I grew up with projectors of all sorts. There were projectors in the studio where my parents made their living taking pictures, projectors in the darkroom where they developed them, projectors in our house where we viewed them, projectors at events where my parents would create sophisticated light shows for performers, and projectors at the museum where they curated films and film series.
By 18 my best friend and I had perfected the art of sneaking into clubs. There were several good reasons to do this, but only one that truly mattered. On the dance floor and bathing in the light we let it transform us into something else, something wiser, something powerful, something better.
Today I still love to gather in groups around projectors and interact with their glowing simulacra. To love projectors is to love light. Needless to say Augmented Reality is quite intriguing for me and I have a keen interest in the direction it’s taking us.
I had my first experience with the MagicLeap headset not too long ago. First and foremeost, it certainly lives up to it’s name. Within minutes I was leaping and running and skipping and laughing and smiling and *living* in that infinite space between digital and analog. The real and the unreal. It was indeed magical. Not going to lie.
I had a similar experience with the Hololens when it first arrived, minus the running and jumping and skipping part. Are there technical drawbacks? Of course there are technical drawbacks, many as a matter of fact. I will leave it to others to complain about them. I don’t care.
The drawbacks I see are not technical. They are deeper than that, they are social, and quite frankly they are disturbing.
For as much pure joy as I had in the glasses, there was an equal amount of dread being around people in the glasses, when I myself was not wearing them. The Glasshole effect was immediate and instantly unsettling.
When you are confronted with someone wearing AR glasses, and you are not, you will wonder what exactly they are looking at. Ok, no big deal you say, seems obvious enough… until they start to look at you. Like staring directly at you with their magic smart glasses. What are they looking at then?
There is much discussion now on shared AR spaces, and therein is the case for projection and shared displays.
VR doesn’t suffer as yet from this. This is no argument for one over the other, just fact that VR experiences are tethered and hooded for the most part. As the joke goes, if you can’t see anything, you are in VR. In AR though, you can see and what you can you see, but others cannot, is the issue.
Mobile AR is also more or less free from the Glasshole effect, as handheld screens are easily shareable. We all can sense where this thing is headed though, and the buck will not rest with your iDevice.
Most disturbing of all perhaps is going to be our *acceptance* of this personal and pervasive spy-tech. Spy-tech tends to be hidden in corners now, we accept that. We accept that it is hooked to the cloud and is pleated with machine vision and artificial intelligence and speaks human languages as easily as it speaks database and computer code. Soon will we simply accept people walking around with it attached to their heads, simply because we will have the chance to do it ourselves?
This is not the future I want. I don’t want guns in the club, and I don’t want to have to add AR glasses to that list. Platforms are dividing us enough already; socially, politically, economically. Let’s work towards a shared augmented reality, or let’s at least make that a thing so that we can create safe places, places where we can be ourselves, be something better than ourselves and do it together.