How augmented is your reality?

Photo credit: Vincentiu Solomon via Unsplash

In the Battlestar Galactica reboot series, the Cylon character Brother Cavil laments that, when he saw a supernova, ‘you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air . . .’ He goes on to demand, ‘I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter!’ In the story, Cavil is a synthetic being but, rather than the gleaming robot form of the Cylons from the original film and TV series, he inhabits an organic human body, subject to humanity’s frailties and constraints.

Cavil’s frustration with the limitations of human senses could be used just as well to express frustration with the slow development of the field of technology known as augmented reality. Augmented reality devices have existed since 1968, when an experimental rig nicknamed the ‘Sword of Damocles’ was used to give a test subject an overlay of information on top of their field of vision. The rig was large, heavy and expensive, and restricted the wearer’s movement and vision.

Given the exponential advances in computing since 1968, it might seem that, by now, we should have solved the problems of these early forms of augmented reality, and that it should now be ubiquitous, cheap and convenient. At first sight, it appears not. In recent years, several dedicated augmented reality devices have come to market, each with a similar form factor: a headset resembling a visor or pair of glasses, a screen and an array of sensors and cameras.

But each has struggled to find a mass market. They remain expensive, compared to other consumer devices. Some of them still require a connection to a mains power supply, or a bulky battery pack. And it appears that, even though we live in a world full of cameras, we are not quite ready to tolerate being filmed just because someone happens to look in our direction.

Does this mean that augmented reality is a bust?

I don’t believe so. I simply think that it has taken a different form from that which we expected. We may not wear AR headsets or glasses, but we wear smart watches which tell us when someone is trying to communicate with us, and give us information about our own metabolism and fitness. We wear ear buds which let us control our audio landscape, whether we are listening to a podcast or talking to a friend. We carry phones, tablets and laptops, and their screens are regularly (perhaps too regularly) part of our field of vision. Even when we are not looking at our own screens, we are surrounded by displays. Consider the experience of catching a bus: a few glances at your environment which tell you when the next bus is due, where the current bus is going, and, from the screens built into the bus stop, what advertisers would like to sell you. Our reality is thoroughly augmented.

Furthermore, the augmentation of our reality can approach the heights of Brother Cavil’s desire for new senses and new experiences. This can appear mundane and routine: when you use a mapping app to find your way to the office, you engage with a global network of satellites sufficiently far enough above the Earth that your phone must use Einstein’s theory of relativity to calculate how gravity affects the passage of time. Or it might be more overtly cosmic and momentous: today, scientific researchers are using the gravitational waves created by the collision of black holes to probe the structure of the universe. Even if we could see radio waves and gravitational waves directly, the experience would seem normal to us, because it would be a natural part of our senses - capable equally of being ordinary and uninspiring (the muted colours of a grey and wet day in late Autumn) or sublime (the nuclear fire of our star refracted through our atmosphere as our planet turns and creates a sunset).

For those of us who work in technology, I think that our task is to recognise that the devices and interfaces we build have already become part of the reality of billions of people around the world. The devices they carry, and the information they consume give us the opportunity to offer them experiences of delight and convenience. They also impose a great responsibility, as we have been invited into the arena of the senses: we have an obligation to tread lightly and carefully.