![](https://crypto4nerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1jxyT5GM5aiORPHwCghdriw.jpeg)
This is part of a series of articles that takes a multidisciplinary look at content creation, policies, and strategy within interconnected industries in ways that you would not find in typical articles on marketing, business, branding, and strategy.
Fact and Science Fiction
About almost 14 years ago, around 2009, during the early years of graduate school, I had to watch a Ted talk in YouTube as part of of classwork. At that time, Web 2.0 was just in nascent development, AI startups were still in the cradle, and YouTube was nothing like what it is now despite there being plenty of tech nerds uploading videos about science and tech. I no longer remember the name of the speaker nor the exact content of the talk. However, I remember he was demonstrating an immersive eyewear (reminiscent of today’s Apple Vision Pro) but with sensors attached to the fingertips (maybe there were gloves involved) so that you could swipe the virtual screen as you navigated your environment to access the information you needed to help assist you in ‘localizing’, which, in other words, is to allow you to develop contextual familiarity with an otherwise alien environment.
The prototype wearable ‘computer’ (and this was before smartphones were even ubiquitous) was aimed at helping you navigate even the most unfamiliar environment. At that time, such goggles were not very comfortable (especially for spectacles wearer as myself) and they tend to create a sense of vertigo with prolonged use. IoT was not that much of a thing outside the wireless network of a laboratory or self-contained room. Neither Google translate nor DeepL were available at that time.
A dozen a years after that, in the spring of 2023, I saw another headgear, in the form of a multi-lingual translator headphones. The scene where this took place was in a few episodes of the ‘Three-Body Problem’, a Chinese drama series based on the first book of Liu Cixin’s hit science fiction trilogy, although not much detail on this scene was given in the novel. In the drama series, world leaders from around the world were gathered together to discuss a problem relating to preventing an alien invasion and it was remarkable that they were speaking their own languages while wearing headsets that could interpret said language to the…