Augmented Reality: Tools to change our sense of place
A reader pointed me to an article by Jamais Cascio in the The Atlantic (November 2009) about Augmented Reality titled “Filtering Reality” (the T/S link “Email Me Tips” really does work!).
Augmented Reality as described in this piece puts a layer of technologically-mediated information between you and your experience of place. Need to find the nearest ATM, remember the name of that smiling person about to greet you, or, in the video below, the location of the nearest London Tube Station? The solution will be AR technologies currently being developed. These technologies will provide a translucent layer of information through which we will experience wherever we are.
The technology is still very rudimentary, serving up domain-specific limited information from inside iPhones and Droids. But eventually all the information you could ever want might eventually appear as projections on glasses, or maybe a contact lens. While it may seem a bit “sci-fi-ish” distributed cognition has been around ever since our ancestors marked territory with runes and signs. Of course, like breezes becoming hurricanes the sheer amount of all this new techno-information will create some novel challenges.
Cascio envisions two problems with an AR-infused future: spam and the further polarization of civil discourse and public life. For the first,
just as Web browsers have pop-up blockers, AR systems will filter spam. Moreover, they’ll likely be able to filter out physical ads, too, such as billboards—a capability that many opponents of visual clutter will find deliriously attractive.
The second problem he sees is less easily dismissed. Not only will we be able to filter unwanted commercial messages from the mediating layer of information AR will provide, we will be able to filter all the people and viewpoints we don’t like.
Conceivably, users could set AR spam filters to block any kind of unpalatable visual information, from political campaign signs to book covers. Parents might want to block sexual or violent images from their kids’ AR systems, and political activists and religious leaders might provide ideologically correct filters for their communities. The bad images get replaced by a red STOP, or perhaps by signs and pictures that reinforce the desired worldview.
Did I mention that the “wrong” people can get replaced too?
After California’s Prop 8 ban on gay marriage passed, opponents of the measure dug up public records of donors supporting the ban, and linked that data to an online map. Suddenly, you could find out which of your neighbors (or the businesses you frequent) were so opposed to gay marriage that they donated to the cause. Now imagine that instead of a map, those records were combined with an AR system able to identify faces.
via Filtering Reality – The Atlantic (November 2009) .
His answer for this problem is less clear, and to my ear at least, just a bit utopian.
The knee-jerk answer would be to ban such reality filters, but a ban could be easily circumvented. The harder answer, but ultimately the correct one, would be to strengthen our society’s ability to tolerate diverse viewpoints—to encourage not muddy centrism, but a basic ability to hear out, and to see, fellow citizens with a measure of respect.
via Filtering Reality – The Atlantic (November 2009) .
As enamored as I am by the possibilities of AR–or maybe titillated, I’m not sure yet how I feel–I share his concerns. But there’s something more basic at play here about our experience as fleshy beings making our way through specific, local places. What AR does is psychologically lower the threshold of effort required to engage a place. Finding that Tube Station, or even politely saying to that person who seems to know you that you’re sorry but you forgot their name, is still possible without a mediating layer of AR. Just more difficult.
But too easy can be just as bad as too difficult. Easier is not always more rewarding. Psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who study “flow,” i.e., how people become engaged in the experience of what they are doing, have explored this balance between challenge and skill: when things become too easy, when the threshold to engage is too low, we become apathetic and bored. While AR will make lots of things easier, it brings the risk, along with spam and political polarization, of reducing our experience of place to a kind of boring, apathetic experience similar to channel surfing. And we have to ask, do we really want a walk down our favorite street to become TV Reality?
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
Creepy. How about instead of “tolerating” others, accepting the essential fact that no one has to, and never will, share all your opinions? Hey, maybe you might learn something from them.
When I researched my book, speaking to people who love and who loathe guns, no one could believe I listened to and wrote equally about both sides, no matter whose POV offended or disturbed me. The PC anti-gun rigidity of some seemed as nutso to me as the guys with 1,000 rounds of ammo in their basement.
Blocking out all that which offends you is about as infantile as it gets.
I wish it were just infantile, but I fear dividing up into some “us” and some “them” and then looking for confirmation of that difference may just be part of being human, at least the American version. People read the papers that bring agreement …. no, change that, people watch the cable news and visit websites that confirm stereotypes. The downside to AR is applying those same filters not just to media choices but to “background-y” experiences like walking to the corner for a coffee.
In response to another comment. See in context »As someone who works in this field, let me say that AR that will block out ideas is pretty far afield. AR may be able to manipulate things, but it is not even in the galaxy of being able to manipulate concepts. Yes, there is certainly the possibility that your prude filter would not be able to differentiate Michelangelo’s David from gay porn. But it’s going to be a long time before it can figure out that a picture of Obama looking like the Joker, and Obama with his colors changed to red, white and blue mean different things.
That said, I’m all for tolerance of different ideas. I just don’t think that we need technology to make that necessary.
Interesting, thanks for the comment, what do you do in the field? Do you think those of you in the trenches actually trying to turn these future techno-visions into actual, working objects are less impressed by the changes coming down the road? Also, any thoughts about the possibility that AR can make R just a little bit boring, as well as easier to navigate?
In response to another comment. See in context »Todd,
In response to another comment. See in context »I work in visual search, where we try to identify objects in still and video images. I think that most tech workers are pretty pro-tech, and are definitely interested in the actual advancements, perhaps less so in the hype. You want to get a laugh out of a computer industry insider – act as if “cloud” technology is anything new.
As far as AR – I remember when it was VR – they had to dial back their ambition because reality is just too hard to “virtualize”.
I am not worried about reality becoming boring – there are no boring realities, only boring people. AR’s promise is actually more in game playing than in reality assist – instant maps are nice, but most people stay in familiar areas.
Will games become so “real” that people check out of their actual life? That’s a risk but the depth of downside depends on the quality of the life.
Your research sounds fascinating, can’t id the object unless you know its meaning and purpose which you can’t know unless you id the object! I’m about as far away from being in the computer industry as you can get, but even I remember (or maybe misremember) a print ad for compuserve from the 80s that represented the service as this huge contraption flying up in the clouds.
In response to another comment. See in context »I guess, as a psychologist, my concern is people checking into games because actual life has gotten unreal and, well, boring.