Augmented Reality: Just a Heads up

Let me set the scene for you. You’re late for work and you’re frantically running down the street to catch a bus. You’re about of breath, you don’t have a bus pass, you’re not sure how much further you can run, and you have no idea whether or not you will get away with being late.

Fortunately, you have all of these stats presented to you, right there in the top of your vision. A countdown to that start of your shift is in the top left hand corner. Your bank balance shows that you have ample funds to purchase a bus ticket. A pointer in the top centre of your vision is leading you to the quickest route to work, and your heart rate is being displayed so you know you’re not over straining yourself.

This is what life would be like with Heads Up Dsiplays (HUDs), most commonly seen in video games. These are the stats and useful data that go on the top of the screen that tell you things like how much health you have left, or how much ammo you have in your weapon, or the directions to your mission objective. Having read a lot about augmented reality this week, I was immediately struck by the concept of having HUD in real life.

Augmented reality is a “view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data,” (Wikipedia).  The articles I read on the concept provided pretty mixed reviews.  Lauren Drell, for instance, noted the many fund and enlightening things that can be done with it, such as going to a museum and having AR technology provide information on each piece for you, (2012). John Havens speaks of the privacy concerns. What if some sort of AR technology reveals certain things about a person, such as dietary requirements, health condition, that they would not have wanted publicised? Privacy issues could become rife in society (2012).

But let’s say our technology gets to a level where we can have AR technology within our vision at all times, either through glasses, such as Google Glass, or some sort of contact lens technology.  Having pertinent information constantly displayed in the form of a HUD could be extremely beneficial in many industries.

• Medicine: Imagine if, when performing surgery, the doctor had a constant reminder in his peripheral vision about how much blood the patient has lost, how much longer anaesthetic will last, how many stiches would be required, what tool would be best suited for certain tasks. I believe this would create a lot more ease of mind in the surgeon, and ultimately make the surgery an easier task.
• The Military: Soldiers could see how much ammo they have left, have a small radar-like screen to tell them when enemies are approaching and where from, a constant reminder of objectives.
• Policing: With a built in speed camera within the vision of a police officer, more speeders could be caught.  The HUD could also display red flags when a license plate with a link to criminal activity is seen. Even something like a lie detector could flag potential criminals could be within the HUD.

These are just a few industries that could be benefitted from having HUDs. Obviously technology like this would be very difficult to develop, and for now, this is mostly in the realm of video games. But I believe that scholarship of augmented reality technologies should look past the aspects of the technology that would cause social concerns, or event the things that would be fun and sort of useful to citizens. There are many ways that augmented reality, particularly a Heads Up Display, could give to the world.

 

REFERENCES:

Anon, n.d, ‘Augmented Reality,’ Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

Drell, L,  2012, ‘7 ways augmented reality will improve your life,’ Mashable, December 20, http://mashable.com/2012/12/19/augmented-reality-city/

Havens, J, 2013, ‘The impending social consequences of augmented reality,’ Mashable, February 8, http://mashable.com/2013/02/08/augmented-reality-future/

Spritz and Memory

So this week I’ve been thinking a lot about memory in its relation to media. Of course, media are commonly seen as tools to help us remember. By nature, many media serve the function of archiving information for later use, and therefore allow us to research into a certain topic and recall things we may not have remembered. This could be something like looking up the definition of a word you’ve forgotten in the dictionary to going through Facebook photos from last night to try and piece together your antics.

But many some, such as Kyong Chun (2011), argue that in this digital age, information pops up so frequently, in such vast volumes, that the information found in digital mediums becomes fleeting, ephemeral, and damages the possibility of properly remembering information.

As soon as I read this I thought of the new app that everyone is talking about, Spritz. Spritz is an app that allows users to read any written text at incredible speeds, potentially 600-1000 words a minute, thanks to the help of rapid sequential visual presentation. Or, in other terms, the words of the text appear on the screen one at a time, and the next word pops up in a matter of milliseconds where the previous word was, so our eyes don’t have to move (Paul, 2014).

This to me is an incredible example of ephemeral information in the digital age. It’s a huge shift from the traditional written word, where you can read through at your own pace, and perhaps go back to information you didn’t quite grasp before, to a new written word that is fleeting, and places an emphasis on speed rather than memory.  Spritz has indeed received criticism in this area: “When we read really fast — especially in complex or difficult material — our understanding of the text suffers,” Paul, 2014.

I disagreed with Kyong Chun’s point that the digital age has made information too fleeting to enhance memory: although there is such a vast array of information on the internet and other digital archives, it’s not as if there aren’t ways to sort through it all. Search engines allow us to do advanced searches and recall whatever we would like, to an extent. However, this app makes me see her point. An app that turns such a deliberate, often slow, and engaged practice into an ephemeral sequence of words that you can’t even backtrack with if you didn’t comprehend something could be seriously debilitating to the concept of memory.  If this technology becomes commonplace, and news organisations begin to present their stories in the format, or authors publish books exclusively in this format, who knows what could happen? If the text is not actually stored elsewhere, and it is exclusively in the mind of the person who read it at the rate of 600-1000 words a minute, this would indeed make the information ephemeral.

 

REFERENCES:

Kyong Chun, WH, 2011, ‘The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory,’ Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley, 184-203

Murphy Paul, A, 2014, ‘The Problem with the speed reading app that everyone is talking about,’ The Week, March 19, 2014, accessed March 26, 2014, http://theweek.com/article/index/258243/the-problem-with-that-speed-reading-app-everyones-talking-about

How do we “play” in our media ecology?

I’m not going to lie: I was genuinely hurt the other day when my friend texted me “you really pissed me off last night.”

What had I done wrong? Did I forget to put in for the drinks? Did I punch him in the face? Did I break one of his favourite pots from his pottery class?

As it turns out, it was none of that (thank God). I had indeed fallen victim to the very media issue that I have been thinking about this week, and that is the concept of metacommunication, as championed by Gregory Bateson. You see, my friend was just messing around, using a sarcastic remark to reference some of my behaviour. But how was I supposed to know this?

In my reading this week, it was particularly interesting to think about the concept of two monkeys play fighting, as mentioned by Bateson (2000, p 179). Bateson notes that despite the fact that on the denotative level, the communication between the monkeys was representing combat (scratching, biting, etc), there was clearly some sort of communication on another level that allowed both of the monkeys to know that it was actually play fighting. “This phenomenon, play, could only occur if  the participant organisms were capable  of some degree of meta-communication, ie of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘this is play,’” (Bateson, 2000, p179). Professor Murphie also noted in the lecture that these other patterns of communication are what make up most of communication itself.

But what happens in a society where most interaction does not take place in person? It’s all well and good for the monkeys (for now), but for us, who are within a society built around mobile communication, it is much harder to get these symbols of meta communication. This correlates to the study of media ecology, which is defined by the Media Ecology Association as something that “looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.”

It almost seems like in our current media ecology, where humans are interacting through Facebook, phones, emails, and many other methods of online communication, a significant amount of this meta communication is lost.

This is something I feel that Bateson or another scholar could explore more. How do we denote “play” in an online media ecology? How do we give off all of the other important signals like tone of voice, body language, and facial expression, in a world where communication is chiefly text? This is certainly something I will be looking into as I research into this topic more this semester.

 

REFERENCES

Bateson, Gregory, 2000, ‘A theory of play and fantasy,’ Steps to an ecology of mind, Chicago Univesity Press, Chicago, 177-183

Media Ecology Association, ‘What is Media Ecology,’ www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology accessed 18.03.14