Benkoil's piece on Augmented Reality lifts NYT writer Michael Young's definition of AR: "layering digital information onto the physical world." The article goes on to touch on interesting, entertaining, helpful, frightening examples of AR at its best and worst. But what has had me thinking since reading the piece is what happens when we do the opposite: layering physical information onto the digital world?
It's not Augmented Reality, but an inversion of it – coming up with a specific word for this touches on the impossible task of determining what is reality and where the line ends, especially with regards to cyberspace. And with digital and physical now repersenting opposites to a dichotomy we have come to accept in our society, it's not far-fetched to think of "physical" and "digital" representing two fully-fleshed out conventions of experience. With all of this in mind, head over to Google Maps, and play around in street view. Everything about the experience of Google Maps is digital, but it simply could not exist without the overlay of true, physical information. With the increasing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones, this inverted AR scenario borrows even more from the physical in order to feed the digital, as Google Maps can offer you directions or satellite photography with regards to your exact location.
What else in the digital world couldn't exist without physical information? User generated content on the Internet fits this inverted AR definition just as well: Facebook wouldn't work as a purely digital space without the insertion of physical information – our lives. Any productivity software, from financial tracking, to dayplanning, to presentation making, requires the inclusion of physical information to exist. Even online shopping couldn't exist without the layering of physical information, or else we wouldn't have products to sell and prices to compare.
In the end, it seems as though most of the stuff we interact with online has a physical overlay to it, and without this physical layer of information, the Internet would be empty. Everything we do online, with very rare, nonessential exceptions, is based on some sort of human or physical data shared online. It is interesting, then, to flip back to the original topic at hand, AR. The reality we experience everyday, separate from our computers or iPhones or the Internet in general can only be enhanced by digital information; the digital world we engage in on almost-equally frequent basis simply could not exist without this physical information. Benkoil tells about USPS, and the idea of being able to hold up an item to a camera, then being told what shipping container to use, which is an awesome simplification of tasks we deal with, but not something that creates a possibility that wasn't already available. In our inversion, removing the physical information breaks the model, rendering it useless. The building blocks of the digital world are fragments of our human experience.
So, luckily, reality hasn't lost to cybereality.
Yet.
The inversion of AR just makes me think of Neuromancer and what would happen if the line was unclear between where reality and cybereality starts and stops. It is true that most online interaction is based on human experience, just on a different platform. The creation of AR would make that line even blurrier with the enhancement of the physical world with AR technology.
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ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you noted that the USPS app is "not something that creates possibility that wasn't already available." This app, like many others, isn't something entirely new. A big part of the popularity and acceptance of this technology is because it's "cool." It's cool to get to put an item in front of a phone and know what box to use. It's cool to point to a wall and have a video come up on our phone. We've become so used to the digital age that we'll love anything that let's us interact with it in new ways.
ReplyDeleteYou're right... it's a bit of a two-way street, isn't it? The physical world we live in informs and constructs our experiences of digital environments. How physical is a Windows '95 desktop, with its icons, color patterns, and text menus? Without recourse to the physical signs we manipulate in our everyday lives, very few of us would be able to relay information digitally. It's too abstract without the bells and whistles. Just goes to show that the dichotomy between physical and digital is a false one.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. I'm left sort of wondering about one portion of it though. You write "The reality we experience everyday, separate from our computers or iPhones or the Internet in general can only be enhanced by digital information; the digital world we engage in on almost-equally frequent basis simply could not exist without this physical information." Don't you also think there are points where the digital world takes on an autonomy of its own. Even though it may be building upon an already existing physical world, it seems that these technologies hold the potential for surmounting the physical world's influence. The world of augmented reality easily has the potential to mushroom into a much larger reality than the already existing physical one we inhabit daily. If AR became such a vital part of our everyday lives that one could not easily navigate everyday life without it, than it would change the game. Perhaps in a lot of ways our experience on the day to day of our current world that still seems pretty actual, or not virtual, is already mediated by technological experiences. The burdens of proof in belief reports are subject to much more scrutiny when people can easily check what you're saying on their phone. People are today more skeptical and more endearing to collaborate with. Its a mixed bag of extremes for sure.
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