FinTech Magazine August 2020 | Page 66

PAYMENT SOLUTIONS

FinTech Magazine explores the challenges , trends and companies dominating VR and AR adoption in the payments industry

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A longside flying Deloreans and robot butlers on roller skates , few things evoke a sense of the futuristic more than virtual reality ( VR ).

Artists , authors and philosophers have been grappling with the themes of “ unreal worlds ” that we might inhabit , mostly indistinguishable from our own , for millennia : just look at the allegory of Plato ’ s Cave – its inhabitants living their whole lives convinced the shadows they see encompass the entirety of their reality . In the last century , science fiction has often speculated on the role that virtual realities might play in our societies , from Laurence Manning ’ s 1933 serial The Man Who Awoke all the way up to probably our biggest modern touchstone for VR : The Matrix . Obviously , in much the same way that robotics and artificial intelligence ( AI ) haven ’ t led to our destruction by terminators and replicants , and experiments with gene editing haven ’ t led to any dinosaur outbreaks ( that we know of ), VR seems equally unlikely to trap us all in pixelated prisons any time soon .
AUGUST 2020