If you could fill your home with customizable, instantly change-able virtual decorations that looked completely real, would you ever buy physical home goods?
If you could have expert real-time instruction super-imposed on all of your activities, from cooking to stargazing to picking up the opposite sex, when would you ever need a real teacher?
If you control an infinite number of applications and programs on an unlimited number of displays… would you ever have the need for a smartphone or a physical computer display again?
“Sight” (a short vilm by Robot Genius) is a rather compelling display of what the future of augmented reality might be like, and prompts some important questions around where technology is headed… and maybe where it should (or shouldn’t) be headed.
Though the tone of the film – and it’s ominous ending – make for a troubling view of the future, the questions it spawns about the future of the human experience aren’t all about malice and coercion. The film begs important questions around what elements of the human experience might be improved via augmentation… and what might be lost.
Importantly, the film poses a question that I suspect will become more and more important as the human experience is radically re-defined in the coming decaded:
If we improve our effectiveness and capacity, won’t we permit an “enhancement” of the dark aspects of our nature as well as the good?
Food or thought.
