Smartphones Have Redefined the Human Experience. So, What’s Next?
Visual encounters have a huge impact on the human experience. Over 80% of our perceptions, learning, cognition and activities are negotiated through vision, and, according to MIT neuroscientists, the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds.
What we see matters, and where and how we’re seeing it is also important. We’re hungry for content, compelling experiences and information—and for most of us, our primary content source is the smartphone, the world’s most used consumer device.
Visual experiences connect us and help us feel more present in the real world, enabling new ways for us to gain insight and information, providing entertainment and allowing us to transcend time and distance across new digital worlds. As our human experience is significantly impacted by what we see on our smartphones, we have a vested interest in how these experiences shape our daily lives, and in the technology trends that will evolve them in the years ahead.
The ecosystem driving the advancement of visual experiences
Arm, a world-leading technology company, is looking ahead at how the visual experience will change on our consumer devices. The best-kept secret in technology, Arm has been at the foundation of these experiences for 30 years, and its innovations underpin much of today’s device technology.
In the early 1990s, Arm’s disruptive tech provided the best combination of performance and efficiency for battery life in mobile devices, which enabled the first GSM mobile phones to go mass-market. Since then, Arm has been at the heart of the mobile revolution—Arm central processing units (CPUs) are adopted in 99% of the world’s smartphones—and, along with its vast ecosystem, the company has driven tremendous economic growth and innovation in the mobile space.
Pushing the boundaries of smartphone performance
The advent and spectacular success of the smartphone has required ever-increasing amounts of computing power to handle more complex tasks, and within ever-smaller, more flexible and more efficient form factors, which has driven broad innovation in electronics and chip design. Over the past decade, Arm and its partners have significantly improved the computing performance of smartphone chips, delivering new capabilities and dramatically improving immersive visual experiences, so that we can enjoy enhanced mobile experiences with our friends, family and colleagues on the opposite side of the globe.
Today’s mobile trend: Life in 3D
Real-time 3D content is redefining visual experiences on our smartphones. For example, game developers are bringing complex 3D gaming content to mobile devices—previously only possible on computers and consoles—and architects are using real-time 3D models to visualize how their buildings will look in real life.
Mobile gaming—a massive, $103.5 billion industry1—is helping to drive the evolution of 3D technology and bring new features and visual experiences beyond our imagination to mobile devices. This requires evolving the content on our screens into more life like and interactive real-time 3D experiences.
This technology will create new possibilities on consumer devices, including virtual sports and music events, and work and personal meetups using virtual reality (VR) headsets. Some of these possibilities are now being realized: For example, Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, has held virtual concerts with performances by Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, and VR platform Rec Room has created an online universe for virtual meetups and collaborations for work and play.
Tomorrow’s mobile trend: The metaverse
The metaverse will propel visual experiences to the next level by intertwining digital worlds with the real, physical world, and has the potential to generate an estimated $5 trillion in value by 20302. New visual experiences in the metaverse will require huge leaps in performance across smartphones, VR headsets and augmented reality (AR) smart glasses, and need to be delivered efficiently on portable devices that are as lightweight as possible to enhance the user experience.
Some metaverse-based applications and experiences are already here. In 2020, Johns Hopkins University performed its first patient surgeries by doctors using wearable AR devices. “When using AR in the operating room, it’s like having a GPS navigator in front of your eyes in a natural way, so you don’t have to see your patient’s CT scan,” said Timothy Witham, M.D., Director of the Johns Hopkins Neurosurgery Spinal Fusion Laboratory and professor of neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine3.
New visual experiences are now possible on Arm
Today, our smartphones are millions of times more capable than the Apollo 11 computers that guided the 1969 Moon landing. Just 10 years ago, most of us never imagined the experiences we now take for granted every day on our smartphones and other consumer devices.
The power of smartphone technology and how it might dramatically change and improve our experiences as humans has never been more apparent. It’s hard to imagine what the next 10 years might bring. But one thing we do know is that it will be built on a foundation of relentless innovation from Arm and its partners.
This article was written and supplied by Arm.
1. https://newzoo.com/insights/trend-reports/newzoo-global-games-market-report-2022-free-version
2. www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/value-creation-in-the-metaverse
3. www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/johns-hopkins-performs-its-first-augmented-reality-surgeries-in-patients
