I wear a pair of AR glasses outside to get a sort of X-ray view of my world. I use it first to find good connectivity. The warmer the colors in the world, the closer I am to heavy-duty bandwidth. With AR on I can summon earlier historical views layered on top of whatever place I am looking at, a nifty trick I used extensively in Rome. There, a fully 3-D life-size intact Colosseum appeared synchronized over the ruins as I clambered through them. It’s an unforgettable experience. It also shows me comments virtually “nailed” to different spots in the city left by other visitors that are viewable only from that very place. I left a few notes in spots for others to discover as well. The app reveals all the underground service pipes and cables beneath the street, which I find nerdly fascinating. One of the weirder apps I found is one that will float the dollar value—in big red numbers—over everything you look at. Almost any subject I care about has an overlay app that displays it as an apparition. A fair amount of public art is now 3-D mirages. The plaza in our town square hosts an elaborate rotating 3-D projection that is refreshed twice a year, like a museum art show. Most of the buildings downtown are reskinned with alternative facades inside AR, each facade commissioned by an architect or artist. The city looks different each time I walk through it.
I wore VR goggles all through high school. These lightweight frames give a much more vivid image than glassless AR. In class I’d watch all kinds of simulations, especially how-to rehearsals. I preferred the “ghost” mode in maker classes, like cooking or electrical hacking. That is how I learned how to weld. In AR I slipped my hands into the position of the teacher’s ghostly virtual guide hands in order to correctly grip the virtual welding rod held against the virtual steel tube. I tried to move my hands to follow the ghost hands. My virtual welds were only as good as my actions. For sports I wore a full helmet display. I rehearsed my moves with 360-degree motion on a real field, shadowing a model shadow body. I also spend a lot of time practicing plays in VR in a room. A couple of sports, like broadswording, we played entirely inside VR.
At my “office” I wear an AR visor on my forehead. The visor is a curved band about hand width wide that is held a few inches away from my eyes for extra comfort during daylong use. The powerful visor throws up virtual screens all around me. I have about 12 virtual screens of all sizes and large data sets I can wrestle with my hands. The visor provides enough resolution and speed that most of my day I am communicating with virtual colleagues. But I see them in a real room, so I am fully present in reality as well. Their photorealistic 3-D avatar captures their life-size likeness accurately. My coworkers and I usually sit at a virtual table in a real room while we work independently, but we can walk around each other’s avatar. We converse and overhear each other just as if we are in the same room. It is so convenient to pop up an avatar that even if my real coworker is on the other side of the real room, we’ll just meet in the AR rather than walk across the gap.
When I want to get really serious about augmented reality, I’ll wear an AR roaming system. I put on special contact lenses that give me full 360-degree views and impeccable fictional apparitions. With the contacts on, it is very difficult to visually ascertain if what I see is fake—except that one part of my brain is aware that a seven-meter-tall Godzilla stalking the street is absolute fantasy. I wear a ring on one finger of each hand to track my gestures. Tiny lenses in my shirt and headband track my body orientation. And GPS in my pocket device tracks my location to within a few millimeters. I can thus wander through my hometown as if it were an alternative world or a game platform. When I rush through the real streets, ordinary objects and spaces are transformed into extraordinary objects and spaces. A real newspaper rack on the real sidewalk becomes an elaborate 22nd-century antigravity transponder in an AR game.
The most intense VR experience of all requires a full-body VR rig. It’s a lot of trouble so I suit up only occasionally. I have an amateur rig at home that includes a standing harness to prevent me from falling while I flail about. It gives me a full cardio workout while chasing dragons. In fact, VR harnesses have replaced exercise equipment in most basements. But once or twice a month I join some friends at the local realie theater to get access to state-of-the-art VR technology. Wearing my own silk underwear suit for hygienic purposes, I slip into an inflatable exoskeleton that closes around my limbs. This generates amazing haptic feedback. When I grasp a virtual object with my virtual hand, I feel its weight—the pressure against my hand—because the inflatable is squeezing my hand just the right amount. If I bump my shin against a rock in the virtual world, the sheath on my leg will “bump” my shin just so, making a totally believable sensation. A reclining seat holds my torso, giving me the option of doing genuinely felt jumps, flips, and dashes. And the accuracy of the super-hi-res helmet, with binaural sound and even real-time smells, creates a totally convincing presence. Within two minutes of entering, I usually forget where my real body is; I am elsewhere. The best part of a realie theater is that with zero latency 250 other people are sharing my world with equal verisimilitude. With them I can do real things in a fantasy world.
• • •
VR technology offers one more benefit to users. The strong presence generated by VR amplifies two paradoxically opposing traits. It enhances realness, so we might regard a fake world as real—the goal of many games and movies. And it encourages unrealness, fakery to the nth degree. For instance, it is easy to tweak the physics in VR to, say, remove gravity or friction, or to model fictional environments simulating alien planets—say, an underwater civilization. We can also alter our avatars to become other genders, other colors, or other species. For 25 years Jaron Lanier has talked about his desire to use VR to turn himself into a walking lobster. The software would swap his arms for claws, his ears for antennae, and his feet for a tail, not just visually, but kinetically. Recently at the Stanford VR lab Lanier’s dream came true. VR creation software is now agile and robust enough to quickly model such personal fantasies. Using the Stanford VR rig, I too got to modify my avatar. In the experiment, once I was in VR, my arms would become my feet, and my feet my arms. That is, to kick with my virtual foot I had to punch with my real arm. To test how well this inversion worked, I had to burst floating virtual balloons with my arms/feet and feet/arms. The first seconds were awkward and embarrassing. But amazingly, within a few minutes I could kick with my arms and punch with my feet. Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford professor who devised this experiment and uses VR as the ultimate sociological lab, discovered that it usually took a person only four minutes to completely rewire the feet/arm circuits in their brain. Our identities are far more fluid than we think.
That’s becoming a problem. It’s very difficult to determine how real someone online is. Outward appearances are easily manipulated. Someone may present himself as a lobster, but in reality he is a dreadlocked computer engineer. Formerly you could check their friends to ascertain realness. If a person online did not have any friends on social networks, they probably weren’t who they claimed to be. But now hackers/criminals/rebels can create puppet accounts, with imaginary friends and imaginary friends of friends, working for bogus companies with bogus Wikipedia entries. The most valuable asset that Facebook owns is not its software platform but the fact that it controls the “true name” identities of a billion people, which are verified from references of the true identities of friends and colleagues. That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook’s remarkable success. And it is fragile. The normal tests we used to prove who we are in digital worlds, such as passwords and captchas, no long work very well. A captcha is a visual puzzle that was easy for humans to solve, but hard for computers. Now humans have trouble solving them, while machines find it easier. Passwords are easily hacked or stolen. So what is the better solution than passwords? You, yourself.