the timboucher experience

I don’t watch cable TV, but I’ve been hearing lots of references to some new advertising by I think Verizon for their new internet anywhere service for laptop users. While the idea of having omnipresent access to the web is nothing new, the fact that one of the biggest communication technology companies is pushing it hard certainly is.

I tend to look at such developments through the trendcasting filter: where is this going? What might such and such mean if you advanced it past where it is now into where it might go? For me, “affordable” omnipresent internet access is one more incremental step towards augmented reality becoming a, well, a reality.

Augmented reality, you might recall, is one of the words they’re using nowadays for mixing computer graphics, and other types of information displays, in with real world objects. It’s like virtual reality, except its overlaid on top of our day-to-day world. The big tech scramble over the next 5-10 years - as I see it - is to see who can create the best, most useful and most entertaining services to augment our reality, and enrich our experiences of whatever it is we are doing on a moment-to-moment basis.

Technologies exist now which will ultimately dovetail nicely into augmented reality: things like GPS. Depending on your position on the globe, you can have a GPS-enabled device serve you information appropriate to your location. Mobile technologies taken to the extreme is what we’re looking at. Google has begun doing something similar, embedding photos, advertisements, Wikipedia entries and user-created maps into its mapping service, nevermind ‘layers’ available in applications like Google Earth. Earthmine is another company conducting similar work. I’m looking at it like this: Google has a headstart in the information-indexing end of the business, having correlated humongous impossibly-large sets of data. The second comprehensive augmented reality technology hits the marketplace, Google is going to be able to flood the “real” world with all kinds of location-specific data, graphics, and who knows what else.

One of the things I dislike about the notion of augmented reality technology, is that under the wrong applications, it may end up distancing people from ordinary reality. Do you ever get annoyed when people have earphones on in public spaces, making it difficult or impossible to interact with them socially? Well, imagine that multiplied by about a thousand. Someone with not just earphones feeding them information, but visors and maybe even haptic devices is certainly going to be living in - quite literally - a different reality (I’ve been calling it “realms”) from someone who is not. Bridging the gulf socially between two people co-existing within the same physical space may become a very weird problem in the not-too-distant future.

That said, I do see the potential for augmented reality technology to actively enhance people’s experience of the physical world. And not only that, I see in it great potential to return to what may represent a more natural or ancestral way of interacting with what we might think of as landscapes of information.

In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, author and magician David Abram explores the disparity between the modern method of interacting with the world and that of what might be called the tribal or primitive (I’m not sure what’s currently in vogue as the PC term here). He says that pre-modern peoples apply their literacy to the landscape, to nature itself. People living in a state of nature know how to read its tiny signs, signals and cues, because their lives are intimately dependent on it. Modern peoples living in the industrialized “educated” world have withdrawn that literacy to the printed word. They may not know how to “read” a tree, but they know how to read text and derive meaningful information from paper, a product created from the tree.

In the culture of the Australian aborigine, there exists a rite which Westerners call the walkabout, in which a pedestrian voyage is made across the landscape, following the so-called “songlines“:

Australian’s indigenous peoples conceive of all things beginning with the Dreaming or (in some Indigenous languages) Altjeringa (also called the Dreamtime), a ‘once upon a time’ time out of time where archetypal ancestral totemic spirit-beings formed the World. These shapeshifting spirits embodied forms of animals, plants, people, natural phenomena and/or inanimate objects and their existence is revealed by their formative journeying and the signs they deposited through the landscape. Their dreaming and journeying trails are the songlines (or “Yiri” in the Walpiri language).

Abram contends that the text-reliant Westerner can re-learn how to use their senses to “read” their environment and the landscape they’re surrounded by to awaken a much richer and perhaps more authentic experience of the natural world. I believe it was the media theorist McLuhan who talked about technologies which would allow us to “re-tribalize” as a people, and augmented reality may end up being a good example. If we can learn how to creatively and effectively embed information into physical spaces and locations, we may be able to blend the best parts of pre-modern natural literacy, with post-modern (or whatever era we’re technically in now) capacity to store and transmit cultural knowledge through mediated texts. The future, I think, is exactly as bright as we make it.

[See also: Augmented Reality & The Memory Palace, geocaching]

• Reality Mining >> Data Re-Creation >> Time Travel
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] - Sample Chapters [Index]
• In No Doubt About Their Request
• Parallel Realities, not “augmented reality”
• Exploring rich human-created GPS site-specific information