Eyes of next generation wide open to promise of digital future

For anyone worrying about the future, here’s one possible crumb of comfort. In one vision of a West Cork town 100 years in the future, Skibbereen’s West Cork Hotel has an outdoor swimming pool.

This vision of the town of the future was the work of one young participant in a Coder Dojo project to visualise what their surroundings will look like a century on. It was an illustration of how children still in primary school now often have the technological tools and talents to forge a path into the hi-tech world of the future, even as many of us are still struggling with our iPhones.

The 3D model of Skibbereen’s future was rendered in a Minecraft video game style and displayed in front of an appreciative crowd on the first day of National Digital Week. The buildings of Bridge St and Townshend St in the town were recreated by people from Generation Z, who have only known a digital world. So Dominic Casey Jnr, son of the coach of Olympic silver medalists Gary and Paul O’Donovan, projected a future vision of the rowing club, another youngster recreated the local Church restaurant, and local schoolgirl Fiona formed the future hotel.

Future education was one of the key issues addressed on day one of what is becoming a unique event in the Irish tech calendar.

David Whelan of Waterford-based Immersive VR Education outlined the potential for a virtual reality ‘Engage’ university, where donning a headset would place you in a global classroom in which you could learn interactively while sitting ‘next’ to classmates who in reality could be thousands of miles away.

In this world, marine biology students might have a VR seabed surrounding them, with whales swimming past. As an example of what can be achieved, David played an earlier version of a VR recreation of the Apollo 11 mission, in which the participant can play out the full experience from lift-off to moon landing and back again, with triggered events and timed events, and full recreations of the interior of the space craft and everything to scale. We heard actual Nasa audio and the voice of former US President John F Kennedy, on “the goal of landing a man on the moon”.

Day one also heard from Jonathan Davies of PayPal about the future of money and retail, from Grainne Bagnall on the teaching of science, technology, engineering, arts and maths (STEAM) subjects in primary schools, and on the Google stage about how Agri-tech, from modern milking parlours to the use of drones, is developing farming.

In what suddenly seems a more uncertain world, we may be looking to technology for salvation, or sanctuary. I donned a VR headset and quickly I was on the seafloor, looking at the wreck of the Titanic. Earlier, I found myself on a subterranean roller coaster — think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Walking away afterwards, feeling slightly nauseous, I was reminded why I tend to close my eyes any time I’ve found myself on a real roller coaster or fairground ride. The next generation have their eyes wide open, trained on a digital future.