[-empyre-] Week 1: Intersubjectivity

[WA Watters F]

Hi everyone,

I write this comment in the spirit of Ileana's call to consider 'extremes' of intersubjectivity, while projecting into the future a trend that George Sabau described in his first message.

That is, I find it amusing to imagine what will happen once "augmented reality" (AR) becomes highly immersive, widely accessible, and connected to the GPS and internet.

For the uninitiated: by "augmented reality" I don't mean "virtual reality". A virtual reality is self-contained and entirely simulated. By contrast, AR implies the ability to project virtual objects and avatars into the physical environment using, for example, goggles that display these representations but also permit the wearer to see the world around them. These objects will have a location or volume-of-influence in physical space, and they may reside in one or more "layers".

Imagine, for example, NYC's Central Park with a layer for Alice in Wonderland, with Cheshire cats perched on tree limbs and Mad Hatter tea ceremonies gathered around picnic tables.  Another layer in the same space might contain a simulated ecology of alien plant life, or a forest of unfolded tesseracts, or whatever.

What excites me is the prospect of AR layers that resemble the user-created world Second Life: layers in which communities create and modify scriptable objects and environments that are freely shared with (and sometimes also modified by) all comers.  Such denizen-created "sandbox" layers might transform how we create and share aesthetic experiences as well as how we explain and learn about ideas, and surely how we relate to our physical environment, to scratch only the surface.

Maybe all of this is old news to most of you, but for those curious to learn more about what the AR future may resemble, I recommend the imaginative descriptions in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End", as well as "Daemon" and "FreedomTM" by Daniel Suarez.

Wes

-- 
W.A. Watters Farfan
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