It’s been estimated that augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications have the potential to deliver a £1.4 trillion boost to the global economy by 2030. Adoption of AR/VR has accelerated as businesses discover the cost and productivity benefits: 56% of businesses have implemented augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) in some form and 35% are considering it.
We will explore what augmented reality (AR) is, how it works and how it delivers numerous benefits to industries in this article.
What is augmented reality?
Augmented reality (AR) is the usage of computer technology to project layers of digital content to the real world. The technology dates back to 1960s but the widespread use of smartphones made AR accessible to everyday consumers.
What is the difference between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)?
Compared to AR, virtual reality (VR) provides a more immersive experience by creating a completely artificial environment that replaces reality. Augmented reality, on the other hand, augments the real-world experience with virtual elements.
Since VR provides a more immersive experience than AR, it often requires special equipment and high-end computers. AR can be accessed with smartphones or tablets which makes it accessible to a wider audience.
How does augmented reality work?
In order to overlay digital content in a real-world environment, AR needs a device with a camera and AR software such as a smartphone, a tablet, or smart glasses.
The AR software uses computer vision to process the video stream captured by the camera and to recognize objects in the environment. This allows the AR system to project virtual content to a relevant place.
Then, it displays the digital content on top of the real environment through the display device in a realistic way.
What are the different types of augmented reality (AR)?
There are different types of augmented reality technology that are proper for different types of tasks. The two main types of AR are:
Marker-based AR applications are triggered by specific physical images (markers) captured by the camera to position the digital content on top of it. A marker can be an object or a visual such as logos, posters, or QR codes. The video below demonstrates a marker-based AR. The business card acts as a marker for the AR application which displays additional digital information after it encounters the card.
Markerless AR does not depend on markers and lets users decide where to display the digital content. Markerless AR applications rely on the camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer of the device to gather information about the environment.
There are also different types of markerless AR technology:
Superimposition-based AR detects the objects in the real world and partially or fully replaces their original view.
Projection-based AR does not need a display device as it projects light onto a surface to display digital objects.
Location-based AR provides augmentation in specific places. It uses the device’s GPS and compass to position the virtual object at a point of interest. Pokemon GO mobile game is a popular example that uses location-based AR.
AR allows retailers to let their customers try products before buying them. For instance, IKEA Place app lets customers to place furnitures in desired places so that they can visualize how the item will look in their homes.
Education
AR applications can be used to make learning material more accessible and help students better engage with the subject. Teachers can get help from visual representation while explaining a subject. For example, Photomath app allows students to scan a math problem and virtually guide them through the solution.
Manufacturing
AR allows fast prototyping in manufacturing and allows remote assistance in maintenance. For instance, Boeing equipped its wire production technicians with AR glasses which guides them while they wire aircrafts. The company claims that this cuts its wiring production time by 25% and reduces the error rates to nearly zero.
Logistics
AR increases efficiency and enable logistics companies to cut costs in warehousing and transportation. AR-enabled devices can instruct human workers in a warehouse by displaying shortest routes to a shelf and provide information about items on the shelves.
Facebook has been under fire recently, with explosive whistleblower allegations and continuing regulatory headaches. But things might have just got worse for Facebook’s 3 billion users—could it be the turning point that finally incentivises people to delete their accounts?
If you care about your data, it might be. According to a new report in Vice’s Motherboard, Facebook has no idea what it does with your data, or where it goes. That’s despite the fact that Facebook is one of the most data-hungry platforms in the world.
Motherboard published the leaked document written by Facebook privacy engineers in the social network’s Ad and Business Product Team, in full.
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.)
“You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere. How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
As Motherboard explains: 3PD means third-party data; 1PD means first-party data; SCD means sensitive categories data.
Another highlight in the document reads: “We can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do.”
The problem with the leaked Facebook document
So what’s the problem with this? Privacy regulation such as the EU Genereal Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—which is thought of as the “gold standard” for people’s data protection rights—stipulates that data must be collected for a specific purpose. In other words, it can’t be collected for one reason, and then reused for something else.
The latest Facebook document shows the social network faces a challenge in complying with this, since it appears to lack control over the data in the first place.
“Not knowing where all the data is creates a fundamental problem within any business but when that data is personal user information, it causes huge privacy headaches and should be dealt with immediately,” says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.
A spokeswoman at Facebook owner Meta denies that the social network falls foul of regulation. “Considering this document does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations, it’s simply inaccurate to conclude that it demonstrates non-compliance.
“New privacy regulations across the globe introduce different requirements and this document reflects the technical solutions we’re building to scale the current measures we have in place to manage data and meet our obligations.”
Time to delete Facebook?
Facebook saw a decline in user numbers for the first time this year—which have since recovered slightly—as its data-hungry practices become more clear to all.
At the same time, Facebook has been hit hard by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency features, which allow people to prevent ad tracking on their iPhone. However, these features don’t prevent Facebook from collecting first party data—the data you provide to it on its site.
If you want to delete Facebook, I’ve written an article detailing the steps required to do so. If you are not quite ready yet, it’s worth considering deleting the app on your phone and instead using it on your computer’s browser, to at least limit the amount of data Facebook can collect.
If used improperly, the metaverse could be more divisive than social media and an insidious threat to society and even reality itself.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Social media manipulates our reality by filtering what we are allowed (or not allowed) to see.
We live in dangerous times because too many people use social media to disseminate untruths and promote division.
Augmented reality and the metaverse have the potential to amplify these dangers to incomprehensible levels.
At its core, augmented reality (AR) and the metaverse are media technologies that aim to present content in the most natural form possible — by seamlessly integrating simulated sights, sounds, and even feelings into our perception of the real world around us. This means AR, more than any form of media to date, has the potential to alter our sense of reality, distorting how we interpret our direct daily experiences. In an augmented world, simply walking down the street will become a wild amalgamation of the physical and the virtual, merged so convincingly that the boundaries will disappear in our minds. Our surroundings will become filled with persons, places, objects, and activities that don’t actually exist, and yet they will seem deeply authentic to us.
Early augmented reality (AR)
Personally, I find this terrifying. That is because augmented reality will fundamentally change all aspects of society and not necessarily in a good way. I say this as someone who has been a champion of AR for a long time. In fact, my enthusiasm began 30 years ago, before the phrase “augmented reality” had even been coined. Back then, I was the principal investigator on a pioneering effort conducted at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) with support from Stanford University and NASA. Known as the Virtual Fixtures project, for the very first time, it enabled users to reach out and interact with a mixed reality of both real and virtual objects.
This early system employed a million dollars’ worth of equipment, requiring users to climb into a large motor-driven exoskeleton and peer into a makeshift vision system that hung from the ceiling, all while they performed manual tasks in the real world, such as inserting pegs into holes of different sizes. At the same time, virtual objects were merged into their perception of the real workspace, the goal being to assist users as they perform the complex task. The research was a success, showing that we could boost human performance by over 100 percent when combining the real and the virtual into a single reality.
But even more exciting was the reaction of the human subjects after they tried that very first version of AR. Everyone climbed out of the system with big smiles and told me without prompting how remarkable the experience was — not because it boosted their performance but because it was magical to interact with virtual objects that felt like genuine additions to the physical world. I was convinced that this technology would eventually be everywhere, splashing techno-magic onto the world around us, impacting every domain from business and commerce to gaming and entertainment.
Now, 30 years later, I am more convinced than ever that augmented reality will become central to all aspects of life, touching everything from how we work and play to how we communicate with each other. In fact, I am convinced that it will happen this decade — and yes, it will be magical. But at the same time, I am very concerned about the negative consequences, and it is not because I worry about bad actors hacking the technology or otherwise hijacking our good intentions. No, I am concerned about the legitimate uses of AR by the powerful platform providers that will control the infrastructure.
A dystopian walk in the neighborhood
Let’s face it: We find ourselves in a society where countless layers of technology exist between each of us and our daily lives, moderating our access to news and information, mediating our relationships with friends and family, filtering our impressions of products and services, and even influencing our acceptance of basic facts. We now live mediated lives, all of us depending more and more on the corporations that provide and maintain the intervening layers. And when those layers are used to manipulate us, the industry does not view it as misuse but as “marketing.” And this is not just being used to peddle products but to disseminate untruths and promote social division. The fact is, we now live in dangerous times, and AR has the potential to amplify the dangers to levels we have never seen.
Imagine walking down the street in your hometown, casually glancing at people you pass on the sidewalk. It is much like today, except floating over the heads of every person you see are big glowing bubbles of information. Maybe the intention is innocent, allowing people to share their hobbies and interests with everyone around them. Now imagine that third parties can inject their own content, possibly as a paidfilter layer that only certain people can see. And they use that layer to tag individuals with bold flashing words like “Alcoholic” or “Immigrant” or “Atheist” or “Racist” or even less charged words like “Democrat” or “Republican.” Those who are tagged may not even know that others can see them that way. The virtual overlays could easily be designed to amplify political division, ostracize certain groups, even drive hatred and mistrust. Will this really make the world a better place? Or will it take the polarized and confrontational culture that has emerged online and spray it across the real world?
Now imagine you work behind a retail counter. AR will change how you size up your customers. That is because personal data will float all around them, showing you their tastes and interests, their spending habits, the type of car they drive, the size of their house, even their gross annual income. It would have been unthinkable decades ago to imagine corporations having access to such information, but these days, we accept it as the price of being consumers in a digital world. With AR, personal information will follow us everywhere, exposing our behaviors and reducing our privacy. Will this make the world a better place? I don’t think so, and yet this is where we are headed.
The metaverse could make reality disappear
Over the last decade, the abuse of media technologies has made us all vulnerable to distortions and misinformation, from fake news and deepfakes to botnets and troll farms. These dangers are insidious, but at least we can turn off our phones or step away from our screens and have authentic real-world experiences, face-to-face, that aren’t filtered through corporate databases or manipulated by intelligent algorithms. With the rise of AR, this last bastion of reliable reality could completely disappear. And when that happens, it will only exacerbate the social divisions that threaten us.
After all, the shared experience we call “civilized society” is quickly eroding, largely because we each live in our own data bubble, everyone being fed custom news and information (and even lies) tailored to their own personal beliefs. This reinforces our biases and entrenches our opinions. But today, we can at least enter a public space and have some level of shared experience in a common reality. With AR, that too will be lost. When you walk down a street in an augmented world, you will see a city filled with content that reinforces your personal views, deceiving you into believing that everyone thinks the way you do. When I walk down that same street, I could see vastly different content, promoting inverse views that make me believe opposite things about the very same citizens of the very same town.
Consider the tragedy of homelessness. There will be those who choose not to see this problem for political reasons, their AR headsets generating virtual blinders, hiding soup kitchens and homeless shelters behind virtual walls, much like construction sites are hidden in today’s world. There will be others who choose not to see fertility clinics or gun stores or whatever else the prevailing political forces encourage them to “reality block.” At the same time, consider the impact on the poorest members of society. If a family cannot afford AR hardware, they will live in a world where critical content is completely invisible to them. Talk about disenfranchisement.
You can’t ever leave the metaverse
And no, you won’t just take off your AR glasses or pop out your contacts to avoid these problems. Why not? Because faster than any of us can imagine, we will become thoroughly dependent on the virtual layers of information projected all around us. It will feel no more optional than internet access feels optional today. You won’t unplug your AR system because doing so will make important aspects of your surroundings inaccessible to you, putting you at a disadvantage socially, economically, and intellectually. The fact is, the technologies we adopt in the name of convenience rarely remain optional — not when they are integrated into our lives as broadly as AR will be.
Don’t get me wrong. AR has the power to enrich our lives in wonderful ways. I am confident that AR will enable surgeons to perform faster and better. Construction workers, engineers, scientists — everybody, young and old, will benefit. I am also confident that AR will revolutionize entertainment and education, unleashing experiences that are not just engaging and informative but thrilling and inspiring.
But AR also will make us even more dependent on the insidious layers of technology that mediate our lives and the powerbrokers that control those layers. This will leave us increasingly susceptible to manipulations and distortions by those who can afford to pull the strings. If we are not careful now, AR could easily be used to fracture society, pushing us from our own information bubbles into our own custom realities, further entrenching our views and cementing our divisions, even when we are standing face-to-face with others in what feels like the public sphere.
Being an optimist, I still believe AR can be a force for good, making the world a magical place and expanding what it means to be human. But to protect against the potential dangers, we need to proceed carefully and thoughtfully, anticipating the problems that could corrupt what should be an uplifting technology. If we have learned anything from the unexpected evils of social media, it is that good intentions are not enough to prevent systems from being deployed with serious structural problems. And once those structural problems are in place, it is extremely difficult to undo the damage. This means the proponents of AR need to get things right the first time.
The Last Week Tonight host discussed the ‘sprawling, unregulated ecosystem’ that allows for companies to use personal data to target consumers
John Oliver: ‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a whole crowd of strangers watching what I search for on the internet. Not because it’s gross, but because it’s private.’
John Oliver took aim at the dark art of data brokers, raising the alarm on unregulated practices that many internet users are unaware of.
The Last Week Tonight host discussed the “unsettling moments” that often happen throughout the day online, as we discover that companies are “monitoring our activities a little bit closer than we would like”.
John Oliver on next-day shipping: ‘Someone somewhere pays the price’
He called attention to data brokers, who are part of a multibillion-dollar industry that encompasses “everyone from credit reporting companies to these weird people-finding websites whenever you Google the name of your friend’s sketchy new boyfriend”.
They “collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others” and have once been referred to as the “middlemen of surveillance capitalism”. It’s a sprawling, unregulated ecosystem”, and looking into what they do and how they do it can get “very creepy, very fast”.
“They know significantly more about you than you might think, and do significantly more with it than you might like,” Oliver said.
The main tools are cookies, which enable websites to remember you and have evolved to include third-party cookies, which track where else you are going on the internet. “I don’t know about you but I don’t want a whole crowd of strangers watching what I search for on the internet,” he said. “Not because it’s gross, but because it’s private.”
The process takes breadcrumbs of where we have gone and what we have done online, and packages it to share with marketing firms. Users are then sorted into groups, such as couples with clout, ambitious singles, boomers and boomerangs and kids and cabernet.
The dark side of this includes more narrowly targeted lists, which separate us by certain ailments or sexual preferences. Investigations have found that people are defined by their depression, diabetes, cancer and pregnancy. It’s a “system that seems ripe for abuse” as “what they can buy is pretty troubling”.
While marketing firms have claimed the data is anonymous, the process of “de-anonymising” is fairly easy as Oliver details as people can be discovered by a quick data investigation. “None of us are really anonymous online,” he said.
He called it all “objectively unsettling” and used an example of a priest who was forced to resign after a Catholic newsletter used app data signals from Grindr and matched his phone to his residence, outing him.
It’s a “massive, harmful invasion of privacy” and also incredibly dangerous. He used the example of a domestic violence victim whose address came up on a data broker website. Oliver also shared a horrifying story of a stalker who killed a former classmate after finding her with info he brought for $45.
Requesting removal of information is a “complex process” and there is no federal law requiring that the companies honour an opt-out request.
It also suits the government as both FBI and Ice have bought data to aid criminal investigations and deportations.
“The entire economy of the internet is basically built on this practice,” he said. “All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product.”
He said there needs to be a comprehensive federal privacy law but many politicians build their campaigns on use of personal data.
He used the example of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, which was passed when Congress freaked out when they realised their video rental histories could be shared. “It seems when Congress’s own privacy is at risk they somehow find a way to act,” he said.
To show this, Oliver’s team used “perfectly legal bits of fuckery” to target members of Congress. They bought ads and showed them to men over 45 in DC who had searched for divorce, massage, hair loss and mid-life crisis, creating a group called Congress and cabernet.
“This whole exercise was fucking creepy,” he said with ads that pushed divorce help, Ted Cruz erotic fiction and voting twice. He said it might worry members of Congress that he now has the information of who clicked on what. “You might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything with it,” he said.
Distributed digital identity, decentralized identity, blockchain, and distributed ledgers: what do they mean and how can they help keep my company secure?
What is a digital identity? A digital identity is information that combines all your personal online activities and data. Examples of what would make up your digital identity include usernames, passwords, online searches, date of birth, and social security number.
What Is the History of Digital Identity?
Digital identity is a critical and ever-present part of our lives. Identities play a role in almost every aspect of our lives, from business to commerce to entertainment. Additionally, many jurisdictions are turning to digital identity as civic documentation to cover identification purposes outside of the private sphere.
The history of digital identity has followed security, privacy, and usability questions, with different technologies attempting to address various aspects of these categories. One of the central challenges to digital identity has been centralization.
Centralization brings a host of problems to administrators, enterprises, and users alike:
Central Points of Failure: Centralized identity relies on central control over the implementation of that identity, which often means on-premise databases of login credentials (typically usernames and passwords or PINs). If that database is hacked, then those credentials are compromised and all user information has most likely been exposed.
Usability and Security Practices: Centralized identity schemes force organizations to either adopt outside identity management systems or implement their own—a reality that has led to a fragmentation of identity management. Users have to remember individual credentials for multiple systems, leading to poor security (from simple or reused passwords) and identity theft.
Lack of Ownership: The question of digital identity ownership is a lively one, with different regulations and business practices vying for control of private information. Centralized identity management requires that organizations mediate control between digital identities and users rather than placing ownership in the users’ hands.
Modern identity and access management have worked toward addressing some of these issues, primarily to support a connected, cloud-based, and secure digital world.
One of the emerging technologies to address these issues is single sign-on. The goal of SSO (also known as federated identity) is to facilitate authentication across multiple systems using a centralized repository of identities and policies.
Generally speaking, there are a few protocols through which SSO works:
Security Assertion Markup Language
SAML is an open markup language used by identity providers to format and transmit authorization credentials to other platforms or service providers. The idea is that a centralized SSO provider manages identities through a server and formats SAML authentication through an XML-based token system that connects identity providers and service providers (the organization handling your identities and the company with which you want to authenticate).
Open Authorization
As the name suggests, OAuth is more an authorization approach than an authentication method, but it can be used as part of an SSO scheme. Unlike SAML, where federation happens from a centralized identity provider across multiple service providers, it’s more often the case with OAuth that a user in an authorized session with one provider can access another provider from that session.
Of course, it bears stating that SSO is a smaller part of the larger discipline of IAM explicitly focused on how to provide federated identity and authentication without compromising security.
The problem with SSO and IAM, in general, is that they only address a small subset of issues with centralized SSO or OAuth. To start with, SSO systems still have security issues, and a compromised identity provider will still pose a risk to all users. Additionally, none of this addresses the issue of identity and data ownership.
To take steps in facing some of these lingering issues, developers and scientists are working toward developing distributed identities.
What Is Distributed Identity?
Distributed identity, also called decentralized identity, is the practice of truly removing the centralized nature of identity management from the equation.
Instead of creating localized or platform-specific usernames that rely on a single organization or consortium of participating organizations to manage, decentralization uses technology to place ownership of identity data into the hands of the users that information is supposed to represent.
How is this possible? The truth is that there isn’t a clear-cut answer yet but rather a collection of technologies that are stepping up to introduce decentralization into IAM as a whole:
Blockchain: Originally introduced in cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, as part of the nascent “Web 3.0,” the blockchain has been isolated as a uniquely powerful technology that provides an immutable, decentralized ledger of ownership. Under a blockchain, users have programs called wallets that store information and denote ownership, and this ownership is not dependent on a central organization to manage.
Decentralized Identifiers: Created by the World Wide Web Consortium, DID is a scheme of identity decentralization outside of blockchains proposed as a general protocol for managing identity. With DIDs, users can control their data, be protected by cryptography, and authenticate with participating organizations.
The blockchain, in particular, is part of what is currently being dubbed Web 3.0, emphasizing decentralization of control over information. It works by creating a ledger that the users of that network control through their participation, protected with cryptography.
Why Is Distributed Digital Identity So Important?
Right now, data ownership and protection are critical questions for large enterprises, governments, and end users alike. The General Data Protection Regulation is one of the most stringent privacy and security jurisdictions globally, due in no small part to its driving mission to place control of private data into the hands of consumers.
But giving users control over their digital identity and their personal data is no small task. Data is often seen as ephemeral, and users in many places (including the United States) have willingly given up control over their information to large corporations.
A distributed identity system could allow users to take control of their digital identities. Several governments have already begun to develop distributed forms of digital identities to support their citizens.
The European Union, for example, has started creating a self-sovereign identity framework built on DID and blockchain to modernize government ID for citizens. Countries like Germany, Uruguay, and Finland have started issuing electronic IDs and bank-issued eIDs to serve as national identification.
On a smaller scale, distributed identity can still benefit enterprises internally. By leveraging distributed identity systems, enterprises can connect user IDs with several different service platforms and authorization policies without reinventing or replacing existing identity systems. Additionally, enterprises can then adopt their schemes or extend existing ones offered through government agencies.
Strong Authentication and Distributed Identity with 1Kosmos
Distributed identity isn’t just a powerful new technology or the future of identification—it is a business imperative that will eventually shape how enterprise organizations integrate and adopt different types of managed services, cloud applications, and internal security measures. By working with user-owned, self-sovereign ID, businesses can mitigate some of the most significant weaknesses of centralized identity (security and usability) while expanding their ability to adapt and scale with new technologies.
BlockID from 1Kosmos provides secure authentication and promotes identity ownership through a few critical features:
Private and Permissioned Blockchain: 1Kosmos protects personally identifiable information in a private and permissioned blockchain and encrypts digital identities in secure enclaves only accessible through advanced biometric verification. Our ledger is immutable, secure, and private, so there are no databases to breach or honeypots for hackers to target.
Identity Proofing: BlockID includes Identity Assurance Level 2 (NIST 800-63A IAL2), detects fraudulent or duplicate identities, and establishes or reestablishes credential verification.
Streamlined User Experience: The distributed ledger makes it easier for users to onboard digital IDs. It’s as simple as installing the app, providing biometric information and any required identity proofing documents and entering any information required under ID creation. The blockchain allows these users more control over their digital identity while making authentication much easier.
Identity-Based Authentication: We push biometrics and authentication into a new “who you are” paradigm. BlockID uses biometrics to identify individuals, not devices, through identity credential triangulation and validation.
Interoperability: BlockID and its distributed ledger readily integrate with a standard-based API to operating systems, applications, and MFA infrastructure at AAL2. BlockID is also FIDO2 certified, protecting against attacks that attempt to circumvent multi-factor authentication.
Cloud-Native Architecture: Flexible and scalable cloud architecture makes it simple to build applications using our standard API, including private blockchains.
To discover the self-sovereign identity and BlockID, read more about 1Kosmos as a Distributed Digital Identity Solution. Also, make sure to sign up for the 1Kosmos newsletter to receive updates on 1Kosmos products and services.
“Born in the cloud” is a new category of cloud services poised to make an impact on enterprises.
Source: Filip323/Dreamstime.com
Years ago, we were talking about cloud native design as the lodestar for modern workload systems.
Now, we see the cloud as one more stepping stone toward even newer technologies that make data even more versatile and transferable.
Let’s look at four of these and how they work, and how they intersect for the next generation, moving beyond the cloud age.
Distributed Cloud Solutions
With the evolution of peer to peer systems, the emergence of the Internet of Things, and the decentralization of the blockchain, cloud systems may be moving to a new place in a type of setup called “distributed cloud.” Here a distributed peer to peer hardware framework runs services at the network edge, instead of in a centralized environment. This contributes to less latency and congestion on the network.
Like distributed computing, distributed cloud makes use of those individual hardware nodes that are ‘out in the field.’ Like the blockchain, it decentralizes certain types of control and management of system operations.
Virtualization
When we talked about no-hardware designs with “born in the cloud” systems nearly a decade ago, we were mainly talking about moving physical infrastructure from on-premises systems, to off-site in a vendor’s network.
People talked a lot about the obvious savings for business that doesn’t have to maintain its own server rooms anymore.
What’s happened since then, though, is that virtualization has brought the next step – completely untethering hardware pieces from a physical footprint and co-locating them in larger data centers.
In other words, virtual machines don’t ‘sit’ anywhere. They don’t have physical connections. You don’t have to get inside their guts to deal with CPU and storage capacity and other allocations.
Virtualization and the practice of using containers became one of the next big trend after companies started moving all sorts of data and operations to the cloud. It remains one of the big transfer modernizing business systems. (Read also: 10 Ways Virtualization Can Improve Security)
NoSQL Data Storage
Here’s another interesting trend that’s been happening over the same time period: the way we approach data storage.
At the same time, people were figuring out better ways of retrieving data from its archived location.
When people talk about modern business data centers and data warehouses, they’re not talking about traditional relational database design. At least that’s the trend – away from old relational database table technology and toward a variety of approaches called noSQL.
In noSQL systems one of the big fundamental changes is that data is not identified by its particular location in a table. Instead, it’s defined by its attributes with key-value pairs, schemas or other types of innovations.
In other words, the data identifiers allow it to roam free in a less structured database environment, which leads to more capable queries and retrieval practices.
Web 3
As we talk about this third trend, let’s also talk about cryptocurrency, which became much more of an integrated presence in our lives throughout the past four or five years.
The first cryptocurrency to make a splash was Bitcoin, and people tried to figure out how to get their heads around the concept of digital currency and blockchain technology.
Then all sorts of other cryptocurrencies started to emerge, including smart contract-handling chains like Ethereum that were able to use tokens to handle data on the blockchain.
Along with that, there was a move toward something called web 3 or the semantic web.
The idea here is that data can move from a simple cloud approach to a more refined place where it exists within semantic structures, noSQL environments and perhaps moves through blockchain oriented processes.
These new trends also mingle with one another.
For instance, BrightStar has developed a resource that is billed by its makers as an “ACID-compliant RDF triple store” that uses a data object layer and semantic web standards to approach data in a whole new way.
Part of the similarity with blockchain and semantic web systems is the use of data objects instead of basic exploration of data locations. Some people describe semantic web as a mapping of the Internet, and others talk about decentralized approaches to networking that complement the decentralization of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
In addition to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, an emerging aspect of this new web is the metaverse. Described by Mark Zuckerberg as an “embodied internet” where the user is actually part of the experience, this new cloud born tech has been making waves and inspiring many predictions about how exactly it will impact the world. By improving the virtual reality experience, the metaverse is poised to make exciting waves in many lifestyle, gaming and ecommerce sectors, and beyond. (Read also: Gaming, Fashion, Music: The Metaverse Across Industries.)
Conclusion
Virtualization, distributed cloud systems, immutable blockchains and noSQL data environments are continually being refined. They are an integral part of what’s going to help our data world evolve beyond what was born in the cloud several years ago as they continue to change in an effort to anticipate and meet the needs of enterprise.
