When you were a small child you learned about object permanence<\/i>: Even when you are not looking at an object, it continues to exist. If you put your teddy bear on a particular shelf in your closet before you leave for school, it will still be there when you return.<\/p>\n
When we are all wearing mixed reality glasses (or contact lenses or implants) object permanence for many things won’t be a necessity. More and more of the “built world” we see around us will be virtual constructs, unconstrained by the laws of physics and inertia.<\/p>\n
Yet we may choose to impose a virtual object permanence anyway. When we place a virtual object in a particular place in the physical world, we might wish to impose constraints upon that object’s behavior, so that it stays where we have put it.<\/p>\n
To me the question of how much — or even whether — we will do this, in the long run, is quite deep. It comes down to the following question: Is object permanence an intrinsic feature of our biological human brain, or is it simply an adaptation that our brain makes in childhood in response to encountering the physical world?<\/p>\n
If the latter case is true, that increases the possibilities for a mixed reality future. If object permanence is not an intrinsic feature of our human brain, we may end up evolving as a social species to replace it with something far more fluid and flexible.<\/p>\n
Of course children will still want to find their teddy bear when they get home from school. But in the future, maybe they will just Google it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you were a small child you learned about object permanence: Even when you are not looking at an object, it continues to exist. If you put your teddy bear on a particular shelf in your closet before you leave for school, it will still be there when you return. When we are all wearing … Continue reading “Future object permanence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20405"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20406,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20405\/revisions\/20406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}