Real Imaginary Friends

Have you heard about digital personalities? Your teens and students already may know a new kind of avatar named Miquela Sousa. By 2020, trendwatching.com reports AI, facial recognition, emotional sensing, and other new technologies will create 5 billion virtual assistants and virtual companions or computer-generated influencers (CGI).

     Marketers are able to tailor a perfect CGI for every marketing segment's sex, age, size, and passions. That's what Trevor McFearies and Sara De Cou are doing at Brud, an LA-based tech startup. Vogue's September, 2018 issue describes Miquela Sousa, the 19-year-old model and musician Brud based on current tastes and culture cues. Stylist Lucinda Chambers outfits Lil Miquela, as she is known since 2016 by her Instagram followers, in Alexander McQueen for a Vogue photo shoot. Miquela's interests are said to be: recording music, the politics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, relapsing into tomboy clothes and activities, makeup tutorials on YouTube, and new Drake albums. She has blunt-cut bangs, straight dark hair past her shoulders, rather thick eyebrows over her brown eyes, full pouty lips, a slim but not skinny body, a pretty face speckled with freckles lightly covered with foundation a tad darker than medium.  

    What does a marketer want a susceptible young person to do after interacting with Miquela Sousa? Imitate her look, fashions, activities, and causes. The latter, in her case, are liberal.

     It is easy to slip out of reality and get caught up imitating what a made-up CGI looks like, wears, does, and says. Too easy. 

Virtual Reality Goes to School

To prepare students for future success, they need early exposure to new technologies the way Bill Gates learned computer science in his teens.

     California-based, Facebook-owned Oculus recognized the importance of getting kids up to speed on virtual reality (VR) and donated its VR headsets to schools, libraries, and museums in Japan, China, and the United States. According to an "Innovation of the Day" post on trendwatching.com, Oculus also is helping the public school system in Seattle, Washington, develop a course intended to teach how to create VR and helping teachers learn how to make the most educational use out of VR technology.

     Virtual reality is already a hit in the gaming world of China's Tencent company's "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds" and "MonsterHunter: World." Competitors played Tencent's "Honour of Kings" at the 2018 Asian Games' eSports demonstration event in Indonesia. The eSports' event will be an official part of the 2020 Asian Games but not a part of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.  Although the games include such sports as boxing and shooting,  the International Olympic Committee said electronic sports promoted violence and contradicted Olympia values.

     It should be noted: VR is not just for kids. Elderly folks, physically unable to enjoy the foreign travel of their younger days, readily put on VR headsets to travel on new adventures. 

Necessity: Introduce Students to New Technologies

Bill Gates at age 13 in 1969 got his start using a computer for the first time at General Electric, reports Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers.

     The New Story a non-profit organization, with the help of Icon construction, was using 3D printers to create the houses rolling off an assembly line in 2018. Designers on the "Project Runway" TV show used 3D printers to create their own fabric designs the previous year.

     To get a head start in life, students need access, not only to 3D printers, but also to virtual reality, holography, robotics, green screens, solar panels, and every other new technology. Whether one advanced technology teacher and a sample are allocated to each school or a teacher and sample travel around a school district, the objective is to give students hands-on exposure to the fields of the future.

     The school that wins a contest to name a robot could get the first one. You can imagine how excited students would be about coming to school every day, if a robot greeted them saying, "Good morning, I have a riddle for you...." Pick the toughest kid in the school to escort the robot and make sure no one harms it. The kid might transform into a new Bill Gates.

     Kids will devise all sorts of ways to use virtual reality to illustrate original fantasy stories and to view wonders of the world and rare animals. There must be ways to use holography to resurrect historical characters and to use green screens to produce special effects for the school play.

     What might kids heat or power with solar panels?

Flying Can Be Fun Again

Some airline passengers in the Caribbean, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, according to trendwatching.com, can begin to anticipate the glamorous experience flying was in years gone by. In Turkey, they'll also meet a new friend, Nely.

     Vacationers touring in Barbados with Virgin Holidays will be able to put their casual flying clothes over their bathing suits and check out of their resort hotels early, because Virgin will pick them up, check their luggage, and take them to the beach. At oceanside, Virgin will provide boarding passes, a locker, beach towels, a showering facility, unlimited refreshments, and an air conditioned lounge area, while every last vacation moment merits a "Wish You Were Here" selfie home.

     Visitors to Singapore's Changi Airport have walked among animatronic, remote-controlled butterflies designed to resemble the Diaethria Anna species. For kids, the airport's five-story playground offers climbing nets, a pole to slide down, and more for use for 50 at a time.

     Before heading into the wild blue yonder from Dubai International Airport, passengers will be exploring the virtual  blue aquarium surrounding them as they walk through a security tunnel to their flights in Terminal 3. To use the tunnel instead of traditional procedures, passengers pre-register at 3D face-scanning kiosks located throughout the airport. Watching the fish is expected to relax and entertain passengers as 80 hidden tunnel cameras scan visitors' faces from different angles. At the end of the tunnel, cleared travelers are sent on their way with a "Have a nice trip" message or a red sign alerts security. Dubai's airports process 80 million passengers now. The tunnel was developed to handle the increased volume of passengers, 124 million, expected by 2020. It should be mentioned that Dubai's virtual aquarium receives the same legal challenges that other facial recognition systems face.

     At Turkey's Istanbul New Airport, a robot named Nely notes the expressions, ages, and genders of passengers before greeting them and making (or not making) small talk. Nely is, of course, travel-functional: booking flights for passengers, relaying information, and providing weather updates. Using AI, facial recognition, emotional analysis based on input from sociologists, voice capability, and a bar code reader, Nely even remembers passengers from previous interactions.

Bucket List: Things I Want to Try

My father worked for a company than made point-of-purchase advertising. When you're in a business that looks for new ways to attract the attention of in-store shoppers, you work on the cutting edge of innovation and develop an eye for what's new in all aspects of life.

     At one point, we had a plastic form for displaying bras and motorized roses circling a bottle of liquor on our dining room table. Our dining room table took a beating, when Dad brought home one of the first ball point pens. It came on a pedestal in a see-through cylindrical display container. We immediately took it out to try and gouged our names right through paper into the dining room table.

     When President Eisenhower initiated the Interstate Highway System, Dad drew a picture (not with a ball point pen on the dining room table) of the new type of clover-leaf interchanges it would have. Then, there was his excitement when he told us we'd be taking one of the first passenger jets to see the new Disneyland in California.

     With this kind of background, I realized I had been making a mental bucket list that included the following: (It might be time to make your own and look for ideas from around the world.)

• Flying a dronw
• Using Virtual Reality glasses to see Victoria Falls
• Making something with a 3D printer
• Twirling one of those fidget widget things
• Programming a simple robot
• Seeing how intricate cut paper pop-ups are made for books and cards
• Trying various hearing aid devices
• Playing "The Settlers of Catan" game
• Seeing how a green screen works in movies
• Making all kinds of repairs
• Riding a Hoverboard
• Using all kinds of phones

As I hear about new things, I wish there were somewhere to go to try them. Maybe in abandoned shopping malls.

Technology Heals and Transports

If you think about it, the first uses for new products are not always the ones that become most useful. Satellites led to the GPS; nuclear bombs led to nuclear materials for treating cancer. Almonds and crickets are now made into flour. So, who knows what AI, 3D printing, drones, robots, and sensors will be best known for in the future.

The Trendwatching site introduced me to the way a Pepsi ad used phones to help sets of three people get together during Ramadan in Egypt. Three people had to hold their phones next to each other side by side to view a full Pepsi ad that told them to put away their phones and pay attention to each other. That's the way to overcome the loneliness that undermines health.

Virtual reality glasses provided health and welfare benefits in Brazil's nursing homes. Intel partnered with "Reasons to Believe" to give VR glasses to seniors who always longed to travel to the countries of their ancestors. With the glasses, they could experience these trips. Working with Burson-Marsteller, Intel's public relations agency, a project called "Technology and Life" also will show VR's importance in treating autism and patients with visual and motor disabilities.

You can start listing other VR uses, some already being tried, to show customers in one country items they could buy in another, to help a shut-in or hospitalized child go to the zoo or a ball game, to show a friend a 3-D version of your African safari.... Look through a travel magazine and you'll see Alaska, Iceland, Ireland, Paris, Rome, Prague, Rio, Cape Town, and so many other places you'd love to visit with the help of VR glasses or a VR headset..

The Importance of Studying Literature in a Scientific Age

Just after I began reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's engaging and informative book, The Gene, I saw Julia, a new Muppet with autism, joined the characters on Sesame Street. Did a gene cause Julia's deviation from "normalcy" and could she be "fixed" by manipulating her genes? Quickly I realized my line of thinking was the dangerous conclusion Mukherjee warns us all to seriously consider.

     Taken together, the 21,000 to 23,000 genes that live in cells on a human's 46 chromosomes carry a set of genetic instructions that cause proteins to build, repair, and maintain our bodies. Once the particular function of a gene or set of genes is identified, genetic technologies can change a function and produce copies. Voila, genetically modified seeds, food, animals, and humans.

     Like a physicist working with atoms can develop a bomb or a hacker can use code to create fake news, a geneticist can manipulate genes to alter humans permanently. These masters will be able to control our bodies, to make what they consider perfect or imperfect humans. What do they do, when they find an unborn child has Down's syndrome or cystic fibrosis? Who will defend the innocent from the guilty and the guilty from the innocent? And who will define "innocent" and "guilty?"

     Science marches on taking us into an age of robots, artificial intelligence (AI), clones, drones, virtual reality, driverless cars, and more. Looking at the horse's name, "Cloud Computing," of the winner of the Preakness, the second race in the Triple Crown after the Kentucky Derby, you see how technology is reaching into all fields. Could Kellyanne Conway have described the Internet of Things (IoT) in a way that didn't suggest microwave ovens spy on us? Yes, but the ridicule that greeted Rachel Carson's expose of DDT in Silent Spring and the skepticism about the miracles at Fatima did not make the messages they delivered any less real.

     The University of Wisconsin-Madison described Matthew Aliota, one of its "Forward under 40" honorees, as "an expert on tropical mosquito-borne diseases" who believes "scientific communication is an important responsibility." To his way of thinking, research findings that are shared quickly with the public can improve public health. Mukherjee would add that shared research findings also would enable the public to understand and react to potential problems caused by these findings. Laughter, ridicule, and skepticism are hardly the right responses to important breakthroughs.

     Throughout the world, the public depends on communicators (authors, journalists, editors, film and TV directors, advertising copywriters, playwrights, social media content developers, artists, and the like)  to read about and understand the potential and problems of each new technology and to know how to provide an engaging presentation that informs us of our choices.