Film Futurist

Earlier this year, I watched that now very famous demo of the MIT project called “The Sixth Sense”, a future phone concept that completely altered the way we currently think of mobile phone. At the time, I remember being awed by the sheer technological genius of it, and the fact that it had been built entirely of easily available consumer parts for under $400. The video is worth watching – I still marvel everytime I see it. And in recent months, I have come back to it for a different reason: I realized it is essentially an experiment in Augmented Reality.

The idea of a phone as a device of person to person communication as it was initially conceived way back when landlines were invented is certainly no more. What’s more, I think what this TED presentation demonstrated was that the mobile phone is now completely transforming our lives – socially, politically, physically and creatively. Of course, the question of whether these changes mark “progress” or not will continue to a subject of lively debate for some time to come.

I am personally fascinated by the idea of mobile Augmented Reality because it has the potential to completely alter the way we filter the world around us as we go about our daily business. In my last post, the overview of various experiments in AR focused almost entirely on gaming, or uses that required a less nimble and seamless interaction with the augmented world. With the iPhone platform (and to some extent Android) unlocking all kinds of possibilities in mobile AR, I think we are in for a complete shift that will impact our entire notion of reality.

The recently released Layar app for iPhone puts the location + information based product to work in a practical sense as the Techcrunch article explains “it’s the placement of a digital layer of information on top of a real-life view of the world around you, as seen through e.g. a mobile phone’s camera lens. …use your smartphone to glance around the main square of a city you’re visiting and get up-to-date information about nearby restaurants, ATMs, real estate offers, and more on-screen, bolted on top of what you’d be seeing if you weren’t looking through the lens.”

Then there’s Wikitude, which claims to be able to identify “more than 370,000 world-wide points of interests (cafes, museums, schools, caves, castles, archaeological sites, battle fields) and can be searched by address by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a the iPhone, as you hold up the device. See a list of museums nearby sorted by distance and links Detail, Map, Drive.”

None of these advancements should shock anyone who has used a GPS device in their car because it is essentially using the same technology – mapping, and satellite tracking, enhanced with additional data applied to certain uses, like travel. I think it’s fantastic in the same way that having a cellphone completely transformed picking someone up from the airport – a convenience that you wonder how you lived without in the pre-mobile days.

But here’s where mobile AR leaves the realm of purely informational and begins to have real implications for the idea of SEEING, EXPERIENCING and STORYTELLING: Imagine if your mobile phone’s AR potential meant that you could simply “encounter” a story, rather than say, sit down in front of your television and watch a story, or go to Broadway and watch a musical, or even the very interactive experience of playing your Wii at home.

I think that when the mobile device leaves the realm of exclusively being a communication/information tool, it enters into the realm of being connected to a digital persona, in even the crudest of ways. Say, for instance, if I were to enable a virtual persona on my device (maybe I took it from The Sims, or Second Life, or heck, even Facebook, if I had some online identity that wasn’t me), within some sort of application that connected me to other people who were doing the same thing. What would happen to my experience of the world around me, or the people I am interacting with when I walk down the street? Is it possible that rather than “me” Aina, walking to the subway, my AR personality could be anyone I fictionally created, and I could interact with people IN REAL LIFE as someone else within a mobile story/game?

While this all may sound completely bizarre and unnecessary in the world of storytelling, it’s obvious that this development will invariably happen sooner than we all imagined. Even if you choose not to participate in that AR world, it still begs the question of how that AR capability alters our way of seeing “fictional” or “real” stories? In the same way that having a mobile phone changed our social behavior, I think we are bound to see a shift in the way we both view, consume and create fiction.