Via Bruce Sterling
Simulacrum.
For centuries we have been drawing maps not only to describe reality, but also to know it. (make it your own! diy!).
With augmentation, we can go ahead and overlay (bury?) the reality we find.
Who will draw the overlay?
Gene Becker writes of the problems for augmented reality becoming truly widespread as it now stands. One of them is translating the data that the GPS spits out into something humans can effectively input.
Lat/long is not how we experience the world – By definition, GPS+compass AR presents you with geo-annotated data, information tied to geographic coordinates. People don’t see the world in coordinate systems, though, so AR systems need to correlate coordinate systems to world semantics. The quality of our AR experience will depend on how well that translation is done, and today it is not done well at all. Points Of Interest (POIs) only provide the barest minimum of semantic knowledge about any given point in space.
But knowing is culturally dependent. The whole world never accepted Western maps. Semantic knowledge of space remains culturally dependant. I heard this report on NPR about aboriginal people in Australia who don\’t have words for right and left but rather orient themselves directionally, as in, \”I hurt my south-west leg.\” The western linguists that studied them were really confused of their semantics for a long time. The linguists were used to relating the world to themselves, rather than relating themselves to the earth. Imagine how different those two augmented realities would be designed.
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