Augmented Reality and Stalin

I think about AR and VR a lot. Not just because I am writing my graduation on it (I am) but also because I am fascinated by it. It’s one of those things like AI chatbots that makes me question what it means to be human and if it even matters…. and no matter what I think, there are some guys out there who are just chugging away and bringing the future closer to us, day by day.

AR level 1: addition

Anyway, this is a free thought rant about a possible direction AR will go, and how it can easily be abused. I was looking around for examples of audio based augmented reality. It was surprisingly difficult, sure my go to example of Pokemon Go ‘overlays sound’ by playing it out of your phone speaker, but that’s very first level augmentation: addition.

Dang it, there’s a Sandshrew sticker on my phone again…

Then I thought I found what I was looking for, the Sennheiser Ambeo, a device that lets you not only play audio on top of the real world, let’s you cut the AR audio to let the real world through. But I feel like it’s missing something.

Let’s say I am listening to a podcast and someone yells at me.

It’s one thing to lower the volume of my podcast in order to hear that person, it’s another to not lower the volume and try and drown that person out, but what if my headphones could remove that person shouting.

AR level 2: subtraction

If I am going to augment someone’s world, I want to be able to take things out of it. Cleaver readers might tell me that it’s simply addition, which is true, I want to add the opposite of what is there.

“It’s great that she can see where to put the wires, but can we hide the fact we’re paying her coworkers more?”

Microsoft is already doing part of the work with the Hololens 2: using machine learning to classify objects.

They’re doing it to generate better 3D maps of the environment, but you can also use this to detect, identify, and then cover up specific things. It’s just a backwards version of remove.bg. Once you find the thing (or person) you want to cover up, you can just use another machine learning algorithm to generate what you need to cover it up.

I mean, the Simpsons did it?

Back to Earth

I know this will take many many years of research and development, but eventually we (designers and developers) will have some degree of control about hiding things from people. And that’s where this comes back to Stalin, if we can erase people in real time, which is a bit more effective than erasing them once…

In Soviet Union Reality Augment you!