I was co-teaching a class the other day during which I suggested that in the future we might all be walking around seeing reality augmented in some way. This is a theme I have visited often, in these pages and elsewhere, and there is a lot to think about and work through on the subject.
At one point one student asked a very reasonable question. “Why,” he asked, “after all the work on virtual reality some years back failed to create a world in which everyone wears V.R. headsets, do you now think that everybody is going to embrace augmented reality?”
It was a question that deserved a serious answer. After all, the dream of immersive V.R. did indeed founder, despite the serious efforts of some very brilliant people.
“First of all,” I said, “we already live in an augmented reality. Everything around us is made up — the chairs, walls, tables, books, coffee cups. None of those things exist except through an effort of collective human will. We can talk about levels of technological sophistication, but there is no fundamental difference, from a cultural perspective, between the completely artificial object sitting on your desk and the one floating in the air in front of you.”
“Second,” I continued, “Virtual Reality had the problem that it didn’t bring people together. It was a fundamentally isolating experience. The information technologies that people embrace are the ones that best connect us to other people — which is, after all, the thing that people care about most.”
I’m not sure my answer was right in every detail, but I am sure about the most important part: Other people are always the killer app.