From Ideapaint – which is the opposite of anti-graffiti paint – instead of making walls graffiti-proof, every wall becomes graffitiable.
As opposed to the proliferating virtual-graffiti, otherwise known as Augmented Reality… which as far as I can tell is (so far) basically to do with projecting hyperlinks and thought-balloons over everything.
Which I think is a neat idea, but I’m not really seeing a killer-app I don’t think. Not yet anyway. I think the main problem I have with this is, it that to these jaded eyes, it already looks like spam, and it hasn’t even started yet really.
It’s a QR code on a wine label – so your cellphone can read it and point you at a website with more information. A really primitive (dare I say it?) early implementation of Augmented Reality… and another example of the Science Fiction Singularity… where we can recognise something that’s actually mind-bogglingly advanced, and only just been invented… as a primitive early stage of something.
This comes from Bruce Stirlingland as part of his Spime-Watch thing… the idea of a Spime (I think) is an artefact that primarily exists in virtual space, and is occasionally precipitated out into a real-world product. Being a virtual thing, it has it’s entire history / designs / bills-of-materials / documentation etc etc online.
I think he’s overcomplicating it… I think that all it is, is giving real-world objects URIs – Unique Resource Identifiers. These then link to various data silos etc on the web. The truth is far scruffier than fiction.
This is what various governments round the world want (especially the British, Oh dear lord yes, they wants it, they wantsss it, they waaaantttsss it) to do with people. They want a unique ID on all people, with associated data trackable, traceable etc.
In many ways it’s not a bad idea, but it shouldn’t be the government that does it – they simply aren’t trustworthy enough – it needs to be open-sourced.
Which is actually pretty neat in some respects, though I expect it will make you look even more of a dickhead than someone with one of those bluetooth headsets where they wander along talking to themselves.
This won’t be it though – augmented reality will either happen with sunglasses or contact lenses or… (don’t laugh) direct brain interfaces… we’re making our first steps in that direction.
And I don’t think that the driver for augmented reality will be as a shopping aid – it will be as a tourism aid, and it will probably push tourism into places where tourism possibly ought not go. If you can rig a system where someone’s sensory input is beamed up to the web (and to a limited degree, we can do that now) then you can have someone vicariously seeing through someone else’s eyes. It’s not entirely impossible that this will create an entirely new genre of sex (or violence) tourism.
Right now though… there are all these places in the world that I miss… and though I can now find photos on the web… sometimes web-cams, it would be so much better to have something like this
and actually feel the breeze and smell the… err… smells… etc.
I’m guessing that at some point you’ll be able to hire tour-guides who will show you round without you having to get out of your chair. They put on a pair of glasses, you put on a pair of glasses, you pay them via SMS and you get to be a kid in the slums of Rio for a day. You get to see your favourite band, you get to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel… you could have a 747 where everyone feels like they’re flying the plane.
You could swap glasses with your girlfriend. It could get well weird actually.
Sooner or later I’m going to get some glasses like these:
And I’m going to blu-tac a webcam to the front of them (yes, this one), and plug it into the glasses so they work just like real glasses except everything will be a bit pixelly.
That would be cool. I might look like a bit of a twonklet, but I look a bit of a twonklet anyway… and I wouldn’t care because I’d use the technique in this tutorial here to basically edit out all the idiots in the world (also wearing these glasses).
Then I’ll wander about the place banging into people who aren’t really there etc.
Actually, there used to be this poster or something entitled “How to make yourself invisible”, and the picture was of a homeless person… kindof a guilt-poster type effect, a kind of irony of which is that in certain respects, if you’re homeless, you want to become invisible, so you won’t get hassled. Which is why I found the following video quite sad, even though it’s a pretty neat thing to make.
I think a homeless person living in this would become an instant hassle-magnet – both from the police and the other vermin that you’re forced to deal with. When I lived in Camden in London in the 90s, the people begging in the doorways up Parkway were charged “rent” by stanley-knife carrying scum who would take a percentage of their money.
The biggest problems people face are generally other people, and the closer you get to the bottom, the worse they become.
