DESIGN FICTION

Make Facebook look like a steam engine. Bruce Sterling talking about the human sensorium, enough hype and putting AR in light bulbs.

Jees, this guy is annoying to listen to, says the only comment. It got upvoted twice. Bruce Sterling – excuse me i mean the prophet of AR – is talking at Augmented World Expo 2016 on YouTube. I came here two years later because of a lengthy footnote that Benjamin Bratton put in The Stack.

The GUI melts into reality itself

I am deep down in the Interface Layer section, having left out the other Layers, in order to find out more about Brattons take on AR. And here we go, pg. 241: „Put another way, AR Apps, in all their baroque banality, augment the world more than they augment vision. As we define the interface as any point of contact that governs the conditions of exchange between two complex systems, then within AR, the GUI melts, so it seems, into reality itself, and is seen as another property of surfaces, things, and events….the real is itself collapsed into the imaginary, making the reality of AR perhaps irredeemably occult.“

Not yet sure what to think about Brattons idea that ARs killer application „would prove to be not marketing but those fundamentalist religion and politics (as well as security Apps and their monetizations)“. That might sound alarmist but we all have seen the chinese police woman a couple of days ago and these worshippers today. These make Sterling sound a lot less crazy in 2009: Soon we’ll have some themepark Creationist Augmented Reality.

Attack and Defend – or Shop

Interpreting Ingress as some sort of training camp for future scenarios in the context of a „weaponized AR“ is ingenious: „to send people out into their cities training them to see, attack, and defend against the territorial incursions of enemies.“

Besides AR warfare training or a Christianist AR „any given site in the City may be overcome by multiple competing perceptual totalities, systems or souvereign geographies“ and „the User must manage more than one exclusive totality at once, and the multiple identities and agencies that each regime provides to the user position.“

GUI, NUI, TUI, MUI

Well. I have the impression that we are already experiencing something similar when walking down the city center with all the commercials crying out loud for attention while the mobile phone rings and we do have to act as employer, friend or someone else. But all this might change when „a fully mature interface regime“ (pg. 226) finally arrives.