Latitude

The bandwidth of urban experience has increased. The ancient ways are still there: the way a place looks, the neighbours we wave at and the hands we shake.

But now, there is an electronic conversation overlaid on top of all that: tweets and status updates, neighbourhood online message boards, detailed mobile electronic maps, and nascent applications that broadcast your location to your friends.

Wired UK, “Digital Cities: Your neighbourhood is now Facebook Live”

The Paradox of Disconnected Connectedness

By overlaying digital information onto physical environments more fluidly–by being so entirely mobile, accessible, location-relevant (and crowdsourced, to boot), augmented reality¹ content should enhance our experiences with the connected, 3-D world.

But one wonders if the “point and peruse” personal device modus operandi of AR doesn’t actually preclude us from engaging with real physical surroundings and with other people in face-to-face scenarios.

I know that when I use my GPS to get to a new destination, later I can almost never recall buildings or shops I passed, street names, or any of those interesting, idling pedestrians on street corners; I do remember a tortuous purple line. And it takes me exponentially longer to learn that route (perhaps because I’m a “landmark driver,” and I didn’t happen to notice any?).

In effect, I’ve traversed urban miles with sophisticated technologies (the digital world overlaid onto my physical surroundings, interacting with me in real-time), but I haven’t really noticed my environment, much less experienced it.

Connecting, Together

So how do we really engage with each other and our physical surroundings in a way that’s truly augmented (not overwritten) by our information technologies?

“‘What’s AR’s killer app?’ … What a notion! when the world is your interface.”

We see the “pull” of the personal device when it comes to information access (ex. viewing a Wikipedia entry about the building in front of me or checking Yelp reviews for Thai restaurants in my vicinity) and the very nature of its physicality as a personal information object (I have to stare at its informative little screen as I walk obliviously past people and sights)–as disconnective attributes.

In the current digital age, sharing and personalization constitute two dichotomous–but simultaneously desirable–poles.

Companies like Apple and Nokia have appeared consistently at the forefront of advances in technology (and social connectivity), and the hope is that mobile innovators will evolve past the current AR model to incorporate more truly shared experiences.

(Presently–at best–AR provides for social content creation much like Wikipedia, where people interact primarily with one another’s content, but not directly with each other.) Expanding these digital experiences into shared physical spaces is a significant area of opportunity.

Virtual Street Corners & Augmented Reality

Virtual Street Corners, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, perhaps feels like a step back in time next to AR (not requiring mobile phones at all), but it utilizes digital technologies in a socially innovative way–and, melded with device-driven AR, can create experiences that better connect us to real, physical surroundings–and which are both personally and socially gratifying.

Virtual Street Corners is a “community art project” designed to bridge geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic divides between two Boston neighborhoods by virtually connecting them with life-sized screens (“portals”) on designated street corners that exchange real-time broadcasts and facilitate cross-community interactions.

Virtual Street Corners represents a nice movement towards interactivity in a world where the digital is fluidly embedded in physical spaces.

In other instances of the “embedded world,” such as physical tweet aggregators (left), mobile has been added to increase the breadth and convenience of interaction.

What we’ve yet to see is an “upload” mechanism in shared, physical spaces.

Adding interactive, digital displays of output relevant to one’s immediate area–and “check-in” or “input” stations in these specific locales for those without (or with) personal devices–would make the information available to all–in shared spaces.

They incent people to transform cyber-connections to “real” ones, and to congregate and collaborate around the “marking up” of physical environments (as “social” AR requires).

I may have been only affirming face-to-face the interactions I just had in cyberspace, but that act was significant for the future of our cities.

Wired UK, “Digital Cities: Your neighbourhood is now Facebook Live”

Implications for Interactive Displays

So far, digital-physical installments such as Virtual Street Corners and other “Interactive Walls” (ex. real-time, filtered aggregation of nearby tweets–click through photo above for larger version) have had noteworthy impacts on:

1. advertising & local businesses (“social” reviews of business, store promotions)

2. accessibility of information (no device required for time- & space-relevant information)

3. events & civic/political engagement (crowdsourced, real-time coverage of events, etc.)

4. community cohesiveness (a general feeling of belonging, or transforming virtual exchanges into face-to-face connections)

What’s Good about an Embedded World, Personally Speaking

And the nice part about a world where connective display technologies are embedded in the world around you? You’d still have your device whenever you needed it for highly personalized queries (maybe it’d be possible for you to upload the rich real-time stream around you, and filter it as you desire).

You could have a visible impact on the world around you (with, or without the device–if there were “input stations”), and the hidden virtual world flying all about you would literally turn itself inside-out, becoming manifest on designated digital structures, sides of buildings or bus stop shelters.

Maybe then you’d put away your personalized miniature screen and experience a highly relevant (real-time, location-aware) social discovery mechanism while being, yourself, a little more location-aware.

¹Augmented reality, a technology recently gone mainstream via several mobile (ex. Wikitude for Android & iPhone 3GS) apps, allows an interactor to move through his physical environment, point his mobile device at an object of interest, and receive supplemental information (as from Wikipedia) overlaid onto the device’s screen. Wikitude now allows interactors to upload information about, or “mark up,” their physical surroundings, which others can then view and append.

Header image courtesy of deapeajay’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.