Design Fiction x AI
About Ploy Pruekcharoen
Story 02
Theme: AI in Health and Well-Being
When: 2040
Where: Home
Why: It is easy to think of a negative future. I wanted to think more positively about the use of Gen AI. I took inspiration from the note that said Image Gen will expand to VR
Narrative:
It is the October of 2040.
Bhaloo, a 5-year-old boy lives with his parents in Singapore. His favourite game is playing hide and seek when it gets dark. The country is pretty safe and Bhaloo is a responsible boy, so his parents don’t worry too much about where he is, if he has been outside playing for several hours. They can track his location and send alerts to the family if he is in an unknown location
Bhaloo slept late at night after playing with his friends. The next day, he woke up at 9am, half asleep still. His parents had left for work in a nearby location. His granny who lives in the mountains of India, as a daily ritual, wore her VR headset, which was very intuitive and easy for her to learn. This gave her a full picture of what was happening in the house in Singapore. She sat on a chair of the dining table and saw that Bhaloo was just playing around.
She taps a button on the VR set and tells Bhaloo to join. Bhaloo joins the space and the VR takes them to a new space. Bhaloo selects the VR location as Seattle. Granny selects Greenland. Bhaloo and his granny fight over the locations for 5 whole minutes, before granny says to him “I will let you keep the location as Seattle if you go and brush your teeth.
The two of them are now in a VR simulation a Space Needle in Seattle. Bhaloo brushes his teeth in the Space Needle of Seattle setting and the granny watches him.
The toothbrush detects that Bhaloo has not been brushing properly and needs to make an appointment with the dentist.
The granny sees this and says that Bhaloo should try to use traditional toothbrushes that she used as a child. She has skepticisms about the new and electric toothbrushes.
Bhaloo puts down the VR headset and invites his friends over to play. Granny continues to watch them play around. And a simulation of granny sitting next to the chair appears.
The kids love playing with the granny. The children sit around her in a circle as she tells stories of the world where there was no camera, and how she took a 20-hour flight to travel to the USA for college and how she did not get to see her parents for sometimes for a whole year. The kids seemed mesmerised but also dismissive because now they can travel to almost any part of the world within an hour.
The granny told them stories of Covid 19 and the children had a good time with the granny.