跨国金融服务公司UBS近日发布了一篇研究报告显示，各项技术中，“当红炸子鸡”ChatGPT达到全球1亿用户所需时间仅用2个月，而电话用了75年，手机的普及则用了16年。OpenAI推出的这款聊天式机器人一经问世，便“引爆”全球，成为热门话题。而在ChatGPT爆火的背后，则是汹涌的人工智能浪潮。 在今年瑞士达沃斯举行的世界经济论坛上，微软首席执行官萨蒂亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）与《华尔街日报》主编马特·默里（Matt Murray）进行了一场对话，谈到了该公司的人工智能业务以及OpenAI的ChatGPT等生成式人工智能工具（AIGC）如何彻底改变我们的工作方式。 在长达30分钟的座谈采访中，纳德拉对ChatGPT的青睐溢于言表，在他看来，人工智能领域的发展在目前这个阶段已经可以用“指数级”来形容。 “至少在从事技术工作的30年里，这是我从没见过的技术扩散，我也不认为这种扩散曾发生在工业革命时期。”纳德拉强调。“也许这一次，对于知识型工作者来说，这就完全等于工业革命。”

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. When you’re wearing the visor of an augmented- or mixed-reality system such as Magic Leap, HoloLens, or Meta, it maps the local environment. To make, say, a virtual teacup appear on your real table, it needs to know where your table is. The visor uses outward-facing cameras and sensors to scan your environment to create this map. Magic Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped place in the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter. Your unit (or perhaps another unit in the same location) merely needs to register and update any changes in the space. This in turn will let you share virtual objects across different surroundings, even if participants are in distant places. Someone in Barcelona can drop a virtual flower into your virtual vase in Chicago. Because artificial reality is inherently social, its environments will be inherently social and networked.

ne of the first things I learned from my recent tour of the synthetic-reality waterfront is that virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet. Today the Internet is a network of information. It contains 60 trillion web pages, remembers 4 zettabytes of data, transmits millions of emails per second, all interconnected by sextillions of transistors. Our lives and work run on this internet of information. But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences. What you share in VR or MR gear is an experience. What you encounter when you open a magic window in your living room is an experience. What you join in a mixed-reality teleconference is an experience. To a remarkable degree, all these technologically enabled experiences will rapidly intersect and inform one another.

I first put my head into virtual reality in 1989. Before even the web existed, I visited an office in Northern California whose walls were covered with neoprene surfing suits embroidered with wires, large gloves festooned with electronic components, and rows of modified swimming goggles. My host, Jaron Lanier, sporting shoulder-length blond dreadlocks, handed me a black glove and placed a set of homemade goggles secured by a web of straps onto my head. The next moment I was in an entirely different place. It was an airy, cartoony block world, not unlike the Minecraft universe. There was another avatar sharing this small world (the size of a large room) with me—Lanier.

Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

Mike is able to have some fast iterations by using After Effects and Cinema 4D, but he also advocates translating other ideas from web design such as the design grid. You can still do a lot of paper prototyping of interface ideas, but VR is a medium that has spatial, depth, and lighting considerations and so it’s helpful to see what it actually might look like in VR as well.