Today I accompanied a friend to a store that sells kitchen furnishings. She and her boyfriend recently moved into a new house, and they are doing a massive renovation — hence the search for kitchen furnishings.
The salesman at the store asked my friend about the layout of her kitchen, and she said it might vary. The reason is that they are considering moving the position of one of the windows.
I found myself thinking about the immense amount of effort it takes to move a window. Essentially, you need to cover over one window, both inside and out.
Then you need make a new hole in the wall somewhere else, avoiding structural support elements of course. Finally you need to finish the second window, both inside and out.
To the naive observer, it will look as though the window has simply moved its location along the wall. Yet in fact it is an entirely different window.
So I asked myself the following question: Will there ever come a day when real and virtual realities become so thoroughly mixed that such massive reconstruction is no longer necessary? Will we ever get to the point where to move a window in our house we simply slide it along the wall to another location?
I realize that there are a lot of different conversations packed into that one deceptively simple question. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? We might as well start those conversations now.