Augmented Reality. Mark Pesce
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into a tiny suburban park.
That might have been a matter of little consequence during daytime hours. But as it passed midnight (on a weeknight!), and the crowd showed no signs of dispersing, the police arrived – alerted by noise complaints from the apartment dwellers surrounding the Park,2 who couldn’t get to sleep over the hubbub of happy players. The police ticketed the double-parked cars and asked everyone else to move on – which, eventually, they did.
While players’ lures quickly vanished, those Pokéstops remained in Peg Paterson Park – drawing players back again, on successive nights.3 It never again reached the intensity of that Tuesday evening, but in the aftermath, it became apparent that Niantic had done something unexpectedly potent when it located those Pokéstops in the park, something that perhaps it had not even intended to do. Pokémon Go changed players’ relationship to space, and changed their behavior within it.
* * *
We’ve always imagined place: Here a church, there a graveyard, and over there, a school. Each place embodies its own associations, drawn from a mix of culture and memory. What we bring to our experience of place comes from both within and outside of us. While the contents of memory and our mix of emotions vary from moment to moment throughout our lifetimes, the cultural meaning of place tends to be far less mutable. A school means today what it meant yesterday, and will mean much the same tomorrow. Any change in the cultural significance of that place usually occurs so gradually we barely notice it.
While there may be times when a place becomes particularly associated with a cultural moment – such as the World Trade Center – these remain exceptions to a rule: The meaning culture ascribes to place tends to remain as it is. That “inertia,” its resistance to change, gives the world a solidity and validity that we rely on. We expect places to be today as they have been in the past.
When a place changes – perhaps a beloved tree has been cut down, or a building burns – we feel something like madness, as our external, collective, and cultural sense of place struggles to adapt to sudden change. Very little can play with our heads as profoundly as place. We take our behavioral cues from place: Sincere in church, somber in the graveyard, open and accepting in school. We “know our place.”
Changing place changes us.
With the exception of the theatrical machinery used to entertain and delight – changing place as a way to evoke strong emotions – the ideal of mutable place has always been something seen through the mind’s eye. We can imagine a place to be transformed, but in reality its inertia keeps it consistent. Or rather, had kept it consistent. For although the real will remain stubbornly stable into the foreseeable future, other forces are at work, changing our perception of place – and reality.
Over the last half century, computing has grown progressively more sensual, drawing closer and closer to our bodies. The earliest machines, though physically huge, lacked even the most rudimentary interfaces. Users of these computers “wrote” programs in wiring, physically altering these devices in order to modify their behavior.
The history of computing tells two stories: One, about how these devices became ever smaller and faster; another, about how they became ever more pliable, facile, and responsive. We found it too hard to conform to the ways of the computer, so we shaped these devices to conform to us.
We have computers that can now play with our heads, but we have no rules to restrain their engagement.
At the mid-point of the twentieth century, computers were a central object of attention – rare, expensive, and demanding. To save money, we learned how to share that massive resource via peripherals – computers accessed via keyboard and screen, then mouse, then touch, becoming more and more natural as the interface moved closer and closer to the body. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the computer vanished into ubiquity, weaving itself into the fabric of nearly every fabricated object, moving beyond perception.
Just at the moment it disappears from view, computing has acquired the capacity to frame human perception, a figure/ground reversal with enormous consequences. No longer part of the scenery – because it cannot be seen – the computer instead assumes the role of scenery manufacturer, generating reality.
While not wholly creatures of perception, we necessarily observe and respond to our environments. Changes in our environments change us in ways both immediate and permanent.
The computer has now become an actor in the field of reality. In a single step, its capacity to affect us has amplified beyond all expectation – and beyond any frameworks of design, ethics, law, or culture. We have computers that can now play with our heads, but we have no rules to restrain their engagement.
When computers sat comfortably “over there” – visible and therefore limited – we could comprehend and manage their capacities. As they fade into invisibility, with vast new capacities to shape our view of reality, we must consider how we can safely allow them to do so – and how they must announce themselves when doing it.
Something so utterly innocuous as a nostalgic game – capturing fantastical, imaginary Pokémon – can produce unexpected and unprecedented human impacts on the real world. The story of Peg Paterson Park reveals the contours of a future where the blending of the real and the algorithmic could be used – indeed, has already been used – to generate social outcomes.
In itself, this represents nothing new: The dilemma of the Web as information/disinformation medium has created a culture with the greatest population of “disinformed” individuals in human history. Yet the Web occupies (and, it could be argued, pollutes) the internal hyperspace of human thought. It exists within a single dimensionless point, while all the real remains beyond its reach.
Having filled all of the sphere of human thought, the Web now looks to be overtopping its dams, undermining their foundations, and explosively flooding the entirety of the real.4 The boundary between what we imagine to be true and what can be seen to be true will wash away. Après moi, says the Web, le déluge.
That flood washes away reality by “augmenting” it at every point. At its most basic level, this new technology of “augmented reality” works like an engine that generates hallucinations – phantasms, projected within the real world. Augmented reality devices make synthetic, “fake” additions to the real world – such as Pokémon sprinkled through a real-world landscape when seen through a smartphone display. Although over half a century old, augmented reality has evolved rapidly over the last several years, and now nears its “unboxing” as a product fit for billions of connected consumers.
This book addresses what the technology of augmented reality does to us, how its use changes us, and how, with some forethought, we can mitigate some of the worst of its effects, perhaps even transforming its impacts. To do that, this book will examine its history, its design, its capacities – and its deep connections to global capital.
A technology freshened up, and presented as “the next big thing” – despite being invented over half a century ago – has rapidly become the idée fixe of all five of the world’s most technology valuable companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – their Holy Grail. Each has directed billions of dollars toward creating augmented reality systems. What has so ensorceled these giants of rationalism and science into the development of a hallucinogenic medium?
In a word: Control.
Each firm seeks for itself the command over reality, both private and public, that will come from a position with market dominance. Each dreams of translating this command into a vast business empire managing the fabric of the real, a world where corporate and individual world views have been woven together, united by the underlying thread of the new technologies of augmented reality.
The allure of augmented reality will also draw to it actors more powerful than the world’s biggest companies. Nations – particularly those with authoritarian aspirations – can and will use augmented reality to manage the behavior of their citizens