[Cross-posted from my post at Boing Boing.]

Augmented Reality is definitely trending up the Hype Cycle in a big way. The past year has seen explosive growth in this nascent field buoyed by the rise of gps-enabled, cloud-aware smart phones. The marketing hype has, of course, been even more resounding, like a wailing chorus of virtual vuvuzelas trumpeting the next great wave of advertising (I couldn’t resist). But beneath the hype and the fluff is a thriving community of innovators & designers working to weave this technology into the very fabric of our lives.

As a quick review, augmented reality is a context-aware UI layer rendered over a camera stream or other transparent interface. This is typically mediated by geo-location, orientation, physical markers (those funky UPC-like symbols), and visual recognition. In this manner AR is able to reveal visually the hidden data shadow of our world, like showing you the nearest coffee shops or details about the air quality in your city. The mobile device gets info about where you are and what direction you’re facing, goes to the cloud to look up data appropriate for the vicinity, then renders it over the camera stream in a way that updates as you move.

A whole industry has been born around this premise, dragging in images, annotations, and data to overlay on the camera stream of our mobiles. But the really interesting stuff is yet to come. As standardization issues, hardware issues, and numerous UI design challenges sort out in the next couple of years, concurrent with the development of AR-specific devices, our interaction with visualized data will become more and more specialized and appropriate to our individual needs. The clutter of markups that currently plagues many AR apps will be attenuated by algorithms that know our interests and affinities and block out the elements we wish to avoid. Just like Amazon makes recommendations based on your click & purchase history, AR apps will screen out the noise and provide us only with the data we need.

When paired with the massive deployment of embedded sensors AR becomes a lightweight visualization layer for interfacing with the instrumented world. Civic workers could see underground cables and pipelines. Homeowners could see real-time energy & network use. Police and early responders could post visual warnings cordoning streets and alerting to hazards. Ecologists could determine water & air quality at-a-glance. Ecosystems begin to have a voice, communicating soil contamination to observers. Public facilities like park benches, utility poles, and street signs could hold annotations & links created by community members, made public or gated by in-group permissions. Geographic social annotations could mark up our cities with tags and content. Virtual worlds might break out of the box and overlay on the physical plane. The environment suddenly becomes much richer – and potentially much nosier – with a flood of information. Augmented reality promises to exteriorize the cloud, drawing it out across the world canvas and making visible our social fabric. But it doesn’t promise to mediate or regulate that content.

We risk myopia, disconnection, visual occlusion, fragmented realities, reinforced tribalism. Consider the seemingly-inevitable future where eyewear mediates a cloud-aware augmented interface with the world. Perhaps you opt to obscure ethnicities or anyone not connected to the net. Ghettos look much nicer when painted over with high-res colors and dancing sprites. The world you experience is really only shared by the other people running your default layer set. Maybe you see paycheck information or health records or political affinities of those you pass, measuring up the once-private lives of your community. Perhaps the most popular layers are hacked to display swastikas or porn or spam swarms or simply to black out your view in the middle of the morning commute. How does the layered world enable crime, gang affinities, and political or religious extremism? What inevitable inequities might arise between those able to purchase such access and those condemned to the dark poverty of quiet disconnection? Do the wealthy become even more enhanced & capable compared to the underclass? And what are the risks of getting lost in the virtual glitz? Are there considerations for how these augmented realities will bring us closer to the natural world in which we’re embedded? And just what is “real” or “natural” anymore?

As connected social computing devices get smaller & smaller and nearer & nearer to us, the weight of the cloud gets lighter. We carry around immense computational power and almost immediate access to the global repository of information. The mobile phone will eventually pair with head’s-up eyewear displays just as more and more people avoid catastrophic disease & injury through the aid of embedded brain-computer interfaces. As computation moves next to and into our bodies, the cloud is breaking out of the screen and washing onto our world. We grow more augmented with computation while our environment is getting smarter and more aware and increasingly able to communicate with us. It may very well be that in 5, 10, 20 years the world is a much more visual, dynamic, and communicative place than we can even imagine.

[For more of my explorations of this subject check out my articles
Breaking Open the Cloud: Heads in an Augmented World and Cognition & Computation: Augmented Reality Meets Brain-Computer Interface.]

“In what ways will the concept and landscape of the city change over the next decade, and will this change bring about positive or negative impact in terms of global resilience, transformational development, and human evolution?”

My answer begins:

“All human systems and technologies are ultimately embedded within the larger natural ecosystem of the planet. As we’re now beginning to witness across all such domains, nature is applying more and more pressure on civilization to force it into better alignment with the principles of conservation and homeostasis critical to balanced living systems. As massive aggregations of society, technology, commerce, industry, resource consumption, and waste production, cities will feel tremendous impact from the corrections imposed by the natural world. Megacities in the developing world like Lagos, Jakarta, Delhi, and Mexico City already exhibit enormous stress due to rapid urbanization, rising populations, and the energetic consumption and waste production that attends their growth. With aging populations and over-burdened consumer economies, first world cities like London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo will find it more & more difficult to support their resource demands. Indeed, given projections for energy prices, food stocks, and clean water & sanitation, cities across the world are trending towards a lower common standard of living.

Continued at KedgeForward…

Last month I attended & participated in the Ten Year Forecast conference presented by the Institute For The Future. This event at Cavallo Point was the culmination of several months of research looking at the signals, trends, and possible futures of five global domains: the carbon economy, the water ecology, adaptive power, cities in transition, and molecular identity. I contributed research for the carbon economy & adaptive power, looking at carbon markets and the distribution of energy resources for the former and investigating insurgency, narcoterror, and the emerging shadow economy for the latter.

Over two days we presented very challenging content, both in scope & complexity, as well as tone. These are major foundational systems that intersect with every aspect of civilization. Most of the forecasts & scenarios were undercut with a tone of constraint and great challenge given the turbulent nature of these modern transitional times. In attendance were many high-level representatives from some of the largest corporate entities on the planet, as well as from NGO’s, government, and private research. The scenarios presented them with a near-future significantly constrained by resource shortages, rising costs of production, and the growing urgency of climate change. All of these constraints were very clearly articulated to highlight the need to reduce consumption, engineer positive behavioral change, and identify new measures of prosperity & wellness unhinged from growth & GDP.

I spoke directly with several VP’s, some responsible for guiding multi-billion dollar corporations, and all expressed a surprising awareness & understanding of the deeply challenging realities we face. I was met again & again with the sentiment that energy constraints will corral growth and compel companies to both modify their operations to reduce energy use and evolve their products and services to be more sustainable. Indeed, everyone acknowledged the impact of sustainability on their business, admitting that nature has now entered the boardroom. To be clear, some of these companies are the largest transporters on the planet – major keystone energy consumers. So when they start admitting that business-as-usual has to change, it’s hard not to feel the gravity of our times.

The first day was especially powerful. There was a distinct thickness to the large ballroom by the time Jane McGonigal was giving her after-dinner keynote on the Epic Win. We had thrown so much really overwhelming information at the attendees, all of which heralded significant changes that will likely impact all human systems in the next ten years. We painted pictures of a civilization that will either adapt quickly & effectively or spiral into a malaise of constraint, decline, & chaos. Yet the tone of the room and the comments & conversations that emerged were radically optimistic, embracing the dire news and ready to press on into the cold night for a better tomorrow.

Undeniably, we live in interesting times. Things seem increasingly out of control. Or at least, we now see so much of the world in such minute detail that our historic models of what order should look like are failing against the vast interconnected global systems laid bare before us. What we know for sure is that inevitable growth is a cancer and cannot be sustained. We know resources are finite and expensive and their industrial use is poisoning the planet. And we know that the planet itself is the ultimate Invisible Hand that will easily wipe us clean if we don’t acknowledge it’s centrality and honor the necessity of it’s health. Perhaps in more pragmatic terms these realizations are now reaching into the boardrooms and staff rooms of our global institutions. Economics, humanism, and ecology – the triple-bottom line – is making it’s way into the machines of commerce. And more and more people are looking for a meaningful future in their own triple-bottom-line of happiness, resilience, and legacy.

[I hope to write something soon about the IFTF Ten Year Forecast retreat this past weekend at Cavallo Point. It was fantastic!]

This past Saturday I worked with Mike Liebhold, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, and Damon Hernandez to present the West Coast Augmented Reality Development Camp at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Ca. By all accounts it was a stunning success with a huge turn-out of companies, engineers, designers, makers, artists, geo-hackers, scientists, techies and thinkers. The planning was mostly done virtually via email and phone meetings with only a couple visits to the venue. On Saturday, the virtual planing phase collapsed into reality and bloomed on site into AR Dev Camp.

As an un-conference, the event itself was a study in grassroots, crowd-sourced, participatory organization with everyone proposing sessions which were then voted on and placed into the schedule. To me, it was a wonderfully organic and emergent process that almost magically gave life and spirit to the skeleton we had constructed. So before I launch into my thoughts I want to give a hearty “Thank You!” to everyone that joined us and helped make AR DevCamp such a great experience. I also want to give a big shout-out to Tish Shute, Ori Inbar, and Sophia for coordinating the AR DevCamp in New York City, as well as Dave Mee & Julian Tate who ran the Manchester, UK event. And, of course, we couldn’t have done it without the help of our sponsors, Layar, Metaio, Qualcomm, Google, IFTF, Lightning Laboratories, Web3D Consortium, IDEAbuilder, MakerLab, and Waze (and URBEINGRECORDED with Cage Free Consulting contributed the flood of afternoon cookies).

So first, just what is Augmented Reality? There’s a tremendous amount of buzz around the term, weighing it down with connotations and expectations. Often, those investing in it’s future invoke the haunting specter of Virtual Reality, doomed by it’s inability to live up to the hype: ahead of it’s time, lost mostly to the realm of military budgets and skunkworks. Yet, the AR buzz has driven a marketing rush throwing gobs of money at haphazard and questionable advertising implementations that quickly reach millions and cement in their minds a narrow association with flashy magazine covers and car ads. Not to diminish these efforts, but there’s a lot more – and a lot less – going on here.

In it’s most distilled form, augmented reality is an interface layer between the cloud and the material world. The term describes a set of methods to superimpose and blend rendered digital interface elements with a camera stream, most commonly in the form of annotations such as text, links, and other 2 & 3-dimensional objects that appear to float over the camera view of the live world. Very importantly, AR includes at it’s core the concept of location mediated through GPS coordinates, orientation, physical markers, point-clouds, and, increasingly, image recognition. This combination of location and superimposition of annotations over a live camera feed is the foundation of AR. As we’re seeing with smart phones, the device knows where you are, what direction you’re facing, what your looking at, who & what is near you, and what data annotations & links are available in the view. In this definition, the cloud is the platform, the AR browser is the interface, and annotation layers are content that blend with the world.

So the augmented reality experience is mediated through a camera view that identifies a location-based anchor or marker and reveals any annotations present in the annotation layer (think of a layer as a channel). Currently, each of these components is uniquely bound to the AR browser in which they were authored so you must use, for example, the Layar browser to experience Layar-authored annotation layers. While many AR browsers are grabbing common public data streams from sources like Flickr & Wikipedia, their display and function will vary from browser to browser as each renders this data uniquely. And just because you can see a Flicker annotation in one browser doesn’t mean you will see it in another. For now, content is mostly bound to the browser and authoring is mostly done by third-parties building canned info layers. There doesn’t seem to be much consideration for the durability and longevity of these core components, and there is a real risk that content experiences may become fractured and ephemeral.

Indeed, content wants to be an inclusive, social experience. One of the core propositions underlying our motivation for AR DevCamp is the idea that the platforms being built around augmented reality should be architected as openly as possible to encourage the greatest degree of interoperability and extensibility. In the nascent but massively-hyped AR domain, there’s a growing rush to plant flags and grab territory, as happens in all emergent opportunity spaces. The concern is that we might recapitulate the Browser Wars – not intentionally but by lack of concerted efforts to coordinate implementations. While I maintain that coordination & open standardization is of necessity, I question my own assumption that without it we’ll end up with a bunch of walled gardens. This may be under-estimating the impact of the web.

Through the lessons and resultant standardization of the Browser Wars, it’s become a best practice (and indeed, a necessity) to design specifically to the most common standards. Arguably, the move from Web 1.0 (essentially a collection of static billboards) to the social interactions that characterize Web 2.0 established and deeply reinforced the fundamental requirement that we’re all able to share information & experiences in the cloud. This social commons necessarily requires an architectural commonality. Thus, we all agree that HTML, JavaScript, PHP, JASON, MySQL, and now RDF, OWL, and SPARQL are the core components of our data service models. Since we understand that AR is primarily a location-aware interface layer for the cloud, it’s very likely that independent implementations will all speak the same language. However, the point of AR DevCamp and similar gatherings is to challenge this assumption and to reinforce commonality by bringing everyone together to press flesh & exchange notes. The social dynamic in the natural world will determine the level of cooperation in the virtual.

Yet, this cooperation and normalization is by no means a given. Just about every chunk of legacy code that the Information Age is built upon retains vestiges of the git-er-done, rush to market start-up midset. Short-sighted but well-meaing implementations based upon limited resources, embryonic design, and first-pass architectures bog down the most advance and expensive software suites. As these code bases swell to address the needs of a growing user base, the gap between core architecture and usability widens. Experience designers struggle against architectures that were not able to make such design considerations. Historically, code architecture has proceeded ahead of user experience design, though this is shifting to some degree in the era of Agile and hosted services. Nevertheless, the emerging platforms of AR have the opportunity – and, I’d argue, the requirement – to include user research, design, & usability as core components of implementation. The open, standardized web has fostered a continuous and known experience across it’s vast reaches. Artsy Flash sites aside, you always know how to navigate and interact with the content. The fundamentals of AR need to be identified and agreed upon before the mosaic of emerging code bases become too mature to adjust to the needs of a growing user base.

Given the highly social aspect of the web, place-based annotations and objects will suffer greatly if there’s not early coordination around a shared standard for anchors. This is where the Browser Wars may inadvertently re-emerge. The anchor is basically the address/location of an annotation layer. When you look through an augmented view It’s the bit of data that says “I’m here, check out my annotations”. Currently there is no shared standard for this object, nor for annotations & layers. You need the Layar browser in order to see annotation layers made in it’s platform. If you only have a Junaio browser, you won’t see it. If you annotate a forest, tagging each tree with a marker linked to it’s own data registry, and then the browser app you used to author goes out of business, all those pointers are gone. The historical analog would be coding your website for IE but anyone with Mosaic can’t see it. This is where early design and usability considerations are critical to ensure a reasonable commonality and longevity of content. Anchors, annotations, & layers are new territory that ought to be regarded as strongly as URL’s and markup. Continuing to regard these as independent platform IP will balkanize the user experience of continuity across content layers. There must be standards in authoring and viewing. Content and services are where the business models should innovate.

So if we’re moving towards an augmented world of anchors and annotations and layers, what considerations should be given to the data structure underlying these objects? An anchor will have an addressable location but should it contain information about who authored it and when? Should an annotation contain similar data, time-stamped and signed with an RDF structure underlying the annotation content? How will layers describe their contents, set permissions, and ensure security? And what of the physical location of the data? An anchor should be a distributed and redundant object, not bound to the durability and security of any single server. A secure and resilient backbone of real-world anchor points is critical as the scaffolding of this new domain.

Earthmine is a company I’ve been watching for a number of months since they presented at the IFTF. They joined us at AR DevCamp to present their platform. While many AR developers are using GPS & compass or markers to draw annotations over the real world, Earthmine is busy building a massive dataset that maps Lat/Long/Alt coordinates to hi-rez images of cities. They have a small fleet of vehicles equipped with stereoscopic camera arrays that drive around cities, capturing images of every inch they see. But they’re also grabbing precise geolocation coordinates that, when combined with the image sets, yields a dense point cloud of addressable pixels. When you look at one of these point clouds on a screen it looks like a finely-rendered pointillistic painting of a downtown. They massage this data set, mash the images and location, and stream it through their API as a navigable street view. You can then place objects in the view with very high accuracy – like a proposed bus stop you’d like to prototype, or a virtual billboard. Earthmine even indicated that making annotations in their 2d map layer could add a link to the augmented real-world view. So you can see a convergence and emerging correlation between location & annotation in the real world, in an augmented overlay, on a flat digital map, and on a Google Earth or Virtual World interface. This is an unprecedented coherency of virtual and real space.

The Earthmine demo is cool and the Flash API offers interesting ways to customize the street view with 2d & 3d annotations but the really killer thing is their dataset. As alluded to, they’re building an address space for the real world. So if you’re in San Francisco and you have an AR browser that uses the Earthmine API (rumors that Metaio are working on something here…) you can add an annotation to every STOP sign in The Mission so that a flashing text of “WAR” appears underneath. With the current GPS location strategy this would be impossible due to it’s relatively poor resolution (~3-5 meters at best). You could use markers but you’d need to stick one on every STOP sign. With Earthmine you can know almost exactly where in the real world you’re anchoring the annotation… and they can know whenever you click on one. Sound familiar?

Augmented reality suggests the most significant shift in computation since the internet. As we craft our computers into smaller and smaller mobile devices, exponentially more powerful and connected, we’re now on the verge of beginning the visual and locational integration of the digital world with the analog world. We’ve digitized much of human culture, pasted it onto screens and given ourselves mirror identities to navigate, communicate, and share in this virtual space. Now we’re breaking open the box and drawing the cloud across the phenomenal world, teaching our machines to see what we see and inviting the world to be listed in the digital Yellow Pages.

So, yeah, now your AR experience of the world is covered in billboards, sloganeering, propaganda, and dancing dinosaurs all competing for your click-through AdSense rating. A big consideration, and a topic that came up again & again at AR DevCamp, is the overwhelming amount of data and the need to filter it to some meaningful subset, particularly with respect to spam and advertising. A glance across the current crop of iPhone AR apps reveals many design interface challenges, with piles of annotations all occluding themselves and your view of the world. Now imagine a world covered in layers each with any number of annotations. UI becomes very important. Andrea Mangini & Julie Meridian led a session on design & usability considerations in AR that could easily be a conference of it’s own. How do you manage occlusion & sorting? Level of detail? What does simple & effective authoring of annotations on a mobile device look like? How do you design a small but visible environmental cue that an annotation exists? If the URL convention is an underlined text, what is the AR convention for gently indicating that the fire hydrant you’re looking at has available layers & annotations? Discoverability of the digital links within the augmented world will be at a tension with overwhelming the view of the world itself.

When we consider the seemingly-inevitable development of eyewear with digital heads-up display, occlusion can quickly move from helpful to annoying to dangerous. No matter how compelling the augmented world is you still need to see when that truck is coming down the street. Again, proper design for human usability is perhaps even more critical in the augmented interface than in a typical screen interface. Marketing and business plans aside, we have to assume that the emergence of truly compelling and valuable technologies are ultimately in line with the deep evolutionary needs of the human animal. We’re certainly augmenting for fun and art and engagement and communication but my sense is that, underneath all these we’re building this new augmented reality because the power & adaptive advantage mediated through the digital domain is so great that we need it to integrate seamlessly with our mobile, multi-tasking lives. It’s been noted by others – Kevin Kelly comes to mind – that we’re teaching machines to do many of things we do, but better. And in the process we’re making them smaller and more natural and bringing them closer and closer to our bodies. Ponderings of transhumanity and cyborgian futures aside, our lives are being increasingly augmented and mediated by many such smart machines.

DARPA wasn’t at AR Dev Camp. Or at least if they were, they didn’t say so. There was a guy from NASA showing a really cool air traffic control system that watched aircraft in the sky, tagged them with data annotations, and tracked their movements. We were shown the challenges to effectively register the virtual layer – the annotation – with the real object – a helicopter – when it’s moving rapidly. In other words, the virtual layer, mediated through a camera & a software layer, tended to lag behind the 80+ mph heli. But in lieu of DARPA’s actual attendance, it’s worth considering their Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization (ULTRA-Vis) program to develop a multimodal mobile computational system for coordinating tactical movements of patrol units. This program sees the near-future soldier as outfitted with a specialized AR comm system with a CPU worn on a belt, a HUD lens over one eye, a voice recognition mic, and a system to capture gestures. Military patrols rely heavily on intel coming from command and on coordinating movements through back-channel talk and line-of-sight gestures. AR HUDs offer simple wayfinding and identification of team mates. Voice commands can execute distributed programs and open or close comm channels. Gestures will be captured to communicate to units both in an out of line-of-sight and to initiate or capture datastreams. Cameras and GPS will track patrol movements and offer remote viewing through other soldier’s cameras. But most importantly, this degree of interface will be simple, fluid, and effortless. It won’t get in your way. For better or for worse, maximizing pack hunting behaviors with technology will set the stage for the future of human-computer interaction.

After lunch provided by Qualcomm, Anselm Hook led an afternoon session at AR DevCamp titled simply “Hiking”. We convened in a dark and hot room, somewhat ironically called the “Sun Room” for it’s eastern exposure, to discuss nature and what, if any, role AR should play in our interface with the Great Outdoors. We quickly decided to move the meeting out into the parking lot where we shared our interests in both built and natural outdoor environments. A common theme that emerged in words and sentiment was the tension between experience & distraction. We all felt that the natural world is so rich and special in large part due to it’s increasing contrast to an urbanized and mechanized life. It’s remote and wild and utterly disconnected, inherently at peace in it’s unscripted and chaotic way. How is this value and uniqueness challenged by ubicomp and GPS and cellular networks? GPS & cellphone coverage can save lives but do we really need to Twitter from a mountain top? I make no judgement calls here and am plenty guilty myself but it’s worth acknowledging that augmented reality may challenge the direct experience of nature in unexpected ways and bring the capacity to overwrite even the remote corners of the world with human digital graffiti.

But remember that grove of trees I mentioned before, tagged with data annotations? Imagine the researchers viewing those trees through AR lenses able to see a glance-able color index for each one showing CO2, O2, heavy metals, turgidity, growth, and age. Sensors, mesh nets, and AR can give voice to ecosystems, cities, communities, vehicles, and objects. Imagine that grove is one of thousands in the Brazilian rainforest reporting on it’s status regularly, contributing data to policy debates and regulatory bodies. What types of augmented experiences can reinforce our connection to nature and our role as caretakers?

On the other hand, what happens when you and the people around you are each having very different experiences of “reality”? What happens to the commons when there are 500 different augmented versions? What happens to community and society when the common reference point for everything – the very environment in which we exist – is malleable and fluid and gated by permissions and access layers or overwrought with annotations competing for our attention? What social gaps could arise? What psychological ailments? Or perhaps more realistically, what happens when a small class of wealthy westerners begin to redraw the world around them? Don’t want to see other people? No problem! Just turn on the obfuscation layer. Ugly tenements ruining your morning commute? Turn on some happy music and set your iGlasses to the favela paintshop filter! Augmentation and enhancement with technology will inevitably proceed along economic lines. What is the proper balance between enjoying our technological luxuries and responsibly curating the world for those less fortunate? Technology often makes the symptoms look different but doesn’t usually eradicate the cause. In the rush to colonize the augmented reality, in the shadow of a wavering global economic system and deep revision of value and product, now is the best time and the most important time to put solutions ahead of products; to collaborate and cooperate on designing open, robust, and extensible systems; and, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, to “work on stuff that matters”.

At the end of the day, pizza’s arrived (Thanks MakerLab!), beers were opened (Thanks Layar & Lighting Labs), and the buzzing brains of AR DevCamp mingled and shared their thoughts. Hearts alit, I’ll be forgiven some sentimentality to suggest that the Hacker Dojo had a soft, warm glow emanating from all the fine folks in attendance. Maybe it was like this around the Acid Tests in the 60’s (with more paisley). Or the heady days of PARC Xerox in the 80’s (with more ties). That growing inertia and sense of destiny at being at the right place at the right time just at the start of something exceptional…

Special thanks to Andrea Mangini for deep and ranging discussions about all this stuff, among many other things.

The present arc of instability & change is driven by massive shifts in economy, ideology, connectivity, and trust. Many deeply entrenched behaviors and the institutions built on them are grinding up against social & environmental feedback, bloated bureaucracy, unsustainable growth models, and the interface of global transparency and closed power structures. On the global stage the myth of America is fading, it’s dematerialized information economies eroding it’s own industry, having financed the rise of it’s greatest competitors. The center of economic power is shifting to the East, into the EU and China, though it’s reasonable to suggest that the center itself is distributing across the primary northern actors. The perceived decline of the US may simply be the effects of capital normalization in a globalized world.

American governance continues to lose it’s ability to effectively manage the needs of it’s citizenry. This will shift governance to local and regional bodies mixing public sector legislators, corporate leaders, and empowered citizen groups & lobbies. Loyalties will trend towards those organizations most capable of meeting the needs of people, eg. stable employers, effective community groups, capable local civic leadership, familial & tribal affiliations, and gangs & insurgencies. As top-down national management weakens, corporate NGOs will play an increasing role in managing civil and socio-economic development.

For better or for worse, Google is a good example of an emerging NGO world leader. Google is financially strong, employs thousands, and is actively engineering & underwriting the development of a more prosperous and sustainable future in both it’s information and energy operations. For it’s employees, it’s business partners, it’s ecology of developers, and the many CSR organizations Google works with, they are a more reliable and trustworthy patron than the State of California or the US Gov. Likewise for Microsoft or, more specifically, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has sent billions of dollars to help African poverty and fight AIDS (as with Google, questionable strategic intentions and pragmatic implementation failures aside). In an age lit with corrupt politicians and bankers, it’s easy for corporations & NGOs to look good by spending money on non-profit causes. In some ways, the market is more effective at getting things done than government these days. Expect to even see investment firms making similar overtures to social and environmental responsibility as capital begins to redistribute in emerging opportunistic investments. The new titans of the information, green tech, and biotech industries will continue to be the powers that are most capable of managing change effectively, though this posture will be both at tension with and an outcome of their need to manage growth and profit for their shareholders. Local and regional investments will inevitably be balanced against the global workforce. Corporate loyalty and integrity will only go so far as outsourcing draws jobs and money away from the locals.

As states risk bankruptcy through bloated bureaucracy, mismanagement, and endless partisan deadlocks, regions & local communities will organize & collaborate to pick up the slack or else decline into economic and social turmoil. This pattern is reflected at the level of national governance, increasingly beholden to global financial centers, extended across the globe in multiple unfavorable & expensive conflicts, and crippled domestically by oppositional bickering in Congress. All these trends reinforce the gap between State & Citizen, Wall St. and Main St., further de-legitimizing traditional governance. With spiking unemployment and the growing commercial credit crunch, the street-level effects of the Great Recession will continue to deepen for some time in spite of Wall St. indicators trying to stoke a rally back to an outmoded growth model. This effect will not be universal but unevenly distributed, reflecting the distribution of innovation, resources, capital, and climate.

For California, some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, are poised to maintain strength and innovation, particularly in the new information economy but also, perhaps more importantly, in the coming biotech revolution. Meanwhile, Fresno, Riverside, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles counties will deteriorate further. Fresno’s fate as it resets against failed housing speculation will be determined primarily by shifting weather patterns. If the region dries, expect even greater flight. Riverside and Bakersfield will likely follow the lead of Los Angeles which seems to be destined for greater chaos, particularly if water supplies are threatened. Expect continued regional migration into LA as extended families draw together to fight unemployment, and job seekers are drawn on hopes of legitimate and criminal financial opportunities. Gang violence will rise as illicit drug and weapons networks stake out territory, increasingly mixing with Mexican and Salvadorean criminal networks. LA and San Diego demographics will continue into a Hispanic majority as people flee a Mexico torn apart by it’s own narco-insurgency. But again, great opportunities exist in the San Francisco region provided the high cost of living and salary requirements do not scare away the most able and potentially benevolent corporate kingpins. The California Bay Area is one of the most innovative and productive centers of US business and will continue to build the information age for the foreseeable future. If not for deeply intractable water issues, one could imagine a Northern California statehood.

Nevertheless, Asia is leading the global economic recovery, not America, underscored most recently by China’s founding of its own NASDAQ-styled ChiNext market, as well as its recent ASEAN attendance. Increasingly, Asian economic bodies are calling for lessened reliance on Western markets, supplementing their currency investments with Euros, Yen, and RMBs. These two features of marked Asian economic growth and increased global currency diversification will inevitably soften the national power of the US, itself holding on by it’s handful of primary innovation centers (increasingly isolated from and at odds with middle America and the south), as well as its absolutely indomitable military force. While it is not in China or anyone’s interest to dump US debt and cause a dollar collapse, it will be interesting to see how an economically weakened and politically fractured America will rely on its military to save face as the global economy becomes more evenly distributed towards Asia & the EU. Similarly, India’s contribution to the region remains unclear as it tryies to resolve it’s hunger for modernization with a huge population mired in poverty and caste culture. Caught between the US & China, India’s primary role in the foreseeable future is to put pressure on Pakistan, forcibly enough to encourage the Pakistani military to put down the Taliban, but subtle enough not to provoke an all-out Pak-India conflict.

However one regards India’s contributions, the rise of Asia will not be easy. There are huge populations but their level of industrial & technological education still lags behind many western nations. Likewise, their financial centers (and political focus) will continue to be challenged by the much larger depressed rural populations still struggling out of feudal poverty. Any attempt to form an Asian counterpart to the EU will be challenged by such vast inequity across many proud and nationalistic cultures that have been traditionally very averse to cooperation. Asia has been at war with itself in some form perhaps as long as the Middle East. Indeed, the rise of the EU was only possible in a post-WW2 reunification towards cooperative economics (and against a rising USSR), and this cooperation remains tenuous at best. Russia itself is a major wildcard sitting between Asia & the EU & the Middle East, economically and politically crippled but still heavily armed with ICBMs & natural resources and making regular overtures to get the Soviet band back together. While the US is only slightly concerned about its southern neighbor, Asia is beset on all sides by nuclear powers, militant Islamists, and strategically-critical but highly chaotic regions. America travels to its conflicts while Asia need only look in its own backyard. Thus, the rise of Asia will be significant, primarily due to the inertia of China (itself in large part buoyed by unsustainable business trickery) and the flocking multinational business interests attracted to its present shininess, but any coherent China-JPN-ASEAN strategy will be beset by many challenges. Indeed, Japan itself will remain heavily dependent on the West, both economically and militarily, with everyone in the region hoping the US will keep North Korea in check. (As an aside, the US military is the *only* military capable of deploying 100,000+ troops anywhere in the world. No other country can move forces globally, control the world seas, and reach any nation with a nuclear strike.)

Either way, there will continue to be a fractured US polity, a weakening dollar, and a lackluster system of state and national governance. Some regions will descend into chaos and become truly feral (eg Detroit, parts of LA), while others will route around bureaucratic impotence with community co-ops, participatory local governance, regional corporate sponsorship, and virtualized global information & content cooperatives. The tensions between neighboring regions will be amplified by ideological and socio-economic differences arising from their respective abilities (or inabilities) to provide for their populations, as well as the presently unforeseeable impacts of climate change and pandemics. One neighbor’s fecundity is another’s reason to migrate or invade.

None of these shifts will radically alter business as usual, in that trade of goods and services will persist. The current global financial paradigm will not likely come crashing down though it will be forced to evolve towards greater transparency & liability. Wall St. can post great numbers but if communities are wracked by unemployment, crime, and dying lands, so-called economic recovery won’t make much difference, especially as the anticipated uptick in business sees more global outsourcing and contract work with diminishing quality of life for the expensive regions. In the near-term, these trends will put pressure on many local communities to fend for themselves (or align with corporate, government, and/or military interests in the region) though some will be uniquely positioned to build local resiliency and self-reliance while remaining highly competitive in a dematerialized global information marketplace.

The next stabilization will likely come on the back of green industry, dematerialized technology, and new energy abundance, all of which will emerge from a deepening understanding and engagement with natural systems & the biochemical world. The present instability is a direct result of an unsustainable resource model kicked off by the industrial revolution. The shift we’re in is driven by the necessity to bring human systems in line with living, natural systems. This is a deep, deep evolutionary priority working it’s way through the human species in ways we don’t even see. But in short, things are shifting quickly. The idealistic paradigms of How The World Is are changing before us on the tide of globalization and instantaneous communication connecting all corners of the Earth. Yet, change is typically not monolithic but is scattered and unevenly distributed. There are many more players on the board now and the myth of US dominance and the ideal of Democracy is challenged on many sides. The system is unlikely to crash but it’s certainly entering a phase of high instability. But don’t under-estimate the collective effort to keep things moving forward. The interconnected web of globalization may actually be the saving grace against system collapse, tying all nations together in mutual reliance.

The Virtual Autopsy Table from NorrköpingsVisualiseringscenter on Vimeo.

With all the hype flying around Augmented Reality lately, it’s easy to assume the nascent tech is just another flash-in-the-pan destined to burn out in a fury of marketing gimmickry & sensational posturing. Yet, it’s informative to consider the drivers pushing this trend and to tease out the truly adaptive value percolating beneath the hype. As we survey the last 40 years of computation we see vast rooms of tube & tape mainframes consolidating into single stacks & dense supercomputers. These, in turn, rode manufacturing advances into smaller components and faster processors bringing computing to the desktop. In the last 10 years we’ve seen computation un-encumber from the location-bound desktop to powerful, free-roaming mobile platforms. These devices have allowed us to carry the advantages of instant communication, collaboration, and computation with us wherever we go. The trends in computation continue towards power, portability, and access.

Specific implementations aside, augmented reality in it’s purest, most dilute form, is about drawing the experience of computation across the real world. It’s about point-and-click access to the data shadows of everything in our environment. It’s about realizing social networks, content markups, and digital remix culture as truly tangible layers of human behavior. Augmented reality represents another fundamentally adaptive technology to empower individuals & collectives with instant access to knowledge about the world in which we’re embedded. It breaks open both the digital & mental box and dumps the contents out on the floor.

There is a fascinating convergence at play here that, at a glance, seems almost paradoxical. While the contents of our minds are moving beyond the digital containers we’ve used to such creative & collaborative advantage, out into the phenomenal world of things & critters, the physical hardware through which this expression is constructed & mediated is miniaturizing and moving closer & closer towards our physical bodies. DARPA is funding research to push AR beyond current device limitations, envisioning transparent HUDs, eye-trackers, speech recognition, and gestural interfaces that release soldiers from the physical dependencies of our current devices. Today’s mobiles (and the limited AR tech built on them) compete directly with the other most adaptive human feature: our hands. Truly functional mobile comm/collab/comp must be hands-free… and this is the promise taking form in the emerging field of neurotechnology.

Nanomaterials, optogenetics, SPASERs, advanced robotics, neurocomputation, and artificial intelligence are merely a handful of the modalities shaping up to enable tighter integration between humans, machines, and the digital sphere. Advances in understanding the communication protocols and deep brain structures that mediate the human interface between our sensorium and the perceived world are presenting opportunities to capture & program our minds, to more accurately modulate the complexities of human emotion, creativity, trust, & cognition, and to build more expressive interfaces between mind and machine. Augmented reality is co-evolving with augmented physiology.

In it’s current and most-visualized form, augmented reality is clunky and awkward, merely suggesting a future of seamless integration between computation & cognition. Yet the visions being painted by the pioneers are deeply compelling and illustrate a near-future of a more malleable world richly overlaid with information & interface. As AR begins to render more ubiquitously across the landscape, as more & more phones & objects become smart and connected, the requirements for advancing human-computer interface will create exceptional challenges & astonishing results. Indeed, imagine the interface elements of a fully-augmented and interactive merging between analog & digital, between mind & machine… How do you use your mind to “click” on an object? How will the object communicate & interact with you? How do you filter data & interactions out from simple social transactions? How do you obfuscate the layers of data rising off your activities & thoughts? And what are the challenges of having many different opt-in or opt-out realities running in parallel?

Humans have just crossed the threshold into the Information Age. The sheer speed of the uptake is mind-bending as our world is morphing everyday into the science fictional future we spent the last century dreaming of. We may not really need the latest advances in creative advertising (similarly driven to get closer and closer to us) but it’s inarguable that both humans & the planetary ecology would benefit from a glance at a stream that instantly reveals a profile of the pollutants contained within, tagged by call-outs showing the top ten contributing upstream sources and the profiles of their CEOs – with email, Facebook, Twitter, and newsburst links at the ready. Examples and opportunities abound, perhaps best left to the authors and innovators of the future to sort out in a flurry of sensemods, augs, and biosims.

There are, of course, many challenges and unforeseen contingencies. The rapid re-wiring of the fundamental interface that such “capably murderous” creatures as us have with the natural world, and the attendant blurring of the lines between real & fabricated, should give pause to the most fevered anticipatory optimists. In a very near future, perhaps 10 or 15 years ahead, amidst an age of inconceivable change, we’ll have broken open the box, painted the walls with our minds, and wired the species and the planet to instantaneous collaboration and expression, with massively constructive and destructive tools at our fingertips. What dreams and nightmares may be realized when the apes attain such godhood? When technology evolves at a lightning pace, yet the human psyche remains at best adolescent, will we pull it off without going nuclear? Will the adaptive expressions of our age save us in time? I think they will, if we design them right and fairly acknowledge the deeply biological drivers working through the technologies we extrude.

[Acknowledgements: Tish Shute & Ugo Trade; Zack Lynch and his book The Neuro Revolution; conversations with fellow researchers at IFTF; and many others listed in the Signtific Lab tag for ProgrammableEverything.]

[Cross-posted from Signtific Lab.]

While most would support using technology to allow parapalegics to walk again, to help the blind to see and the deaf to hear, how will society view those who electively enhance themselves through prosthetics & implants?

Consider the not-so-subtle marginalization of transhumanists who believe that technology should be readily integrated into human biology, experimenting with their own crude body modifications. Or the implications around personal security and privacy (not to mention religious fear) raised by those intrepid folks who are self-implanting RFIDs into their forearms to activate lighting & appliances when they enter their homes. Even the international debates over performance-enhancing drug use by athletes reinforces the cultural belief that a “natural” baseline range exists for human abilities and any “synthetic” modification beyond the accepted range is considered unfair.

From issues of fairness to those of security and trust, integrating more machinery into a programmable nervous system challenges many of the fundamental notions we have of what it means to be human. When a Marine returns from a warzone patched up with a cochlear implant, how will they be regarded when it’s revealed that they can hear you speaking from 3 blocks away? Imagine if that person then enters the Police force, what issues of civil liberty and privacy might be confronted? How might we regard an employer that suggests each employee be programmed with software to bring them into the corporate Thinkmesh?

How does society’s regard for a technology change when that technology becomes part of our bodies? How does our relationship to people change if we know they are different? What competitive advantages are conferred by these technologies and how will they be reinforced by socioeconomic drivers? What gaps might arise between those able to afford augmentations and those who cannot?

And what becomes of the Platonic sense of one fundamental Reality when more & more people are seeing personalized variations of the world mediated by connected devices? Will the merging of technology & flesh enable a more cohesive & effective society or a more fragmented and divisive one?

Thus far humans have worked from a standard body map that allows us to understand ourselves and project that understanding onto all other classes of our species. We will likely bring both our sense of membership as well as our fear of otherness with us as we begin to internalize machines unevenly across cultures.

The first is Health Care 2020 and asks players (you!) to offer input on 4 possible scenarios for the future of health care and what it could look like in the year 2020.

The second project is in conjunction with the American Chemical Society and asks players to consider a future of abundant energy. From the site:

Welcome to 2026. Our world is burning brightly. The “new energy” is abundant, portable, and cheap. Energy distribution is different, too.
In fact, the whole world has changed:
1. New materials have emerged to drive this dramatic transformation.
2. Green chemistry has reshaped entire industries.
3. World markets fluctuate as new technologies shift the value of materials.
4. The availability of massive and portable energy presents new opportunities for communities, corporations, and countries.
5. It also redefines the meaning of mobility and security.
So what do you think happens next? What’s the fate of our nation’s network of wires? How does this new energy change the future of space exploration? What possible human health risks arise as we expand our use of these options? Do you see signals of a surprising new future in this scenario of abundant energy?

Please participate and add your voice and vision to the superstructing of our tomorrow’s!