While on vacation a few weeks ago, my husband and I drove about 300 miles – over 5 hours – from Phoenix to Las Vegas. We are both fans of audiobooks, and so while we drove through the feverish desert landscape we listened to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I am ashamed to admit that, although I am a huge science fiction fan, I have never read Snow Crash before. I haven’t yet finished it, but so far I am struck by one of the primary assumptions made by the book.
Snow Crash – like Neuromancer and many other seminal sci-fi works – assumes that the future of technology and information consumption is through the creation of virtual worlds. This conceit was paricularly powerful through the late 80s to the early 90s, when the advent of video games with increasinly advanced graphic technologies made the creation of a 3D, interactive, info space seem inevitable.
Second Life
From a technological perspective, creating such a virtual world is no longer problematic. Such systems already exist in a variety of formats. In The Sims, players can “play God” with a series of characters (something like dolls in a doll house). The military uses virtual reality stations for everything from flight training to preventing post traumatic stress disorder. And, famously, Second Life allows players to navigate a virtual world and socialize using avatars.
However, despite the availability of the technology, the predictions of science fiction writers – that massive exodus to a virtual reality is imminent - never really came to fruition. Instead, interfaces that are primarily text and image based still prevail. This is because, outside of entertainment and training systems, there is no real benefit to navigating information through a physical metaphor. In fact, physical bodies are detrimental to navigating information – it’s much easier to click a series of links on Google than it would be to walk across a 3D library.
Nokia's Future Vision concept
So, instead of replicating a physical reality, we are beginning to see technologies that use our information spaces to augment it. Augmented reality has gotten a lot of press over the past year, but I’d argue that we have yet to see the most transformative examples come to life. General Motors is testing an augmented reality dashboard that would show information about the driver’s environment and route in real-time (think Terminator vision). Contact lenses that show digital data on the eye are being tested on animals. Nokia’s future vision concept video shows how eye movements and glasses could be used to display contextual digital information in the real world.
Beyond augmented reality, we’re seeing technologies that make physical devices easier to manipulate. There are prototypes for a gesture-activated faucet, and hotels are beginning to replace key cards with cell phone applications. Project Natal, the Wii, and the iPhone have gone a long way towards making gestural interfaces not only intuitive but expected (after showing a two-year-old my iPad, he tried to zoom in to a newspaper by pinching his fingers on it).
I doubt this is an original observation, but I believe that the mega trend here is integrated reality – machine-enhanced information and interactions that are seamlessly integrated into real life contexts.
I, for one, cannot wait.
