A killer application for augmented reality is likely to be the integration of communication channels. Today’s, cellular phones annoy people with constant accountability and stress, not to mention spotty coverage, but if a HUD relay over life can display text messages as they are sent and invite fluid shifts to voice conversation. When video is engaged and shared, people could also see what their potential conversation partner is doing prior to requesting attention, giving distributed social life some of the fluidity and contextual awareness of natural social life. These sorts of benefits will motivate the teenagers of 2020 to broadcast much of their lives and to interpret the absence of their friend’s data streams as a low intensity request not to call. Archival will at first be a secondary but relatively minor benefit from the technology, but will ultimately widen the divide between public and private life, a disaster for privacy advocates but a boon for academic science (by normalizing the publication of all data). Paranormal beliefs will also tend to decline, as the failure to record paranormal events and the fallibility of memory both become more glaring.
Could you operationalize some of the many predictions and theories embedded in this comment? How would one judge all this? (AR apps like Foursquare are already fairly popular but don’t much resemble traditional theories of what AR would look like.)
Humans have long worked to document their lives, inventing gadgets to
aid in writing and recording, concepts and conventions to make what we
say meaningful and comparable, and social institutions to let us coordinate
in monitoring and verifying our documentation. It is harder to lie, and so
to self-deceive, about documented events. [...]
Many lament, and some celebrate (Brin, 1998), a coming ‘‘surveillance
society.’’ Most web pages and email are already archived, and it is now
feasible and cheap for individuals to make audio recordings of their entire
lives. It will soon be feasible to make full video recordings as well. Add to
this recordings by security cameras in stores and business, and most physical
actions in public spaces may soon be a matter of public record. Private
spaces will similarly be a matter of at least private record.
On a AR theme I think there will be a high level language created within ten years for AR that will try to make the following accessible
Pulling info off the Internet
Machine vision
Precise overlay rendering
People will want to mash up different AR services in one “view” so you don’t have to switch between them. There needs to be a lingua franca and HTML doesn’t seem suited. I’d think it likely that it will be some XML variant.
If AR gets any sort of popularity, even just among early adopters, I guarantee you that there will be several competing tools for doing what you describe, with more coming out every month.
There are already plenty of supposedly “paranormal” events recorded on Youtube, as well as elsewhere. With the increase of recording devices, many more such things will be recorded, and paranormal beliefs will increase.
A killer application for augmented reality is likely to be the integration of communication channels. Today’s, cellular phones annoy people with constant accountability and stress, not to mention spotty coverage, but if a HUD relay over life can display text messages as they are sent and invite fluid shifts to voice conversation. When video is engaged and shared, people could also see what their potential conversation partner is doing prior to requesting attention, giving distributed social life some of the fluidity and contextual awareness of natural social life. These sorts of benefits will motivate the teenagers of 2020 to broadcast much of their lives and to interpret the absence of their friend’s data streams as a low intensity request not to call. Archival will at first be a secondary but relatively minor benefit from the technology, but will ultimately widen the divide between public and private life, a disaster for privacy advocates but a boon for academic science (by normalizing the publication of all data). Paranormal beliefs will also tend to decline, as the failure to record paranormal events and the fallibility of memory both become more glaring.
Could you operationalize some of the many predictions and theories embedded in this comment? How would one judge all this? (AR apps like Foursquare are already fairly popular but don’t much resemble traditional theories of what AR would look like.)
Robin Hanson makes a similar prediction in ‘Enhancing Our Truth Orientation’ (pp. 362-363):
On a AR theme I think there will be a high level language created within ten years for AR that will try to make the following accessible
Pulling info off the Internet
Machine vision
Precise overlay rendering
People will want to mash up different AR services in one “view” so you don’t have to switch between them. There needs to be a lingua franca and HTML doesn’t seem suited. I’d think it likely that it will be some XML variant.
Aren’t these more likely to be done by libraries than languages?
I hope not. Something like JSON is far less verbose.
If AR gets any sort of popularity, even just among early adopters, I guarantee you that there will be several competing tools for doing what you describe, with more coming out every month.
It already has a sort of popularity. There are already startups working in the field.
If you want to keep abreast of the field keep an eye on Bruce Sterling’s Blog.
There are already plenty of supposedly “paranormal” events recorded on Youtube, as well as elsewhere. With the increase of recording devices, many more such things will be recorded, and paranormal beliefs will increase.
I think these are great predictions.