Information 4.0 For Augmented And Virtual Realities – Balance Of Ignorance And Intelligence

Scarcity and abundance of information

Data, information and meanings are different stages of the analysis of the perceived world, of representations and measured indicators. The half-century ago, the most important costs were related to collecting data, a quarter of century ago the treatment, classification and structuring was the essential task for the big data technologies. Today the IT-tools are able to analyse the standardised data collected through cyber-physical systems (CPS) (Alexankov, d’Ascenzo, & Pokrovskaia, 2017) and to conclude in the terms of fuzzy logics (e.g., warm or cold). But the most significant need refers to the understanding and search for the sense and meaning of the information and of the results of data treatment. These semantic elements can be useful to construct new realities and to supplement the existing physical reality with the helpful and pertinent information required by the concrete customer.

The superfluous information impedes the correct humans’ reasoning, the new requirement towards the information is the relevance, i.e., the context or targeted advertising is pertinent until the customer has already bought the promoted good or service. The information collected due to the smart-phone that has been used as search tool and payment instrument, and due to the smart streets observing the customer movements can help to avoid unnecessary excess information, especially, with augmented reality devices.

Information 4.0 as the new tool of context sensing

The concept of the information 4.0 refers to the Industry 4.0 as the 4^th industrial revolution based on the ubiquitous smart connection of everything in a networking system (Internet of things, IoT) (Shipunova, Timermanis, & Evseeva, 2014). The Information 4.0 appeared as the resulting concept from the following essential reasons:

• the search for efficiency – the intelligent systems are more efficient than humans to treat and analyze the information. The re-distribution of roles in the division of labour between humans and machines allows humans to create and to produce new realities or to perform the actions that humans prefer to control (Shu, Zheng & Hui, 2017), so the humans’ involvement and responsibilities are required for the specific functions;

• the confidence formed – today the customers (even the operators of equipment as customers for industrial products) are much more trustful towards IT and artificial intelligence (Kalmykova, Pustylnik, & Razinkina, 2017), than several decades ago. Today people are able to trust an auto-piloted car and to live in a smart house, to have confidence to a smart-phone sending the customer’ private data to cloud or centralised corporate terminals;

• the expansion of the IoT system and its penetration into many spheres helps to connect the devices with the information system, so that the autonomous machines are able not only to collect data, but to make decisions about technical maintenance (Khokhlovskiy, Potekhin, & Razinkina, 2018), e.g., an engine or oil or gas pipeline are able to detect metal fatigue and can call on its own for servicing (Gallon & McDonald, 2016);

• the gamification of the working processes as serious games (Routledge, 2015) and the popularity of the games and applications with the augmented reality elements (such as Pokemon go, or furnishing apps similar to Ikea place to put potential pieces into existing rooms) led to the new openness, the notion of the life at work appeared to reflect the blended work and game’ worlds (Mitsuhara, Iguchi, & Shishibori, 2017). This helped simultaneously to make the work more creative and to marry the people’ professional activity and leisure. The augmented reality’ technologies, in fact, appeared firstly in producing process, when the Boeing researchers T. Caudell and D. Mizell have invented a head-mounted device with an adjusted eye-lens that replaced complex schematics diagram sheets for workers assembling the wiring for aircrafts with the system displaying the wires schemes to the plane boards.

The Information 4.0, as a new approach to collect, classify, structure data and make pertinent conclusions on the basis of the treated data, relies upon these factors and accomplishes the functions that match the new social-economic circumstances (table 01 ):

The necessary background was created with the technological and scientific progress, social regulative mechanisms that helped to overcome the suspiciousness and distrust, to construct the wide-spread smart environment (Bylieva, Lobatyuk, & Rubtsova, 2017) and psychological and cultural openness of the people mindset (Shipunova et al., 2017). The facilitating of the work and life processes due to the introduced elements of the Information 4.0 helps to achieve the essential purposes of enhancing the creativity and efficiency, to overcome the anxiety and to decrease concerns of non-significant details and to build a new space for the better self-actualisation and satisfaction of people with their professional and everyday life activities.

Information 4.0 as a new reality

The new environments that are created with augmented or virtual realities are based on the assumption that the context plays the determining role for a correct choice of information treatment for making adequate decisions. The information 4.0 as an efficiency-driven approach intends to analyze the context on the basis of the whole set of sources – indicators and parameters that are measured by the smart devices directly connected to the person (customer), structured data received from digital twins (Ponomarev, Kudryashov, Popelnukha, & Potekhin, 2017) and smart spaces (streets, cities, connected factories) about the place and time that refers to the decision to be made.

The choice of the correct instructions for the person is, at the same time, helping and limiting – the choice is automatically made by the neuron-network and intelligent system (Ababkova, Pokrovskaia, & Trostinskaya, 2018), it is not controlled by the person, so, once the only one option is presented to the person, other options are rejected, but they eventually could be useful and even optimal.

That means that the person starts to live in a new reality, where only several potential ways are available and only a limited kit of interests are prioritized. The machine learning bases its improvement on the analysis of the past (on the previous choices made) that determines the future. This new reality can block the evolution, the personal growth or the business innovation process. This concern, nevertheless, can be mastered with the initial settings and tuning of the necessary new options to be proposed. But in fact, this new reality will also be limiting for the freedom of choice, firstly, because the proposals of the new options will be limited by the analysis made by the intelligent system which is built on the basis of the past adjustments, and secondly, because these new options will impose the necessity to make new choices. This remark reflects both the limitations imposed by augmented or virtual realities (Freiknecht & Effelsberg, 2017) and the reason of the human interest towards the Information 4.0 related to the abundance of choice and to the wish to limit the potential options until a reasonable number.

In this sense, the virtual reality creates a new determined ontology with several fixed options, the limitation of the choices’ range helps to avoid the uncertainty of the real world (Rodionova, Shvetsova, & Epstein, 2018) that increases the feeling of safety and security. The augmented reality (AR) requires more courage and presents larger choice among realities, than virtual one: if the virtual reality technologies “completely immerse a user inside a synthetic environment”, the augmented reality “allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world, … AR supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it” (Azuma, 1997, p. 356).

The augmented reality permits “to overlay computer-generated images onto the physical environment” (Leu & Peng, 2005, p. 74) through a device, such as helmet, glass (e.g. Google glass) or smart-phone. It allows a user to find information about the real-world objects and to pose queries about the interesting items (Guven & Feiner, 2003). The mixed reality can be built with the possibility to immerse the virtual objects into the representation of the physical reality, such as pokemons which interact with the real-world surfaces and spaces and can hide behind objects. The notion of mixed reality can be added to describe the completely interacting real and virtual objects, and all the mentioned cases of the combinations of the real and virtual environments are called extended reality (Irvine, 2017).

Abundance of choice and dependence on smart things

The impossibility to treat the immense volumes of information makes people to rely on the machines’ big data instruments. This “forced” confidence towards machines lasts since several centuries, producing different treatments for the perception of the humans’ dependence of the machines. The study aims to discover if the young people with intense use of IT-tools are aware of the role of the smart devices or spaces in their making decisions process and if they feel the uncomfortable dependence or they prefer the ignorance.

Psychological, social and economic reasons for the Information 4.0 scope

The economic efficiency of the ignorance and psychological comfort due to the limited options for choice (or avoiding a necessity to make a choice, when number of options is equal to 1) help to acquire better social position due to the following factors:

• More efficient people get better social, hierarchical position with access to larger resources and with wider power and authority,

• People that act in the similar manner than the others inside their group are affiliated to the communities and enjoy the advantages of group behaviour and resources,

• The low level of anxiety related to the uncertainty helps people to have on opened mind for new solutions and for the possibilities to improve their situation.

These factors are interconnected and determine the interest to the spread of the Information 4.0 concept and practice as instrumental tools.

Awareness of terms and of their content

The survey among students of economic universities and faculties demonstrates that the young generation has heard about extended realities such as virtual and augmenter ones. At the same time, the students have a vague idea about the implementation of these technologies in their real life. Thus the 100% of students (N=382) responded that they are aware of the term “virtual reality”, only 62.8% are able to describe it, answering an open question (“What is virtual reality?”), and 9.9% of respondents recognized that they “don’t know exactly” what does virtual reality mean. The same distribution of answers was revealed for the notion of augmented reality – 97.9% told that they know the term “augmenter reality”, 0.5% don’t’ know it and 1.6% don’t know exactly.

When they were asked to describe it, the distribution of answers significantly changes (fig. 01):

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More than a half of respondents (61.3%) were able to give a correct answer, the closest answers were similar to “a mix of real world with overlaid information”, but 34.0% of respondents told that they don’t know exactly.

The ignorance of the use of the augmented reality

Many of students think that the augmented reality is something very distant from them.

There were three questions asked about the use of the smart-phones:

• Do you use the augmented reality technology and tools?

• Do you use Google Translate on your smart-phone?

• Do you use the Google Translate tool to make a picture of foreign phrase, to recognise and to translate the picture?

The difference of answers is significant:

That means that among 326 persons who are using a tool of augmented reality (85.3% who answered that they use the instrument to translate pictures made from the real signs around them) only 29 persons (7.6%) know that it is the augmented reality technology. And they are comfortable with this level of knowledge, as the answers at the following question.

Opinions and feelings of dependence on the machines and intellectual systems

Answering a question about their feelings of the dependence, they were very optimistic for the use of the smart devices as the tools that are helping them:

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Only 8 students told that they are worried about their dependence on smart phones and other mart devices, and 19.6% of young respondents think that it is normal to live “with the smart phone in the hand”. 78.3% of students have the positive opinion about the usefulness of the smart devices and their unavoidability in the actual situation: 41.4% of students think that even if sometimes people can feel the helplessness, the smart devices are penetrated in everyday life and are really necessary to make many things and actions, and 36.9% of the respondents are sure that the smart devices give them more freedom.

The ignorance is comfortable

The innovative economic growth and fast social dynamics created a necessity to limit the options’ number because the cost to make a choice of unlimited variants is too high. The efficiency-driven process of analysis and making decision leads to decrease the volume of information. The anxiety of losing control is not considerable comparing with the advantages of the higher efficiency.

The perspectives for the Information 4.0 and the need for balance between ignorance and intelligence

The new reality is already formed due to the smart devices and spaces: smart-phones and fridges, connected factories, smart houses and streets. The Information 4.0 represents an approach that develops the data treatment and analysis to assure the more comfortable informational environment for people. The expansion of this concept and the penetration of these practices in everyday life and professional activity needs to precise the detailed elements of the machines’ right to limit the humans’ choice.