Fani Kiran Vulapalli

Like a lot of children, my daughter, Mayukha, 9, is obsessed with robots. In the children’s books they devour at bedtime, happy, helpful robots pop up more often than even dragons or dinosaurs. The other day I asked Mayukha why children like robots so much. “Because they work for you,” he said. What I didn’t have the heart to tell her is, someday she might work for them — or, I fear, might not work at all, because of them. It is not just Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking who are freaking out about the rise of invincible machines. Yes, robots have the potential to outsmart us and destroy the human race. But first, artificial intelligence could make countless professions obsolete by the time my daughter reach her 20s. You do not exactly need to be Marty McFly to see the obvious threats to our children’s future careers. The da Vinci surgical robot. Image: Intuitive Surgical Systems Say you dream of sending your daughter off to Yale School of Medicine to become a r...

An intuitive design framework for generating Augmented Reality ideas. One of the best ways to think about any new technology is to map out what it empowers users to do that they previously couldn’t. For example, with AR, we can now take almost any 3D product and see it positioned in reality. This is cool, but it’s also not enough. AR has a challenging road ahead of it, headsets are still too bulky, and the capabilities of mobile AR are still too limited. For AR to succeed, the ideas can’t just be good they need to be 10x better than the non-AR alternative. We can’t afford to just empower our users we need to super-empower them. This framework is my contribution to your idealization process. I introduce six categories that (I believe) all AR experiences can be mapped to. These categories can then be used as an aid when designing AR experiences. Holographic projection Holographic projection is the ability for the user to project an idea into reality as a hologram. The user can...