Google recently announced its variation on the Augmented Reality Game genre, Ingress, for the Android phone. In the game, two factions, the Enlightened and the Resistance fight to control locations called portals. Players can find and control these portals by exploring real-world locations using their Android phone.
"The thing about layering things onto a world that can only be seen via smartphone is that it tends to make the real world look boring by comparison. On my smartphone, I was capturing portals and linking them to far-flung places; in the real world, I was a guy standing on a corner dodging people heading back to the office after lunch. Alternate reality games promise a kind of magical intersection between real and virtual worlds; Ingress, at least at this early stage, hasn't quite delivered it."
I think this is an interesting variation on the virtual world idea. Here we have technology being used to layer a virtual world on top of the physical world. This explodes the gap Boellstorf describes is the distinction between a virtual world like SL and the real-world. What does it mean to be a virtual-world when the gap between the virtual world and the real-world disappears?
Such an "augmented reality" is not a new concept. Nor will it be limited to just games. Google Glasses (as silly as it sounded) is also an example of a push towards augmented reality that foretells the ways in which technology will change how we will interact with the physical world. Or are these augmented realities merely futurological rhetoric and transhuman fantasies?
We already see smart phones becoming a big phenomenon. I would argue that smart phones are indeed a nascent form of an augmented reality future, though a variation upon the concept which was not predicted by earlier sci-fi writers and futurologists (which seems to be the origin of the Google Glasses concept). I definitely think such a transition has been facilitated by smaller more powerful computing and huge amounts of data (such as the Google Map data that is necessary for a game like Ingress), and that the gap between the real-world and the virtual will continue to breakdown, in line with what I have said in class about the convergence of identities on the internet due to social media.
I wonder if this means that the internet is developing in a very different direction from the free, independent, completely separate, virtual utopia envisioned by early internet pioneers like John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace). At the same time, perhaps these ideas of have been around since the earliest writings about cybernetics, the cyborg, and cyberpunk (Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson). Except in our world we have Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
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