| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
February 24, 2004
Wearable Intelligence Enhancers
Imagine this. It's about 10 years from now, and almost everyone has a real-time always-on connection to the Net via ubiquitous wearable "augmented reality" devices. As part of this package, made possible with advance minuturized heads-up displays, video cameras, location aware devices, GPS, swarmbots, emotion-sensitive and adaptive algorithms (i.e. Affective Computing), and sophisticated reputation systems, you are able to surf an augmented version of reality itself in real time.
Lets break this down. You would be able to, in real-time see precisely whats going on almost anywhere in the globe by jacking in to the collection of real-time video blogs. As part of this collection, sophisticated 3-D rendering engines would be able to take the collective video footage and extropolate a real-time VR scene, allowing you to transcend the viewing angle of any single camera. Better still, you could jack in to that part of the world from a variety of, not only physical perspectives, but political, intellectual, and emotional as well based on whatever any individual user makes public as part their unique sliding-scale trust system such as the type that Joi Ito has proposed with moblogs. All of this meta-data would form its own collective smart-mob based on individually selected criteria.
What this means is that you could then view the "scene" from virtually any angle. Imagine the possibility here. Some spontaneous news event occurs, and almost instantly as hundreds of people appear on the scene with wearable video cameras broadcasting on the net, you would be able to view this real-time scene from any angle, while simultaneously gaining the collective emotional assessment of the situation from those people choosing to broadcast their emotional indices, as well as the blogging that will invariable start occuring at rapid pace from your customized reputation/trust criteria.
All of this combines to gives you a real-time augmented, yet customized view of real-time reality. One that is rich in social and emotional context, providing and extending intimacy by empowering you to feel and touch the world in entirely new ways.
Taking this idea further, these same wearable devices coule be interfaced with a seamless array of increasingly minuturized bio-monitoring feedback equipment which constantly asseses your physiological and cognitive states. Using adaptive algorithms, they could continually learn about your internal emotional states and in turn provide you with increasingly effective feedback signals to optimize physiological responses to stressful situations.
As Max More wrote in 1997, in his article From Enhanced Senses to Experience Machines:
By employing the neuroscientific understanding now starting to emerge, and by combining that knowledge with new internal neurological sensors, we may achieve an unprecedented level of self-awareness and self-control. For example, micromachines or nanomachines could monitor levels of neurohormones and neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, pregnenolone, cortisol, vasopressin, and GABA, as well as activation levels of neural layers and subunits. The information about changes in neural activity could be converted into visual, auditory, or somatic signals when we enter desired or undesired emotional or cognitive states. Through biofeedback mechanisms we may then be able better to modify our moods and thoughts. By tying abstract emotional states to percepts we can more easily monitor and regulate those states.
Over the next couple of decades, then, we can expect technology to increase our sensory contact with reality, both external and internal. Far from cutting us off from the world or alienating us from ourselves, new technologies will give us more penetrating, discriminating, and illuminating senses.
(I think) I want some of that. As I was reading tho' I found myself wondering about how we individually and collectively will find the wisdom, purpose and meaning for being able to cope and or use well this new type of always on-ness.
It begs the issue of grounded self-knowledge and acceptance - which is starting to seem almost counter-cultural.
Posted by: Jon Husband at February 26, 2004 07:16 AMHi Jon,
One of the things that will evolve concurrently with these technologies is our increasing ability to customize how and to what extent we do experience it. In about a week, I'm going to follow up with a piece on Intellingent Reality Filters. Along with wearable computing will be the ability to change what we see, to customize, colorize, modulate, manipulate, replace what we see through our heads-up-displays with something we do like. So rather than this becoming a case of always-on overwhelmness, it will be more highly tuned to our individual tastes. We already do this with the web, and our desktops, user interfaces and file arrangements to some extent. It will only increase as physical space becomes more a part of cyberspace.
David Weinberger did an excellent piece on the Semantic Earth. Check out my personal blog from about a week ago for more details and the link to his story.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at February 26, 2004 08:14 AMYes, nice, and ... I think I believe it still begs the issue(s) of being grounded in states like compassion, positive self-esteem, contribution and service, positive hedonism, and so on ... and having a basic ability to control what we think or at a minimum have an awareness of what we think and want that has some reference to social behavious and the society in which we live. No ?
Will everyone between 20 and 30 just want to experience Spring Break at Daytona for six months and then sleep for six months ? ;-)
Come to think of that, maybe this will be a good way for us to experience enough to grow more rapidly towards compassion, acceptance, tolerabce abd wisdom - we'll get bored really quickly with partying and promiscuity.
Posted by: Jon Husband at February 27, 2004 02:37 AMJon,
As always you have very insightful points to make, and ask all the right questions. IMHO of course! :-)
I agree with you, that technology alone is not the answer to our enlightenment. I think positive change comes from subjective, deeply felt experience. I think many of these tools have the potential to enhance our ability to touch and feel the world in increasingly intimate ways. Sure, they have and could be used to block out reality just as easily. But if anything the Internet and ubiquitous connectivity has done more to bring the world toghther than tear it apart.
David Weinberger mentioned the echo-chamber effect, but this happens anyway among our peers. The internet connects to more people of like mind, and in turn increasing our level and amount of intimate connections, than if not.
In some people's eyes the bigger issues is why is the average American (not sure about Canadians), so socially alienated from their physically proximate neighbors? I think it's because our culture has celebrated the individual more than the most previous cultures.
Will these connecting technologies increase the amount of echo-ing at the cost of alienating our physically proximate neighborhoods? Is this change is social space from physical proximity to mental/emotional proximity facilitated by the Internet, make our physical locations less relevant?
I think the Internet, allowing you to make greater numbers of connections increases the level of intimacy you have with those online buddies, enhances your sense of individuality. On the other hand physical proximate space most often has you in proximity to a random sampling of values and beliefs, and social customs, which you must adhere to if you want to be accepted or worse, not thrown in jail! :-)
Coming soon are location-based services, bringing more of physical space into cyberspace. Combine this with p2p social networking software and you could seriously increase the level of intimacy and connectivity possible with like-minded people who are close to you physically.