We live in a world of relative perception. We experience an objective world in as much as we can agree on what we perceive through our senses.
To date we have confined digital information to devices and screens, seperate from the real world around us. This seperation has kept a clear division between the made up and the real.
This seperation is closing and will soon dissapear, as screens are replaced by glasses, lenses, a digital overlay over one of our key senses, our eyesight. Our ears will also hear digital sounds to enhance the illussion.
We are about to embark on the greatest shift in human consciousness we have seen in the history of the human race. Humans through the power of augmented reality are about to digtiise their reality.
Imagine minor information assist augmentation designed to help us in our jobs. Imagine a world with augmented assisted travel. Imagine experential augmentation for pleasure such as living life with a star wars filter or a Pokamon Overlay. This is all about to become possible within the next five years.
We are about to make our world even less objective. This means the information you experience in the world, the sights, the sounds, the experience of being human in the same time and space will be remarkably different for two individuals.
Could you or should you get real time profile feeds of individuals you meet? Should you apply a comedy filter in an important business meeting. It is ethical to apply a romance or beauty overlay to your partner?
We will download and apply individual filters for fun or participate in group platform augmented versions of the world. People already lose themselves in minecraft or Warcraft. In this case, the augmented reality platforms will create new dimensions of reality that seperate humans into groups of see or see not. Imagine digitisation that is spatially matched to reality that only certain groups of people can see.
In any one spatial dimension there will be multiple layers of digitised overlayed information displayed as text, images, vector graphics or realistic moving imagery. You may or may not be able to access these dimensional layers or even know they exist. In many cases these layers will be so dark you may not want to know. Welcome to the spatial internet.
Just like todays realty, in many instances this technology will be a harmless game, for others a key business tool, for some an asset that allows them to experience life as an elite with rights and privaledges only available to the few. Some will lose themselves and reality as the temptations of a digitally augmented technology dominate their life.
One day, in the not too distant future, you will innocently buy a pair of smart glasses and ear pods instead of a smartphone. This is the day it begins…
