custom CSS to the whole website or specific posts.
• Code Snippets: Add custom PHP code snippets.
• Simple Custom CSS: An easy way to add custom CSS.

31. GDPR Compliance

• Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA: Inform users about cookies.
• WP GDPR Compliance: Assists with GDPR compliance.
• Complianz | GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent: Manage cookie consent and compliance.
• GDPR Cookie Consent Banner: GDPR cookie notice plugin.
• GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation compliance toolkit.

32. Content Curation and Aggregation

• Feedzy RSS Feeds: Aggregate RSS feeds via shortcode.
• WP RSS Aggregator: Import and display content from RSS feeds.
• Curated RSS Aggregator: A comprehensive aggregator for curating content.
• Content Views: Display WordPress content in grid and more layouts.
• WP Content Crawler: Get content from almost any site, automatically.

33. Polls and Surveys

• WP-Polls: Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress site.
• YOP Poll: Conduct polls and surveys within your posts/pages.
• Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker by OpinionStage: Create and manage polls and quizzes.
• Formidable Forms: Not just forms, but also surveys and polls.
• Gravity Forms: Advanced forms for surveys and polls.

34. Donations and Fundraising

• GiveWP: Donation and fundraising platform.
• Charitable: Donation and fundraising plugin.
• WP Crowdfunding: A crowdfunding system.
• Donorbox: Free donation plugin with recurring donations.
• Seamless Donations: Easy donations with PayPal integration.

35. Video and Multimedia Management

• Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator: Makes video embedding easy.
• Envira Gallery: Responsive WordPress gallery with video support.
• WP Video Lightbox: Display videos in a lightbox overlay.
• FV Flowplayer Video Player: Embed FLV or MP4 videos.
• YouTube Embed Plus: Enhance your YouTube video embedding.

36. Widgets and Sidebars

• Widget Options: Control and manage your widgets’ visibility.
• Custom Sidebars: Dynamic sidebar management.
• Content Aware Sidebars: Create sidebars for specific content.
• WP Widget in Navigation: Add widgets to your navigation menu.
• Black Studio TinyMCE Widget: Add rich text widgets to your sidebars.

37. Table and Chart Creation

• TablePress: Embed tables into posts, pages, or text widgets.
• wpDataTables: Create and manage tables and charts.
• Visualizer: A simple, yet powerful tool for creating charts.
• Data Tables Generator by Supsystic: Create responsive tables and charts.
• League Table: Create sortable and responsive tables.

38. Discussion and Comment Management

• Disqus Comment System: Replace WordPress comments with Disqus.
• wpDiscuz: Super fast and responsive comment system.
• CommentLuv: Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment.
• Akismet: Protects your comments and contact form from spam.
• Thrive Comments: Convert comments into a community.

39. Sliders and Carousels

• Slider Revolution: Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin.
• LayerSlider: Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin.
• Soliloquy: Drag & Drop Responsive WordPress Slider.
• Smart Slider 3: Responsive slider solution.
• MetaSlider: Easy to use slider plugin.

40. Portfolio Management

• Portfolio Post Type: Enables a portfolio post type.
• Visual Portfolio: Create beautiful portfolios and galleries.
• GridKit Portfolio Gallery: Portfolio, gallery, and product catalog.
• Portfolio Gallery: Stunning portfolio galleries.
• Essential Grid: Portfolio display plugin.

41. User Registration and User Profile

• Profile Builder: Front-end user registration and profile management.
• Ultimate Member: User profile and membership plugin.
• User Registration: A drag and drop user registration form builder.
• WP User Frontend: Post submissions and user profile builder.
• UsersWP: Lightweight user profile and registration plugin.

42. Directory and Listing

• Business Directory Plugin: Create a local or global directory.
• GeoDirectory: Turn any WordPress theme into a global business directory.
• Connections Business Directory: A simple to use directory plugin.
• Sabai Directory: A directory plugin for creating community-driven sites.
• Directorist: Versatile and feature-rich business directory plugin.

43. Project Management and Collaboration

• WP Project Manager: A project management and task management tool.
• UpStream: Project management plugin to manage any type of project.
• Panorama: Project management and communication tool.
• Kanban Boards for WordPress: Use Kanban boards for project management.
• Task Manager: A simple and flexible task management plugin.

44. Invoicing and Billing

• WP-Invoice: Send itemized invoices to clients.
• Sliced Invoices: WordPress invoice plugin that’s easy and powerful.
• Sprout Invoices: Advanced invoicing and estimates management.
• WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips: Automatic invoicing for WooCommerce.
• WP Simple Pay: Easily create payment forms, subscription forms, and invoices.

45. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Images

• SEO Optimized Images: Automatically update images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes.
• EWWW Image Optimizer: Optimize your images for SEO and speed.
• Smush: Compress, optimize, and lazy load images for SEO.
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer: Improve website performance and SEO by optimizing images.
• Imagify: Optimize images to reduce their file size without losing quality.

46. RSS Feed Enhancement

• Feedzy RSS Feeds: Import content from RSS feeds.
• WP RSS Aggregator: A comprehensive RSS feed importer.
• RSS Importer: Import posts from an RSS feed.
• Category Specific RSS feed Subscription: Add RSS feeds for categories.
• RSS Feed Widget: Display RSS feeds in your widget areas.

47. Social Media Auto Posting

• Revive Old Posts: Auto-posting your old content to social media.
• Social Auto Poster: Automatically post content to various social media platforms.
• FS Poster: Auto-publish posts to many social networks.
• Blog2Social: Customize and schedule posts for social media.
• AccessPress Social Auto Post: Auto-post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr.

48. Multi-language and Translation Management

• WPML: Make your site multilingual.
• Polylang: Add multilingual content to your site.
• Loco Translate: Manage translations within WordPress.
• Multilanguage by BestWebSoft: Easily translate your WordPress site into multiple languages.

49. Custom Fonts

• Use Any Font: Embed any custom font in your website.
• Easy Google Fonts: Integrate Google Fonts with your WordPress site.
• Font Awesome: Use Font Awesome icons.
• WP Google Fonts: Add Google Fonts to your theme.
• Custom Fonts: Upload custom fonts and assign them easily.

50. Content Duplicator and Cloner

• Duplicate Post: Clone posts and pages.
• Post Duplicator: Create a duplicate post, page, or custom post type.
• Duplicate Page: Duplicate your pages, posts, and custom post types.
• Yoast Duplicate Post: Copy posts, pages, and custom posts easily.
• WP Staging: Clone your website for staging or development purposes.

51. Custom Login and Registration Pages

• Theme My Login: Customize your login, registration, and forgot password pages.
• Custom Login Page Customizer: Customize the login page using the customizer.
• LoginPress: Design beautiful and modern login page styles.
• Admin Custom Login: Customize your admin login page.
• WP Admin White Label Login: Customize the WordPress login page to match your branding.

52. Advertising and Ad Management

• Ad Inserter: Insert ads into post content.
• Advanced Ads: Manage ads and display conditions.
• WP-Insert: Manage your ads and other code snippets.
• Ads by WPQUADS: Quick AdSense reloaded; manage your AdSense and other ads.
• AdRotate: Manage all your advert campaigns.

53. Content Scheduling

• Editorial Calendar: See all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.
• Schedule Posts Calendar: Easily schedule posts using a calendar.
• WP Scheduled Posts: Manage your scheduled posts.
• Content Scheduler: Schedule content updates and expirations.
• Auto Post Scheduler: Schedule and recycle posts automatically.

54. Database Optimization and Cleaning

• WP-Sweep: Clean up unused, orphaned, and duplicated data.
• WP Clean Up: Optimize your WordPress database by removing unnecessary data.
• Advanced Database Cleaner: Clean up old and unnecessary data from your database.
• DBManager: Optimize and backup your database easily.

55. Spam Protection

• Akismet: Filter out comment and form spam.
• CleanTalk Spam Protection: Cloud-based anti-spam solutions for WordPress.
• Anti-spam: Block spam in comments automatically.
• WPBruiser: A no-captcha, anti-spam plugin.
• Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk: Comprehensive spam protection.

56. Customer Support and Chat

• LiveChat: Offer live chat support to your visitors.
• Tidio Live Chat: Connect with your visitors in real-time.
• WP Live Chat Support: Free live chat plugin.
• Zendesk Chat: Add Zendesk’s live chat capabilities.
• Crisp Live Chat: Live chat with automation capabilities.

57. FAQ Management

• Ultimate FAQ: Create, organize, and publicize your FAQs.
• Accordion FAQ: Build FAQ sections with accordion layouts.
• Easy Accordion: Create beautiful accordion FAQ sections.
• HTML5 Responsive FAQ: Make a responsive FAQ section.
• Quick and Easy FAQs: Quickly add FAQs using custom post type.

58. 404 Error Management

• 404page: Create custom 404 error pages.
• Redirection: Manage 301 redirections and monitor 404 errors.
• All 404 Redirect to Homepage: Redirect all 404 errors to the homepage.
• Smart 404: Helps WordPress find a match for 404 pages.
• SEO Redirection Plugin: Fix 404 errors by redirecting to similar posts.

59. Real-Time Notifications

• OneSignal Push Notifications: Send real-time notifications.
• PushEngage: Browser push notifications.
• WP Notification Bars: Create custom notification and alert bars.
• NotificationX: Best FOMO, Social Proof, Sales Popup for WooCommerce, EDD and more.
• Better Notifications for WordPress: Customizable email notifications.

60. Podcasting

• Seriously Simple Podcasting: Easy podcasting solution using WordPress.
• PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry: Comprehensive podcasting plugin.
• Podlove Podcast Publisher: Designed for podcasting, handling complex needs.
• Simple Podcast Press: Automate podcast publishing and grow your audience.
• Castos: Fully integrated podcast hosting and publishing.

61. Cache and Speed Optimization

• LiteSpeed Cache: Acceleration & advanced caching features.
• WP Fastest Cache: Simple and effective caching plugin.
• Autoptimize: Aggregate, minify, and cache scripts and styles.
• Hummingbird: Speed optimization through caching, minification, and compression.
• Cache Enabler: Lightweight caching plugin for WordPress.

62. SEO Rich Snippets

• All In One Schema Rich Snippets: Support for schema.org rich snippets.
• Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin: Create and manage rich snippets.
• WP SEO Structured Data Schema: Comprehensive schema management.
• Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP: Supports a wide range of schema types.
• Snippet Box: Rich snippets and structured data plugin.

63. Broken Link Checkers

• Broken Link Checker: Monitor and test all internal & external links.
• Link Checker: Check links in posts, pages, comments, and custom fields.
• WP Broken Link Status Checker: Broken link detection utility.
• WP Link Status Pro: Check and manage HTTP response codes.
• Link Valet: Automated broken link checker.

64. A/B Testing

• Nelio AB Testing: Powerful and versatile A/B testing tool.
• Simple Page Tester: Easy A/B split testing.
• Thrive Optimize: A/B testing for Thrive Architect pages.
• Marketing Optimizer for WordPress: A/B testing and conversion optimization.
• Split Hero: WordPress A/B split testing plugin.

65. Content Protection

• WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click: Protect your content from being copied.
• Content Protector: Protect content using access codes.
• Secure Copy Content Protection: Protect text and images from being copied.
• WP-CopyProtect: Disable right-click, text selection, and image dragging.
• My Private Site: Make your WordPress blog private.

66. Affiliate Management

• Affiliates Manager: Manage, track, and pay your affiliates.
• YITH WooCommerce Affiliates: Add an affiliate system to WooCommerce.
• AffiliateWP: A full-featured affiliate marketing solution.
• Ultimate Affiliate Pro: Advanced affiliate management system.
• WP Affiliate Platform: Simple affiliate program management.

67. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• WP ERP: A complete business manager with CRM, HRM, and Accounting.
• UkuuPeople: Simple CRM for WordPress.
• Zero BS WordPress CRM: Free CRM solution for WordPress.
• WP-CRM System: Manage your customers, projects, and tasks.
• Groundhogg: Marketing automation and CRM for WordPress.

68. Social Media Feeds

• Smash Balloon Social Post Feed: Display your Facebook posts on your website.
• Custom Twitter Feeds: Customize and display your Twitter feeds.
• Instagram Feed: Display beautifully clean, customizable Instagram feeds.
• Feeds for YouTube: Easily display YouTube feeds on your website.
• Flow-Flow Social Stream: Display social media content in beautiful streams.

69. Logistics and Shipping Solutions

• WooCommerce Shipment Tracking: Add shipment tracking information to your orders.
• AfterShip – WooCommerce Tracking: Automate tracking and delivery updates.
• WooCommerce Advanced Shipping: Highly customizable shipping method plugin.
• Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce: Define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, or weight.
• WP EasyCart Shipping by Weight: Set up shipping rates based on weight, integrating with various couriers.

70. Digital Asset Management (DAM)

• Folders: Organize site content in folders.
• FileBird: WordPress media library folders.
• WP Media Folder: Manage files and folders in WordPress.
• Enhanced Media Library: A better management for your media items.
• Media Library Assistant: Advanced management and taxonomy for media files.

71. Email Management and Marketing

• MailPoet: Create newsletters, automated emails, post notifications, and autoresponders.
• Newsletter: Email marketing and newsletters made easy.
• Mailster: Email newsletter plugin for WordPress.
• SendPress Newsletters: Create and send newsletters.
• The Newsletter Plugin: Comprehensive email marketing plugin.

72. Real-Time Backups

• BlogVault: Real-time backup and security for WordPress.
• UpdraftPlus Premium: Advanced features and real-time backups.
• Jetpack Backups: Real-time backups and security scanning.
• VaultPress: Real-time backup and security scanning by Automattic.
• BackupBuddy Stash Live: Real-time WordPress backup solution.

73. Anti-Spam & Security

• CleanTalk Spam Protection: Cloud-based antispam protection.
• WP Cerber Security, Antispam & Malware Scan: Security solution against spam, Trojans, and malware.
• Titan Anti-spam & Security: Anti-spam, firewall, and malware scanner.
• SecuPress Free — WordPress Security: Protect your website with automated security.
• Anti-Spam by CleanTalk: Spam protection for comments, forms, and registrations.

74. Social Login Integration

• Nextend Social Login: Social login with Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
• Super Socializer: Social login, sharing, and comments.
• Social Login WordPress Plugin – AccessPress Social Login: Simplify login using social network profiles.
• WP Social Login: Allow visitors to comment, login, and register with social networks.
• MiniOrange Social Login: Social login and social sharing.

75. File and Document Management

• WP Download Manager: Manage, track, and control file downloads.
• File Manager: Easy to use WordPress file manager.
• Groups File Access WordPress Plugin: Offer file downloads for authorized users.
• WordPress Download Manager Pro: Advanced features for managing downloads.
• Download Monitor: Track and manage downloadable files.

76. SEO Audit and Monitoring

• SEOPressor Connect: Advanced SEO analysis and recommendations.
• Rankie: WordPress rank tracker plugin.
• SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant: Real-time content analysis.
• All In One SEO Pack Pro: Advanced SEO features and support.
• Yoast SEO Premium: In-depth SEO analysis and optimization.

77. Quiz and Survey Builders

• Quiz And Survey Master: Flexible quizzes and surveys.
• WP Quiz: Create interactive quizzes.
• Formidable Forms: Advanced form builder that also handles quizzes and surveys.
• eForm: Form builder with quiz and survey capabilities.
• Gravity Forms Quiz Add-On: Extend Gravity Forms to include quiz functionality.

78. Productivity Tools

• Editorial Calendar: See and manage your posts with a simple calendar.
• TaskFreak! Free: Project and task management tool.
• Kanban Boards for WordPress: Personal task or project management.
• Post Duplicator: Easily duplicate posts, pages, and custom post types.
• WP Sticky Sidebar: Make your sidebar sticky to increase usability.

79. Image Galleries and Sliders

• NextGEN Gallery: Comprehensive gallery management.
• Modula Image Gallery: Customizable image galleries.
• FooGallery: Responsive image gallery plugin.
• Slider Revolution: Responsive slider plugin.
• Soliloquy: Drag and drop slider plugin.

80. Video Management

• Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator: Facilitate embedding of videos.
• ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder: Embed videos responsively.
• FV Flowplayer Video Player: Embed FLV or MP4 videos using HTML5.
• YourChannel: Display a YouTube channel on your website.

81. Accessibility Enhancements

• WP Accessibility: Helps improve accessibility features in your WordPress site.
• One Click Accessibility: Adds accessibility options with a single click.
• Accessibility Suite by UserWay: Web accessibility solutions.
• Accessible Poetry: Adds various accessibility options to your site.
• Able Player for WordPress: Accessible multimedia player for WordPress.

82. Content Import and Export

• WordPress Importer: Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from a WordPress export file.
• WP All Import: Advanced XML and CSV import capabilities for WordPress.
• Export any WordPress data to XML/CSV: Export WordPress data easily.
• WP Ultimate CSV Importer: Import/update posts, pages, custom post types with CSV files.
• Really Simple CSV Importer: Simpler, faster CSV importer.

83. Booking and Reservations

• Booking Calendar: Allows guests to make reservations on a calendar.
• WP Hotel Booking: Booking system tailored for hotels.
• Booked: Appointment booking for WordPress.
• Amelia: Enterprise-level appointment booking for WordPress.
• BirchPress Scheduler: Booking tool for appointments and services.

84. Widgets Management

• Widget Logic: Control widgets’ visibility with WP’s conditional tags.
• Content Aware Sidebars: Create and display custom sidebars based on content.
• Widgets for SiteOrigin: Additional widgets for the SiteOrigin Page Builder.
• Enhanced Text Widget: An enhanced text widget with more features.
• Black Studio TinyMCE Widget: Use the WYSIWYG editor for adding content to widgets.

85. Maps and Geolocation

• Maps Widget for Google Maps: Display a single image static Google map.
• GeoDirectory: Create a location-based directory.
• WP Google Maps: Customizable Google Maps.
• MapPress Maps for WordPress: Easy map insertion.
• WP Store Locator: A powerful store locator plugin.

86. Multi-Vendor Marketplaces

• Dokan Multivendor Marketplace: Create a multi-vendor marketplace.
• WC Vendors Marketplace: Multi-vendor marketplace plugin for WooCommerce.
• WCFM Marketplace: WooCommerce Frontend Manager for multi-vendor stores.
• YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor: Turn your store into a multi-vendor marketplace.
• MarketPress: Create a marketplace with WordPress.

87. Forums and Community Building

• bbPress: Forum software with a twist, from the creators of WordPress.
• BuddyPress: Social networking, the WordPress way.
• PeepSo: Social network plugin for WordPress.
• WP Symposium Pro: Create your own social network.
• Asgaros Forum: Lightweight forum plugin for WordPress.

88. Customer Feedback and Reviews

• WP Customer Reviews: Collect customer reviews for your business, website, or individual products/pages.
• Site Reviews: Where site visitors can submit reviews with a 1-5 star rating.
• Review Builder: Create reviews with star ratings, especially for products.
• WP Product Review Lite: Turn your posts into smart reviews with ratings.
• YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews: Enhance the review section of your WooCommerce product page.

89. Heatmaps and User Behavior

• Crazy Egg: Integrate Crazy Egg heatmaps and website analytics.
• Heatmap for WordPress: Real-time heatmap tool, showing where clicks are happening.
• WP Heatmap: Simple heatmaps to understand user engagement.
• Hotjar: Connect your WordPress site to Hotjar analytics & feedback.
• Aurora Heatmap: Visualize clicks, touches, and scrolls without configuration.

90. Push Notifications

• OneSignal Push Notifications: Send web push notifications.
• PushAssist: Let your website visitors receive push notifications.
• PushAlert – Web Push Notifications: Instantly alert your visitors with web push notifications.
• WonderPush: Web and mobile push notifications.
• Smart Notification WordPress Plugin: Multi-channel notification system including web push.

91. Version Control and Staging

• WP Staging: Creates a staging site for testing.
• VersionPress: Git-based version control for WordPress.
• Revisr: Manage your WordPress website with Git.
• WP Time Capsule: Incremental backups and staging.
• Duplicator Pro: Move, migrate or clone WordPress sites between domains or hosts.

92. SEO Keyword Optimization

• Yoast SEO: Focus keyword and content analysis tool.
• Rank Math: Built-in suggestion tool for keywords.
• SEOPress: Simple, fast, and powerful SEO plugin for keyword optimization.
• All in One SEO Pack: Supports SEO integration for custom keywords.
• The SEO Framework: Automatically suggests keywords based on content.

93. Countdown Timers

• Countdown Timer – Widget Countdown: Add countdown timers to your website.
• T(-) Countdown: Display a stylized countdown timer.
• Countdown Builder: Customizable countdown timers for events or offers.
• Finale WooCommerce Sales Countdown Timer & Discount Plugin: Create urgency and scarcity with countdown timers for sales.
• Evergreen Countdown Timer: Create evergreen countdown timers for marketing campaigns.

94. Popups and Modal Windows

• Popup Maker: Create and manage powerful modal popups.
• Layered Popups: Animated popups with layers.
• Ninja Popups: Popups for newsletter subscriptions, etc.
• WP Popup Plugin: Simple popups creator.
• ConvertPlus: Popup plugin for lead generation.

95. Content Slider and Carousel

• MetaSlider: Easy to use WordPress slider plugin.

96. Email Log and Management

• WP Mail Logging: Log every email sent by WordPress.
• Email Log: Store sent emails for auditing.
• Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log: Log and manage emails, includes SMTP support.
• Mail Bank: Manage and log WordPress emails.
• WP Email Users: Send emails to users or user roles.

97. Two-Factor Authentication

• Two Factor Authentication: Add two-factor authentication to WordPress login.
• Google Authenticator: Use Google Authenticator for two-factor login.
• Wordfence Login Security: Provides login security features including two-factor auth.
• Duo Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication in partnership with Duo Security.
• MiniOrange 2 Factor Authentication: Secure WordPress login with 2FA.

98. Dynamic Content and Personalization

• If-So Dynamic Content: Display dynamic content based on conditions.
• Content Views: Display WordPress content in various layouts dynamically.
• Personalized Content: Offer personalized content to your users.
• WP Personalize: Personalize website content based on user behavior.
• Logic Hop: Personalize content and increase conversions with dynamic content.

99. Content Restriction and Membership Levels

• Restrict Content Pro: Premium content plugin for subscription-based content access.
• MemberPress: All-in-one membership plugin for content restriction.
• Paid Memberships Pro: Flexible content restriction and membership plugin.
• WooCommerce Memberships: Integrate memberships with WooCommerce for content restriction.
• Ultimate Member: User profile and membership plugin for content restriction.

100. Weather Widgets and Plugins

• WP Cloudy: A weather plugin that uses OpenWeatherMap to create beautiful weather widgets.
• Awesome Weather Widget: Display weather using widgets or shortcodes.
• Weather Atlas Widget: Display weather from any location.
• Simple Weather: Simple shortcode and widget to display weather.
• Weather Effect: Add beautiful weather effects to your WordPress site.

Not finding your desired problem-solving plugin?

NB: The above list is not exhaustive. You can find plugins for use in projects involving entertainment, health, transport, agriculture and any sector of interest! And if you can’t find a WordPress plugin for your use case in the WordPress repo, WordPress is open source and allows you to code your custom plugin. You can also use some coding knowledge to create a basic plugin to add additional functionality to your website. If your plugin goes well, you may even be able to sell it to others and turn your project into a side hustle. Check out this beginner’s guide by our sponsor, WPBeginner: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-create-a-wordpress-plugin

As we look forward to the creativity and ingenuity that will undoubtedly be on display at the National ICT Innovation Hub in Nakawa, Kampala on July 5th, it’s clear that the future is bright for Uganda’s young problem solvers. With WordPress and its vast ecosystem of plugins, the only limit is your imagination. So, let’s harness the power of plugins to transform ideas into digital realities, creating innovative solutions that benefit our local societies and beyond.

When ready, be sure to submit your project at events.wordpress.org/uganda/2024/competition/call-for-projects before the 30th April 2024 DEADLINE!

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