– and dominion over it, as conferred by the right of title – forms one of the foundations of Law. We use attorneys – rather than armies – to wage wars over each patch of ground, legally arbitrating our spaces and our rights within a space. Changing space changes law, rights, responsibilities, and risks. Our culture of law reflects our spaces, just as our spaces reflect our culture of law. A world with pervasive augmented reality requires new laws, new regulations, new standards – and new behaviors.
Touch reality – or, rather, our perception of the real – and everything within the human sphere bends under that pressure. Innocuous though it may seem to lure and capture cute cartoon monsters via a smartphone app, other monsters from other and far less friendly realms of imagination lie in wait, queued at that same threshold of data and perception, pressure pushing them into the real. We will see the nightmare side of augmented reality, because we cannot experience the benefits without opening ourselves to their opposite.
We cannot know the precise shape of the future. We can look to the past for precedents, and to a present, where, as William Gibson wisely noted, the future already exists – unevenly distributed.7 At a public park in Rhodes, New South Wales, our augmented reality future began its colonization of the present, landing at Peg Paterson Park and claiming that space as its own, establishing a beachhead of augmentation within the real.
Although it may appear as though the events of that July night had no precedent, the entire arc of computing has led us through an accelerating series of innovations in the relationship between ourselves and our machines, bringing them closer. As they grow closer to us, our machines grow in potency. To understand where we are, and where we are headed, we must begin in chapter 1 by looking back, to our strange eventful history augmenting reality.
The origins of augmented reality (AR) bring us in chapter 2 to a present day of rapid developments in technology – and a battle fought by technology giants to create the first mass-produced AR devices, the so-called “mirrorshades,” devices that marry continuous surveillance with an intimate capacity to generate synthetic additions to reality.
Chapter 3 considers how these AR devices might use the information they gather about us, by looking at the whole history of user profiling and user “engagement” – techniques pioneered by Google and Facebook to make content so engaging, so precisely fit to the individual, they find it difficult to look away.
The promise of “digital depth” – the revelation of the inner workings of a deeply technological world largely hidden from view – forms the core of chapter 4. Can we balance the dangers of augmented reality with its enormous potential to liberate and illuminate?
Finally, chapter 5 looks at the ethical questions posed by any attempt to “write” on the world via augmented reality. Who writes, for whom – and who has the “right to write”?
Invented as a machine-amplified empowerment of our native human cognitive and perceptual capacities, augmented reality has evolved into a technology of control. Hence, it is with control we must begin.
Notes
1 1 Zorine Te, “How Pokemon Go Nearly Destroyed a Quiet Suburb,” Gamespot, August 2, 2016, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-pokemon-go-nearly-destroyed-a-quiet-suburb/1100-6442283/
2 2 James Lemon, “Pokemon Go: Residents call police as Rhodes swamped,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 13, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-go-residents-call-police-as-rhodes-swamped-20160713-gq4hb3.html
3 3 Kathryn Wicks, “Pokemon GO: All Pokestops removed from Peg Paterson Park at Rhodes,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 1, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/technology/pokemon-go-all-pokestops-removed-from-peg-paterson-park-at-rhodes-20160801-gqio00.html
4 4 Ian Bogost, “Every Place Is Exactly the Same Now,” The Atlantic, January 16, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-has-ruined-space/605077/
5 5 Franziska Roesner, “Who Is Thinking About Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality?,” Technology Review, October 19, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609143/who-is-thinking-about-security-and-privacy-for-augmented-reality/
6 6 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 119–30.
7 7 William Gibson, “The Shape of Things to Come,” The Economist, December 4, 2003.
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