The Emerging Synthesis of Experience
Flying home from a vacation in England earlier this week I scrawled on a notepad a sequence of thoughts on how such a trip might be experienced as technology and information continue to mature. To my delight, upon signing in to Medium I was recommended an article that brilliantly covers a lot of the concepts in exceptional detail and allows me to spring-board.
Please visit: Will AR/VR Replace Travel & Tourism? by
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Also, for what is AR/VR? see: ExplainThatStuff!
I love to travel. My main interests are incredible landscapes (personal recommendation: south island of New Zealand) and history (I got shivers seeing some of the original documents in the British Library). The experiences as described in Scottie Gardonio’s article are sure to become more rich and accessible.
Location Information
Less curated locations today may have no formal “tour” and rely upon the visitors to have done the work before visiting to appreciate more than what is apparent merely visually. Many places add plaques or have volunteer docents, paid tour guides to share the stories, subtler details and draw attention to less obvious points of interest based on their own study or custom of the site. In India, at the Tiger Fort a man shadowed us and increasingly provided colorful stories (of perhaps dubious accuracy) greatly enhancing the experience and then ultimately requesting payment, which was worth it.
As a child I vividly remember interacting with the costumed “residents” of Colonial Williamsburg and Plimouth Plantation. This effective form of immersion shows the potential of the integration of VR/AR and perhaps interactive AI agents for such roles. We can see the scene before us shown from historic photos or inaccessible angles (like a drone overhead). But digital media and artificial intelligence go way beyond this as we realize these are systems not local objects. These technologies will allow us to synthesize how we experience our world spanning time and space. Perhaps this sounds too grand, but nothing new needs to be invented, what I will now describe could be built on today’s technologies, given the initiative and a whole lot of information orchestration.
Continuum Mindset
I have another article in the works (I will edit this and link to it when published) that looks at how digital technologies can change uncertainty in engineering by allowing us to essentially think across time. I call this a Continuum Mindset. Applied here, the world we experience will no longer be isolated events (like “my visit to Kenilworth Castle”) but an intelligent digital personal assistant-interaction that remembers past experiences and considers new ones yet to come.
Already we can access online information pre-trip to plan our schedule and prioritize what to visit, then as we are there of course we can look up something of further interest — and finally much later in another experience we can consult such information to help recall details from what is then in our past. An intelligent digital personal assistant’s attention span is effectively infinite, so any one visit would simply be part of a tapestry of prior and potential future moments in what it understands of your interests and goals.
In a simple example, remembering that items were taken from Kenilworth as it fell into ruin, my visit to Warwick Castle the following day could highlight the woodwork that had originated in Kenilworth. Then to better answer my daughter’s question on how the Warwick Trebuchet works, suggest I (later) visit the interactive demonstration of the physics of trebuchet ballistics hosted at Wolfram. Or years from now alert me that a local Renaissance Faire has added a new siege weapon demonstration. The point is the histories and topics are not tied to a single visit or location, but cross all of our interaction with the world.
My daughter’s intelligent digital personal assistant might guide the curriculum at her school to encourage her to share something she visited in England as it takes a role in her History class. Rather than digitizing and decoupling our physical experience with the world from information — this stimulates more personalized sharing.
Hyper-Reality: Possibilities & Pitfalls
Sometimes the term hyperreality emphasizes the Matrix-like quality of the virtualness, and that is not where I care to explore. Instead think of the concept as applying hypertext link overlays to our world in real time through augmented reality. This can be as simple as holding your mobile phone up to what you see before you and seeing on the screen what your eyes also see, but with additional enhancements.
The systems are aware of the full landscapes of our world and can perfectly recall our prior experiences and guide us to future ones of interest. This synthesis of experiences — across our own movies, books, travel locations, etc. with those of our friends and family opens a rich path to education. We learn across all the years of our lives, and digital technologies allow the vast information of our past and our world to be remembered, indexed, cross-linked, annotated and critiqued in ways previously unimaginable.
With the ongoing struggle for integrity of online information, of course all of this is at risk of digital vandalism, subjective manipulation and becoming overwhelming in navigating details arising from debate of pedantic differences. Additionally, the intelligent digital personal assistants and their information stores must consider not only integrity but also privacy and security controls. The more we rely on such things for how we ingest information across our lives, the more sensitive we may become to augmented reality being a filter to warp our experience. My hope is innovation and integrity will prevail and instead digital technologies will ultimately become an antidote for malicious manipulation and indoctrination — even bringing to light forensic information on the manipulators and manipulation itself to better understand the full dimensionality of perspectives in our world.
We have an opportunity to footnote and hyperlink our world. Our technology can weave together past memories, present experiences and guide future plans. We can ask questions and even if not answered immediately, remember the moment’s curiosity and later revisit them upon discovery of answers appropriate to our age and the knowledge we possess. Learning can become more prominent in how we live out or lives, where topics persist over time and can become thematic mysteries to explore. These are potential fruits of the rapid advancement of vast digital information, mobile connectivity, artificial intelligence, augmented & virtual reality.
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