A strong focus of the class involves peer engagement, fulfilling the idea of helping one another out as we all aim towards building our ideas of the future. The many sci-fi media we watch nowadays acts as a guiding beacon to the formation of our ideas, and the aim of our digital artefact to solidify our ideas in futurology, based on society’s current trends.

In this assignment, I am tasked to review the pitches of three assigned peers: Au Kwan Yu, Mariella de Castro and Subbiah Shanthashivu.

Au Kwan Yu’s VR Medicine Pitch

The first pitch I looked at focuses on the future of VR medicine as a whole. I find it excellent that virtual technology has great potential in the future when it comes to also helping people, going beyond its entertainment usage at face value. There are many splendid possibilities that are open and also practiced today, such as training surgeons or helping pain management as mentioned in the pitch video.

The topic of VR medicine however seems to be a broad topic as a whole, so I suggested narrowing it down to exploring its use in rehabilitation or physical therapy as there are some companies that are looking into developing this. The pitch also considers if it would be in widespread use in the future for many countries, which is a feasible idea when noting present-day trends in how VR headsets are becoming cheaper.

Mariella de Castro’s Pitch on the future of dating

Mariella tackles an interesting prospect on how the dating scene would be revolutionized in the coming 25 years. I became impressed with the topic when she explains how courting used to be the method of dating in the past and then comparing it to nowadays where we can find our potential dates at the swipe of a button.

As she believes virtual reality would be the novelty that changes the way we find our soulmate, I believed it was appropriate to link a source to VRChat. It is an online virtual world community that currently exists and inhibits a lot of similarities with the Metaverse in how people can log on as avatars and socialize. It is also not uncommon to find people also taking advantage of the platform as a means to find a lover. The only difference is that it isn’t as widely known nor does it explicitly advertise itself as a dating platform, but it can prove an interesting point of research as there may be similar apps in the future that focuses on the niche of VR dating.

Subbiah Shanthashivu’s Pitch on Cryptocurrency

Considering the similarities of our chosen topic in our digital artefact pitch, I believe I was able to provide a constructive comment for their pitch. Just like VR, cryptocurrency is also a well-known technology trend that has a great number of future possibilities. Much controversy and international debate surrounds cryptocurrency, with countless tales of successes and failures present on the news. With its incredible price volatility, it proves itself an unpredictable factor in judging the future and requires intensive research to figure the kind of future that cryptocurrency may bring.

Understanding that Shivu is a business student, I believe this currency-based technology is a perfect fit for his skillset and eagerly await his analysis. As cryptocurrency itself is still quite a broad topic, I’ve broken down a few questions that he could consider answering for his digital artefact and hope it would be of great use to him.

Conclusion

The merits of futurology allows us to speculate possibilities in 5 or more years, and identify the best path for humanity to create a better future. Technology can become a greater good or evil of the future, and it is up to think tanks, visionaries and us to figure precautions before certain technological trends become the norm. Humans have a great capability for future planning, and the value in this class is how we can all help each other envision what the future has in store for us.