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In the last Augmented Realist post, Towards a Digital Animism, I made the argument that conceptions of AR with ’scarce mappings‘ — that is, artificial limitations on the number and kind of augments that are connected to the things, people and places of the real world — are land-grabs by prospective rent-seekers.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the potential downsides of allowing anyone to ‚attach‘ any digital payload to any thing or person or place, but curtailing that freedom in order to prevent bad behavior would be like preserving the technology of writing for a trusted elite while leaving the general public illiterate in order to avoid the promulgation of bad ideas.

In that last post, I gave the hypothetical example of an AR-enhanced Times Square, making the point that in a system where all augments are always visible, public spaces would immediately become too crowded with digital elements to see through or use in any way.

Your first instinct about how to address this issue might be to ‘ban’ or ‘outlaw’ people putting augments on real estate they don’t own, as Mark Pesce advocates in the book Augmented Reality.

It’s hard to overstate how much I disagree this position.

I believe that augments are speech, and that augments that are ‘anchored’ to real-world things or people or places are simply speech about those things.

Read the latest post on Augmented Realist for my (impassioned) argument why.

https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/augments-are-speech

The below is an excerpt from ‚What is Augmented Reality (For)‚, a post from Augmented Realist.

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It’s rightly considered hack to start an essay with a definition, but when we’re dealing with a topic that is effectively speculative fiction, it’s good to make sure we’re on the same page.

Anyway this whole essay is the definition, so I’m in the clear.

———

As terse as I can get it

Augmented reality is a medium that layers digital elements onto real-world sensory input.

We don’t know what we’ll use AR for in the future, any more than we knew what computers would be used for in the 1960s, nor the internet in the 1980s, nor electricity in the 1880s, etc.

Lots of people are doing a lot of speculating but widespread adoption could well be 10+ years away, maturity much further than that, so it’s really anybody’s guess. Hell, we’re still finding uses for electricity and computers. The internet I think we’re done with.

Because of that naive perspective, at this point, the most we can say is that AR is a form factor. It’s a medium where digital elements (I’ll call them ‘augments’) are inserted into our sensory experience alongside the things we see and hear (and maybe smell and feel) while moving our bodies through reality.

The important part – the new part – is that we’re talking about digital things sharing our world, not our screens, with us. We will be invited to stop treating the digital as though it were a diorama in a box. As the technology matures, it will be hard to think of digital things – augments – as anything less than an equally different kind of real.

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The genie leaves the bottle

Right now, computing happens behind LCDs and inside smart speakers, and we interact with the computers in our lives by going to them, by looking into the rectangles they use to communicate with us, or by speaking with them in the fixed points in space that they occupy.

The computer is a thing in a place; we peer into its world through its screen, and then we look away, and walk away, into reality, to do reality stuff, and the computer stays behind.

The computer is a timeless, blind oracle, trapped in a box. Despite all its knowledge of the world, every time we engage with it, it’s as though we’ve woken it from a dream. We have to remind it where we are, and who we are, and explain to it in stilted, unnatural language the thing we’re looking at, or we were just thinking about, or were talking about in its presence, because it misses all of that.

With AR – wearable computers that inject their stuff between reality and our senses – computing sublimes and becomes ambient. No longer do we have to go to the computer, to hunch our focus into the slab, to twist our minds into a perfectly flat pile of rectangles and backlit text.

We’re upright, we move our neck to look around us, our eyes focus on objects in the foreground, to the horizon, or to the middle distance, accommodate, and converge, and we use our hands and arms and shoulders and feet naturally to move in a 3-dimensional space as our sea cucumber ancestors intended. Our brain works as it evolved to work: spatially.

With computers that see what we see, hear what we hear, and make sense of the world something like we do, the primary thing we think of as computing – the thing we’ve grown so accustomed to that we don’t notice we’re contorting ourselves do it – visiting the computer and explaining ourselves to the computer – begins to disappear.

What is the Metaverse tho

No fucking clue. Although, to be fair, I’m starting to get what is meant by the term, but I don’t think its hype jibes with how it’s being explained, so I’m back to thinking I don’t get it.

I’m not going to cool-kid strawman this thing — I’ll try to star-man if I can, but do drag me in the comments if I’m being unfair. Here’s what I think is meant by most uses of the term:

The Metaverse is the product of interconnecting a number of virtual 3D worlds such that users and virtual things can move freely between them. It is, itself, a virtual 3D world.

I’m paraphrasing, and this might be recognizable as a simplified version of Matthew Ball’s definition [emphasis his]:

“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

Continuing with Ball — he later offers a generalized definition less specifically focused on ‘real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds’:

The Metaverse, like the internet, mobile internet, and process of electrification, is a network of interconnected experiences and applications, devices and products, tools and infrastructure.

Of course, once you’ve removed the focus from what the Metaverse is used for, we’re really not making a distinction from today’s internet. That’s not very helpful, but it’s not my issue with the Metaverse.

Herein lies the dissonance: many definitions of the various Metaverses center, as Ball’s does, around ‘real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds’, but then immediately spiral out into claims that that same Metaverse will also encompass just about everything digital.

I should call out that this isn’t particularly an issue with Ball’s conception of the Metaverse but more with how it’s been interpreted by others.

My trouble with this is that there is an enormous surface area for utility in AR that has little to do with ‘real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds.’ I really don’t have a problem with the ‘Metaverse’ conception until it’s framed as the superset of all things spatial computing. That’s where I lose the plot.

My personal wig is extra-twisted because my hobby horse is left out. The paradigm I’m envisioning is not particularly concerned with the strictly virtual as it exists independent of the real, nor is it particularly focused on real-time 3D rendering, even if that does come into play to some degree….

… to read the spicy conclusion to this spicy teaser, in which I make a bold claim for why AR matters, and how it might not be for the reasons you think, read the rest of What is Augmented Reality (For) on Substack.