Loosely Assembled

Just like most of the web, and many newer technologies, Augmented Reality is a self centered experience, focusing on the discrete interaction between the tech and one user. But, unlike the web, AR aspires to be a deeply integrated overlay on the real, shared, communal world, a view into the hidden, a new array of human senses. There is severe experiential turbulence where these two perspectives come together.

Observation changes things. This we find even in the fundamentals of our physical world through research like the double-slit experiment. We also know this anecdotally in many areas, one example being that surveillance cameras are supposed to deter crime, that we act differently if we know we are being watched.

Interaction also changes things, anyone who shares a home or office with another human realizes that objects don’t always stay in the exact spot you last saw them. Other people interact with the world in your absence, a lot, sometimes eroding and depreciating, but sometimes adding, contributing and improving. Most systems in the physical world don’t reset themselves just for you. Video games, and then the web, on the other hand discovered that these customized, personal experienced could easily be created just for you. Countless people could read the same book or document at the same time without making it unavailable to anyone else, or could start a fresh game of pac man without worrying about other instantiations of the ghost infested mazes. The notion of scarcity-free on-demand experience found a way into our cultural bloodstream.

But sometimes we still want the social experience. We still have certain reasons to watch a movie in a dark room full of strangers, we still flock to music festivals, sporting events, and shopping malls to rub elbows and bump egos.

My proposal is that the Augmented Reality movement take into account the ways in which shared social interaction with digital assets might be used to enhance understanding, access, and hedonic quality within the augmented views of the world. If you interact with something, there are cases where I should experience the changes you made. These notions are already central to many online social gaming experiences like Second Life, where my actions do have effects on the other inhabitants, or on the environment. What can the AR community learn from these scenarios?

Sometimes it’s nice to listen to music together, and to know that those around you, or at least to know who among those around you, are hearing the same music as you. A dance party with everyone listening to their own layers of unsynchronized sounds is not likely to be a transcendent experience.

Seems like they should have created the demo with an AR app so that he can actually look through the phone’s camera into his own physical space.

via @paigesaez