Susan P Crawford, Columnist

Cable Cabal Tries to Block Future in Kansas

February 5, 2014 at 2:00 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

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In Stockholm late last year, I met Daniel Khilgren Kallander, a 22-year-old who is very excited about his future career in virtual-reality design. To give me a sense of the possibilities, he strapped plastic goggles over my eyes and sent me on a roller-coaster ride, plunging me into a fully immersive virtual experience that involved some terrifying drops. Take it from me: Your brain is easily convinced that you really are wherever the screen suggests you are.

In the future, when those big goggles have evolved into micro-thin surfaces, virtual-reality businesses will need very-high-capacity fiber-optic Internet networks to keep up with the demand for immersive digital interactions.