Written by - Digibeings
History of Operating System
For years our perception of what an operating system is has been dominated by the notorious blue screen of death of Microsoft Windows. You all know Windows and Mac. If you’re a bit of a nerd, you know Linux too. As far as most users were concerned, the operating system was something that came prepackaged with their PC. They knew it was called Windows, they knew it somehow made everything work together under the hood, and they knew it was quite expensive to get one. That’s all they cared about.
The most important aspect of an operating system is that it defines the user interface.
There are multiple ways to view the role of operating systems in modern computing systems, but the most important aspect of them is that they define the user interface. They define what is possible and what is not when you’re using your machine.
You might have seen a movie called the Matrix. Do you remember those cute dark screens, you could do stuff with it. Stuff like creating new documents, play games and surf the Web. Your life had changed forever. And then along came Steve Jobs. He disliked the idea that the user was stuck with this bulky, antiquated piece of machinery we call the PC. He saw the potential of mobile devices, and, thus, the iPhone was born. The new interface was radically different than everything that preceded it. You no longer point and click with this weird gimmick called the mouse, you swipe with your own finger. You’re not stuck with a screen and keyboard, you have a portable personal computer in your pocket. The future of computing would no longer be the same!
Unrealised Potential
What’s the key lesson from the above short history of operating systems? It’s the story of any technological breakthrough. Science comes up with a new application, then some daring entrepreneur seizes upon the opportunity to radically change they way the rest of us perceive our lives, and thus a new era begins. So what is the next step in operating systems?
Think about the way you interact with most of your gadgets today. To get a response out of your PC or smartphones, you must type with your keyboard, click with your mouse, scroll, navigate tabs, swipe, push with your finger and so on. Now take a moment to consider how you interact with other human beings. Chances are, most of the time you simply talk to them. 65% of human communication is non verbal involving gestures, facial expressions and head movements.
A virtual Human operating system will happen — it IS happening. Just look at all the evolution of chatbots and voice assistants in the recent times which shows we are moving towards making interfaces more humanised. Face-Face communication is ultimate communication with 65% of our communication consisting non-verbal behaviour. Virtual Humans will become ultimate interfaces.
Virtual Human in VR
Computer generated Reality is a fantasy. VR doesn’t actually ship us to somewhere else, it makes an (exceptionally persuading) fantasy that we are elsewhere. Mel Slater, the VR pioneer, discusses two central hallucinations made by computer generated reality. The first is Place Illusion, the feeling that we are in a better place, this is created by low level highlights of VR like head following. The subsequent fantasy is additionally testing. It is called Plausibility Illusion. The sense of what’s going on in VR is truly occurring. That it is a persuading occasion. The possibility of believability fantasy came in huge part out of work on virtual characters (which I was fortunate enough to team up with Mel on).
One of the principal factors in credibility hallucination is whether the VR world reacts to you. In the event that you are in a world, yet nothing you do has any impact it doesn’t feel like a genuine encounter. Then again if your activities have an impact (as basic as branches moving as you brush them with your arm) at that point the world all of a sudden appears to be conceivable and you feel a genuine piece of it. This is one reason it is imperative to such an extent that virtual characters react to clients and don’t just play back canned activities. What’s becoming increasingly apparent, is that the battle for VR is not about hardware or even software in the strictest sense. Instead it’s about the platforms that form the foundations for both of these things. It’s about the operating system.
In history there was better help. We used to live in towns with your seniors, siblings, sisters that you could converse with, or ministers who were considerably more significant. Whoever it was there was an entire emotionally supportive network and now we don’t have it — presently the sum total of what we have is our “iPhone”. With such significance laid immovably on our contraptions, their entrance to the web and its apparently unending pool of information, innovation can possibly trouble us to the point of wear out. I consider the manner in which the gadgets that we carry are currently part of us. An incredible amount of information flows through our gadgets, through our writings, through our messages. A large amount of our day is spent learning, getting and answering correspondence.
In the movie “Her”, Scarlett Johansson’s Samantha eases this weight from Joaquin Phoenix’s character. She channels his messages for significance, regularly passionate significance, basically placing request into a life that is progressively overwhelmed by data. Innovation in the motion picture is utilised to streamline and sort, helping Theodore (Phoenix’s character) feel, well, increasingly human. Samantha is even there to offer guidance and go about as a computerised comfort in times of dire need when things get excessively out of control. As our lives move to virtual universes we will feel all the more forlorn and for now, VR encounters feel like a phantom town without people to collaborate. It is imperative to have a working framework/OS like Samantha with a human face that have the ability to turn into our emotionally supportive network in virtual universes.
Virtual Humans are the future of human computer interaction. Once they go to market, and that is already happening, they will see ubiquitous adaptation. They are an incredibly useful technology, one that will help our productivity skyrockets and unlock tremendous hidden potential in virtually all our gadgets.