E061 - Interview: Avi Bar-Zeev about Spatial Computing and its origins as far as we know it in 1992

Welcome to 2024 and welcome to the age of Spatial Computing! At
least that is what Apple wants us to believe. And they push hard
and swift to proof they want to make it happen. So much, that they
just announced to release the Apple Vision Pro as early as February
2nd 2024! That is indeed "Early next year". But that is not enough:
Within their developer website they ask developers not to use the
words AR, VR or MR, but only to speak about Spatial Computing. Time
to investigate what Spatial Computing actually is. But there is a
problem: The Wikipedia article is rather short. And not very
helpful. Usually that's what journalists or the so-called experts
on LinkedIn would do: Read the Wikipedia article and hope they
understand enough, what a word actually means. It was enough for
Metaverse (it was not). But for Spatial Computing we really could
need some historical help. Thats why I am happy to have Avi
Bar-Zeev as a guest in this episode. He claims to have used the
word as early as 1992 at Worldesign Inc, which would be 10 years
earlier than what the Wikipedia articles source Simon Greenwolds
work "Spatial Computing" from 2003 claims. In "Spatial Computing"
Greenwolds uses this example to explain Spatial Computing: “The
simplest example may be an auto-flushing toilet that senses the
user’s movement away to trigger a flush. This is trivial spatial
computing, but it qualifies. The space of the system’s engagement
is a real human space.” Avi doesn't agree here. Although the toilet
recognizes you leave the room, the computational aspect of the
mechanism is not existent. As the former team-lead prototyping the
AppleVision Pro he explains what he understands Spatial Computing
is: "The general accepted definition of Spatial Computing is that
humans are naturally spatial, we exist in a spatial environment, we
interact in the world around us. There is the world within arm's
reach, and then there is the world we can see. But all of those
things is what we call ego-centric, they are very much about us who
are placed in the world. Spatial Computing is essentially trying to
get the computer to understand that, that world, that we live in,
so that we can interact with the computer. Because everything else
up to now has been us trying to adapt to the computer's world.
[...] Spatial Computing is adding a few new technologies in order
to bring the intelligence of the computer into our world."