How will the future look like? Or, putting it differently, to what kind of possible future scenarios do we want to contribute? It’s not just about virtual meeting rooms or mindmapping in 3D. What is developing right now is a combination of augmented reality, various degrees of virtuality, mobile&ubiquitous computing and real time data flows. Virtual communities and networks help to develop all this or find use cases to enhance their activities.
All this is of course just a part of the broader changes, which also involve biotechnology and nano-technology. For now, let’s stick to augmented reality and virtual environments. I’ve been reading a number of blogposts I’d like to share with you, about urbanism, networks, production and distribution of stuff, how all that will change because of profound changes in our societies and technology.
Just imagine that virtual objects and spaces blend with the physical world. That augmented reality allows your avatar to visit some virtual 3D version of a city and have a meeting there with other avatars, whose real life typists may be or may not be in that real life city.
It cannot be that impossible to do as Google is using crowdsourcing to build 3D cities on Google Earth.
Of course, you could also use hand sketching as a natural way for creating Augmented Reality mechanical experiments, as demonstrated in this video:
On Life at the Feeding Edge Epredator talks about an iphone application called Sculptmaster 3d by Volutopia which lets you build and manipulate a 3d model using touch and some simple tools. You can then take that model and export it as an OBJ file via email or just snapshot it. “It produces very organic results, it feels like modelling with clay in many respects”, Epredator says. He explains that the objects could be materialized using a 3d printer and the data pattern “could be sold, licenced adapted, dropped into other virtual environments.”
Elsewhere, on Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling is announcing the next CITRIS Research Exchange at the Banatao Institute at Berkeley this semester: “Making the Future: What DIY Culture is Telling Us About Tomorrow” by David Pescovitz [Co-editor of BoingBoing.net and Research Director at Institute for the Future].
This is about the transformation of how
goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.
Sounds exciting? Well, just read Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities, the “Web Squared Era,” and Google Wave, a long and very rich post by Tish Shute on UgoTrade.
One of the gems of this blogpost:
Adam Greenfield’s, “summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing” is:
1. From latent to explicit; 2. From browse to search; 3. From held to shared; 4. From expiring to persistent; 5. From deferred to real-time; 6. From passive to interactive; 7. From component to resource; 8. From constant to variable; 9. From wayfinding to wayshowing; 10. From object to service; 11. From vehicle to mobility; 12. From community to social network; 13. From ownership to use; 14. From consumer to constituent.
Now, if we imagine that these visions come true, what is the role of what we know today as “virtual worlds”? The boundaries between real evironment, augmented reality, augmented virtuality (think Star Trek’s holodeck) and virtual environment will become blurred. This can be demonstrated by this video about Augmented Collaboration in Mixed Environments (ACME), a mixed reality teleconferencing application based on Second Life (SL) and the OpenSim virtual worlds (read also the post on Earth Times):
I think we’ll still need our virtual environments, as laboratories and spaces where one can experiment endlessly unconstrained by any physical limitations. They can even provide virtual walls and a well-defined virtual space where communities can flourish. However, the skills one learns in those virtual environments, and the ethos of playing and controlling each and every pixel, could very well be a major inspiration for developing augmented reality and for transforming how goods, services and experiences will be designed, manufactured and distributed.
Roland Legrand
