Читать книгу Augmented Reality - Mark Pesce - Страница 6

On the evening of July 12, 2016, a large crowd gathered at Peg Paterson Park. Very little distinguishes that park – located in Rhodes, New South Wales – from any of the others threaded among Sydney’s vast and growing suburbs. Surrounded on three sides by tall apartment buildings, the park offers a bit of green space and some basic playground facilities, the kind of space ideal for walking the dog – or letting the kids have a bit of well-supervised exercise.

On that evening, the draw for people crowding into Peg Paterson Park had nothing to do with reality. Instead, the virtual world of data and networks had exploded into the physical world of places and people, an eruption that began six days earlier, when a small games company named Niantic released a new smartphone app.

Niantic’s app used the smartphone’s camera and other sensors – including Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides accurate coordinates for any location on Earth’s surface – mixing all of this input together, adding to it, then displaying that synthesis to the smartphone’s screen. The world portrayed on-screen, though rendered in cartoon-like detail, looked similar to the real world, reduced to its essential figures and landmarks. Within this simplified landscape Niantic had situated synthetic, imaginary creatures – Pokémon.

Already 20 years old, the Pokémon franchise of card and video games, television series, films, books, and comics had revived the fortunes of the once-dominant/now-struggling video gaming firm Nintendo. The card games became a craze among 8- to 10-year-olds around the world, with sales reaching tens of billions of cards. A whole generation had played Pokémon, maintaining a nostalgic love for the imaginary (and cute) monsters.

Niantic’s app – Pokémon Go – came along at just the right moment to mine that nostalgia within a generation who had come of age in the era of the smartphone. Millennials with the latest iPhone and Android models found Pokémon Go drained their smartphone batteries like no app ever had – and turned the real world into the universe of Pokémon.

While the card and video games might allow players to imagine another universe where Pokémon freely wandered about, Pokémon Go united the real world – as sensed by smartphone camera and GPS – with all of the various Pokémon, each with their unique look, sound, and capabilities. Within its app, Niantic had lured Pokémon out of imagination and into reality.

Into that newly mixed-up world of real and imaginary, Niantic had added other features, including “Pokéstops” – landmarks keyed to real-world coordinates via GPS, and offering valuable items for the Pokémon Go player’s inventory – the sorts of tools that would make it easier to catch and train Pokémon.

Wanting to test its new app – and the huge network of cloud-based computers that supported it – Niantic released the app in stages, nation by nation, over a period of months. Australia, as a mid-sized nation with a high rate of smartphone ownership, got it first – and it quickly became a craze. As friend told friend, Australians began to play Pokémon Go in vast numbers. Groups of friends struck out together in search of Pokémon and Pokéstops. Hundreds of thousands of players went for a wander around their suburbs, looking for what they might find. For a few days it seemed as though “Gotta Catch ’Em All” had become the national slogan.

As a well-visited landmark in the suburb of Rhodes – mapped out by players of Niantic’s other app, Ingress – Peg Paterson Park had several Pokéstops. The first folks to stumble upon them told their friends, who told their friends, who told their friends – and those friends shared it on Facebook. All of which meant Peg Paterson Park – conveniently located just a 2-minute stroll from Rhodes’ railway station – got very popular, very fast.

Niantic added another clever feature to Pokémon Go – lures. Lay down a lure and the chances of attracting a rare and valuable Pokémon increased dramatically. But lures only worked for an hour before they vanished, and – unlike the app itself – lures cost money. Not a lot of money, though – just a dollar. The perfect reason to spend: Make a fun game even more fun.

Players soon learned that lures worked for everyone – not just the player who plumped for the lure. Everyone else around benefited. Drop a lure, and expect to see a few other Pokémon Go players turn up – lured in by that lure.

Players at Peg Paterson Park dropped lure after lure – drawing in many rare Pokémon.¹ Players would message other friends – playing somewhere else – telling them to get over to Peg Paterson Park, because it had suddenly become easy to catch rare Pokémon. That combination of Pokéstops and lures, broadcast and amplified by social media, generated a vast crowd – hundreds of players all crowded into a tiny suburban park.

That might have been a matter of little consequence during daytime hours. But as it passed midnight (on a weeknight!), and the crowd showed no signs of dispersing, the police arrived – alerted by noise complaints from the apartment dwellers surrounding the Park,² who couldn’t get to sleep over the hubbub of happy players. The police ticketed the double-parked cars and asked everyone else to move on – which, eventually, they did.

While players’ lures quickly vanished, those Pokéstops remained in Peg Paterson Park – drawing players back again, on successive nights.³ It never again reached the intensity of that Tuesday evening, but in the aftermath, it became apparent that Niantic had done something unexpectedly potent when it located those Pokéstops in the park, something that perhaps it had not even intended to do. Pokémon Go changed players’ relationship to space, and changed their behavior within it.

* * *

We’ve always imagined place: Here a church, there a graveyard, and over there, a school. Each place embodies its own associations, drawn from a mix of culture and memory. What we bring to our experience of place comes from both within and outside of us. While the contents of memory and our mix of emotions vary from moment to moment throughout our lifetimes, the cultural meaning of place tends to be far less mutable. A school means today what it meant yesterday, and will mean much the same tomorrow. Any change in the cultural significance of that place usually occurs so gradually we barely notice it.

While there may be times when a place becomes particularly associated with a cultural moment – such as the World Trade Center – these remain exceptions to a rule: The meaning culture ascribes to place tends to remain as it is. That “inertia,” its resistance to change, gives the world a solidity and validity that we rely on. We expect places to be today as they have been in the past.

When a place changes – perhaps a beloved tree has been cut down, or a building burns – we feel something like madness, as our external, collective, and cultural sense of place struggles to adapt to sudden change. Very little can play with our heads as profoundly as place. We take our behavioral cues from place: Sincere in church, somber in the graveyard, open and accepting in school. We “know our place.”

Changing place changes us.

With the exception of the theatrical machinery used to entertain and delight – changing place as a way to evoke strong emotions – the ideal of mutable place has always been something seen through the mind’s eye. We can imagine a place to be transformed, but in reality its inertia keeps it consistent. Or rather, had kept it consistent. For although the real will remain stubbornly stable into the foreseeable future, other forces are at work, changing our perception of place – and reality.

Over the last half century, computing has grown progressively more sensual, drawing closer and closer to our bodies. The earliest machines, though physically huge, lacked even the most rudimentary interfaces. Users of these computers “wrote” programs in wiring, physically altering these devices in order to modify their behavior.

The history of computing tells two stories: One, about how these devices became ever smaller and faster; another, about how they became ever more pliable, facile, and responsive. We found it too hard to conform to the ways of the computer, so we shaped these devices to conform to us.

We have computers that can now play with our heads, but we have no rules to restrain their engagement.

At the mid-point of the twentieth century, computers were a central object of attention – rare, expensive, and demanding. To save money, we learned how to share that massive resource via peripherals – computers accessed via keyboard and screen, then mouse, then touch, becoming more and more natural as the interface moved closer and closer to the body. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the computer vanished into ubiquity, weaving itself into the fabric of nearly every fabricated object, moving beyond perception.

Just at the moment it disappears from view, computing has acquired the capacity to frame human perception, a figure/ground reversal with enormous consequences. No longer part of the scenery – because it cannot be seen – the computer instead assumes the role of scenery manufacturer, generating reality.

While not wholly creatures of perception, we necessarily observe and respond to our environments. Changes in our environments change us in ways both immediate and permanent.

The computer has now become an actor in the field of reality. In a single step, its capacity to affect us has amplified beyond all expectation – and beyond any frameworks of design, ethics, law, or culture. We have computers that can now play with our heads, but we have no rules to restrain their engagement.

When computers sat comfortably “over there” – visible and therefore limited – we could comprehend and manage their capacities. As they fade into invisibility, with vast new capacities to shape our view of reality, we must consider how we can safely allow them to do so – and how they must announce themselves when doing it.

Something so utterly innocuous as a nostalgic game – capturing fantastical, imaginary Pokémon – can produce unexpected and unprecedented human impacts on the real world. The story of Peg Paterson Park reveals the contours of a future where the blending of the real and the algorithmic could be used – indeed, has already been used – to generate social outcomes.

In itself, this represents nothing new: The dilemma of the Web as information/disinformation medium has created a culture with the greatest population of “disinformed” individuals in human history. Yet the Web occupies (and, it could be argued, pollutes) the internal hyperspace of human thought. It exists within a single dimensionless point, while all the real remains beyond its reach.

Having filled all of the sphere of human thought, the Web now looks to be overtopping its dams, undermining their foundations, and explosively flooding the entirety of the real.⁴ The boundary between what we imagine to be true and what can be seen to be true will wash away. Après moi, says the Web, le déluge.

That flood washes away reality by “augmenting” it at every point. At its most basic level, this new technology of “augmented reality” works like an engine that generates hallucinations – phantasms, projected within the real world. Augmented reality devices make synthetic, “fake” additions to the real world – such as Pokémon sprinkled through a real-world landscape when seen through a smartphone display. Although over half a century old, augmented reality has evolved rapidly over the last several years, and now nears its “unboxing” as a product fit for billions of connected consumers.

This book addresses what the technology of augmented reality does to us, how its use changes us, and how, with some forethought, we can mitigate some of the worst of its effects, perhaps even transforming its impacts. To do that, this book will examine its history, its design, its capacities – and its deep connections to global capital.

A technology freshened up, and presented as “the next big thing” – despite being invented over half a century ago – has rapidly become the idée fixe of all five of the world’s most technology valuable companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – their Holy Grail. Each has directed billions of dollars toward creating augmented reality systems. What has so ensorceled these giants of rationalism and science into the development of a hallucinogenic medium?

In a word: Control.

Each firm seeks for itself the command over reality, both private and public, that will come from a position with market dominance. Each dreams of translating this command into a vast business empire managing the fabric of the real, a world where corporate and individual world views have been woven together, united by the underlying thread of the new technologies of augmented reality.

The allure of augmented reality will also draw to it actors more powerful than the world’s biggest companies. Nations – particularly those with authoritarian aspirations – can and will use augmented reality to manage the behavior of their citizens by changing their relationship to the spaces they move through.

To facilitate a world where machines and their masters manipulate our reality, we will all be watching one another, all the time, on an unprecedented scale.

Even if nations somehow avoid this temptation, the fundamental nature of augmented reality means that space will be observed, recorded, quantified, and surveilled as never before. In order to augment a space, its dimensions must be taken. To do this on an ongoing basis, such measurements must be performed continually. To facilitate a world where machines and their masters manipulate our reality, we will all be watching one another, all the time, on an unprecedented scale.⁵

This, in brief, characterizes the problem posed by augmented reality.

Against this, we catch glimpses of a great promise – that the “digital depth” pervading our world could be revealed, a world currently hidden from view by these same economic forces and state actors – as a mechanism of control. The real world offers a potential of a universal, revelatory informational transparency, each object illuminated from within by its digitally inscribed meanings.

With that veiling of control laid aside, all of the connections, data flows, and control loops that characterize the made world of the twenty-first century become apparent, substantial, and apprehensible. Visibility – where it can be had, and for as long as it lasts – provides the conditions for addressability, accountability, and awareness. Objects no longer in eclipse can be seen for what they are – and whom they serve. Revelation redistributes power.

The capability to augment reality carries with it a number of key questions: Who ascribes these meanings? Who writes the illuminating scripts? How do they attach themselves to objects in the real? Who gets to overwrite the meanings of the real world? None of this augmentation of reality happens by itself, and all of it forces hard questions, ones that should not be reduced to an ignorant click on a terms-of-service contract. That would transform this redistribution of power into an act of disempowerment.

Peril undermines promise, just as promise undermines peril.

Much will be promised for the augmentation of reality, but the price remains untabulated. How much would we pay for reality? How much should we be paid to let others drive our view of the real? Can we even frame our experience of the real in transactional terms, or does that indicate the final triumph of Late Capitalism? A reality manipulable by the highest bidder could quickly evolve a license for unlimited, perpetual extraction of our inner lives.

Such fears have old roots, stretching back at least as far as Gutenberg, and have always been both fully justified and entirely overblown. Culture muddles through, walking a tightrope between tyranny and banality, forging a middle path. As Mark Twain purportedly said, the past does not repeat, but it often rhymes.

Yet this moment has its unique qualities. The genius twentieth-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan identified two media that map the place of the body.⁶ Architecture situates us within public space, while clothing defines our most personal and private space. We now add a third, augmented reality – both as intensely private as an individual world view, and, because augmented reality systems are always connected, as broadly public as the planetary noosphere. This new hyperconnectivity of place and reality, simultaneously deeply personal, yet thoroughly connected and thereby common, creates a lure to draw us in, like Pokémon at Peg Paterson Park.

Space – and dominion over it, as conferred by the right of title – forms one of the foundations of Law. We use attorneys – rather than armies – to wage wars over each patch of ground, legally arbitrating our spaces and our rights within a space. Changing space changes law, rights, responsibilities, and risks. Our culture of law reflects our spaces, just as our spaces reflect our culture of law. A world with pervasive augmented reality requires new laws, new regulations, new standards – and new behaviors.

Touch reality – or, rather, our perception of the real – and everything within the human sphere bends under that pressure. Innocuous though it may seem to lure and capture cute cartoon monsters via a smartphone app, other monsters from other and far less friendly realms of imagination lie in wait, queued at that same threshold of data and perception, pressure pushing them into the real. We will see the nightmare side of augmented reality, because we cannot experience the benefits without opening ourselves to their opposite.

We cannot know the precise shape of the future. We can look to the past for precedents, and to a present, where, as William Gibson wisely noted, the future already exists – unevenly distributed.⁷ At a public park in Rhodes, New South Wales, our augmented reality future began its colonization of the present, landing at Peg Paterson Park and claiming that space as its own, establishing a beachhead of augmentation within the real.

Although it may appear as though the events of that July night had no precedent, the entire arc of computing has led us through an accelerating series of innovations in the relationship between ourselves and our machines, bringing them closer. As they grow closer to us, our machines grow in potency. To understand where we are, and where we are headed, we must begin in chapter 1 by looking back, to our strange eventful history augmenting reality.

The origins of augmented reality (AR) bring us in chapter 2 to a present day of rapid developments in technology – and a battle fought by technology giants to create the first mass-produced AR devices, the so-called “mirrorshades,” devices that marry continuous surveillance with an intimate capacity to generate synthetic additions to reality.

Chapter 3 considers how these AR devices might use the information they gather about us, by looking at the whole history of user profiling and user “engagement” – techniques pioneered by Google and Facebook to make content so engaging, so precisely fit to the individual, they find it difficult to look away.

The promise of “digital depth” – the revelation of the inner workings of a deeply technological world largely hidden from view – forms the core of chapter 4. Can we balance the dangers of augmented reality with its enormous potential to liberate and illuminate?

Finally, chapter 5 looks at the ethical questions posed by any attempt to “write” on the world via augmented reality. Who writes, for whom – and who has the “right to write”?

Invented as a machine-amplified empowerment of our native human cognitive and perceptual capacities, augmented reality has evolved into a technology of control. Hence, it is with control we must begin.