Hyper-Reality [video] | Hacker News Reader

Hyper-Reality [video]

vimeo.com

301 pointsdumindunuwan108 comments

At 4:00 you can see that not much of the world has actually changed other than having tracking markers added everywhere: https://imgur.com/ffgbpjb.

So the tech depicted here is actually less advanced than we what we have today (Hololens etc are all trackerless). Other than having a compact form for glasses this kind of reality is achievable in just a couple more years.

Despite the theme of the video I am looking forward to it. The first decade of having the internet sucked too with geocities design and crazy popups/viruses on every click. But I wouldn't choose an alternate reality where the internet didn't exist at all.

We should be more optimistic that all of these UI issues will be figured out once it actually gets adoption.

You forget about batteries. We are probably able to do VR/AR stuff like this in a few years but we won't have the energy to implement them as wearables. It will take a lot of progress or some kind of massive breakthrough in battery technology to actually produce good non-trivial wearables.

The hololens can already last 5.5 hours so it doesn't seem that impossible of a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AADEqLIALk. The dealbreaker right now seems to be resolution and a narrow field of view where it "is like standing 2 feet away from a 15″ monitor".

As someone not in this field, I have no idea if the remaining problems are going to take more than another few years to solve but I hope not!

5.5h is nothing. It's not long enough that you can use it the entire day, it's not even long enough in a work environment. 5.5h may be enough for gaming or something but apart from that, it's just too limiting.

Additionally to that the Hololens is also quite bulky, so it's not like you can sacrifice on the design to create more battery capacity. It already doesn't look like something anyone would want to wear outside.

Even if you improve the battery capacity, increase efficiency of the hardware and software and you still have something you can't really sell anyone as a AR-utopia level device, just on account of that design.

I'd expect it to take at least a decade until you'll see regular people wearing AR glasses regularly as a personal device during their daily life.

For anyone interested in those markers on the side: These seem to be AprilTags (http://people.csail.mit.edu/kaess/apriltags/). They are optimized for this kind of application.

@rawnlq: "We should be more optimistic that all of these UI issues will be figured out once it actually gets adoption."

The future as nightmare more likely. The theme of the video is how this technology is going to further alienate people rather than facilitate communication. You can already see a contemporary version where people everywhere, faces buried in their devices obsessively txting and no doubt looking up their 'friends' on Facebook. Anything but instigate a conversation with the person sitting next to them. See 'The Congress (2013)' for an interesting variation on the theme. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/

>You can already see a contemporary version where people everywhere, faces buried in their devices obsessively txting and no doubt looking up their 'friends' on Facebook.

Yeah, and the response to that is "people were always doing that". As if some billions of us weren't around in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and even 00's to see what the real case was, and will be convinced by such bs.

Mostly inevitable, a little terrifying, but also some really creative use cases I'd never pondered there, especially highlighting the street when traffic is about to come through. There's probably a lot more interesting ideas to ponder in this video then just "boo hoo ads", if you can "open your mind, Quaid"...

In David Brins "Existence" he has this exact same AR, where the government controls some channels, there are other commercial channels and hacker channels. I think it's a really neat idea.

In his world there were also tiny cameras everywhere and you could connect to them (for a tiny price) view the feed and any recordings.

The scifi-cyberpunk-geek in me can't wait for wearables like this! This is an exaggerated view of what can happen but also not too unfathomable. And yes there we'll be ads and unnecessary gamification, but like you noticed in the video, there will also be very useful technology as well.

Some positive things I took away from this:

- Real-time language translation

- integrating map and directions into your view

- (as you mentioned) clear and evident warnings that you couldn't cross the street

- be able to add more information about products at stores. I know this similar to advertising, but if you're at a grocery store and are able to get more info about products immediately, I see that a plus.

- The fact that you have an HUD for all your apps helps reduce "text-neck" sprain and also allows for ease of walking and and being on your device.

- Fashion. The one person who attacked her, while that part being a negative experience, her body was covered in videos. I can foresee the fashion industry becoming more involved with this tech. (I think Snow Crash dealt with this in the virtual world part of the novel)

I think the attacker has camouflage that obscures their identity. Also I believe the attacker used her blood to do bypass biometric verification and fully take over her account (draining all her points).

If you liked this video I'd highly recommend two episodes of the British series "Black Mirror." Check out "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Entire History of You."

List of Black Mirror episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes

So, yeah, we'll live in a nightmare of advertising and triviality, but we'll finally be able to "highlighting the street when traffic is about to come through" -- which was never much of an issue anyway.

Reminds me of all those grand visions of why we need a fridge connected to the internet to automatically order groceries for us.

Such, a breakthrough.

But you know what, I can order groceries just fine. And I can automate that in 20 ways from the web, even without the fridge (especially since grocery shopping is periodic).

How about the future giving me more actual vacation time instead of such "time savings"? Now THAT would be a breakthrough.

So fired up! The good news is that there is more than one programmer in the world and we can spend time on both things.

Yeah, but the bad news is that most marketed things land in the first category. Else we'll be working the 3-day week by now...

Also see "Sight", another short film with a similar premise: https://vimeo.com/46304267

This is worth watching for the end credits especially.

Credits are pretty cool. I haven't watched them before (I've seen the video, but didn't pay attention past the end of the action). One thing I've noticed is an interesting design dark pattern. If you look at the "stats" of the film crew, you can see that the "level 0" of the bars is past the label - which, without a low stat to compare with, makes them look longer than they should be. Not sure if they did this on purpose to bring some point across or not, but this kind of stuff happens often in real-world publications and is done to mislead readers.

This reminds me of "Enter the Void". Both films are in first person, and draw emphasis to the difference between external reality and personal perception.

New "augmented reality" stuff is super interesting to me because it's basically the means of creating a shared illusion. So, like a drug trip, but more social and controlled. Basically like video games, but way larger in scale and social reach :)

Thoughts?

My thought? Not sure if I want a lot of that illusion to be shared. I wish AR would be used to really augment people, and that for me implies a degree of customization.

This topic is super interesting to me too. I just don't want it to look like on that video...

I'm with you on your last point. But I really don't think that this film is an accurate representation of what it'll be like at all. Unless you really wanted to make it that way for yourself, which neither you nor I would want

Movie seems to indicate lots of customization. Same yoghurt is branded/marketed differently when see as 'Emillio'. Dog pet shopping assistant becomes scantily clad women.

> New "augmented reality" stuff is super interesting to me because it's basically the means of creating a shared illusion. So, like a drug trip, but more social and controlled. Basically like video games, but way larger in scale and social reach :)

Would you want to be constantly immersed in a video game with your friends/family? Or even the same social groups? That idea does nothing for me... it's actually a huge turn-off from AR. If I just wanted trippy graphics with friends, I'd go on a shroom camping trip with friends.

In my mind, AR is about automating and building context. It's the first cybernetic, tightly integrating our visual/auditory senses with technology. Video games, re-skinning reality, omnipresent advertising... none of that will surprise me, that's updating current applications to use new technology.

Boring.

What about new applications? Imagine working on a car engine and hitting a snag, snapping off a seized bolt head for example. AR should recognize that I'm staring at a car engine, grunting in frustration, with elevated heart rate/sweat and other physiological symptoms of stress. The application should use those signals to look at my contact list (integrating their social media context) and suggest calling a mechanically inclined friend for advice. It should know that I hate animated graphics covering my work and simply talk, telling me that John might be able to help out if I buy him some beer. At some point it might even be smart enough to warn me against snapping the bolt head in the first place..

Or imagine project management style stuff. AR should know I'm 24 minutes away from my next meeting by foot and tell me to start walking (offering to reserve a taxi at the same time). Once I start walking, AR should automatically start giving me meeting prep (notes I prepared beforehand, meeting invite body, who's on the meeting invite list, etc). It should also show me a line that will take me all the way to the meeting room, and highlight the right button on any elevators on the way.

Imagine I'm painting a large canvas piece. Instead of lugging around a handful of sketches, putting them away and taking them out every time I work on the piece, AR can display (or even overlay) hundreds of sketches (letting me position them as I see fit). It can remind me that a particular part of the canvas is still wet, or when I can start painting over a section. Even better, it could show me contextual paint reviews when I'm at the shop... recommending certain brands because the colors dry true, or any number of personally relevant metrics (pulled from past internet search history).

Augmented reality: Adding to reality.

Virtual reality: Replacing reality.

That's a valid distinction -- I really didn't mean to conflate the two.

I guess I'm imagining a shared super-reality, not an alternative reality, which I didn't make clear.

What would a shared super-reality look like?

Basically Hololens demos... Holographic objects that you interact with socially.

You could use these objects for design, planning, entertainment, expression... Maybe holographic programming. And all of it in the context of shared visualization.

I see obvious enterprise solutions around graphical design, and the artistic applications are very exciting... I just don't see shared visualization playing a big role in the lives of every-day consumers. Maybe we just have different thresholds for how visually intrusive AR should be.

> This reminds me of "Enter the Void".

I remember seeing that. It was a profoundly disturbing, unsettling experience. It's a good, well-made film, but what it portrayed was really scary.

We are working really hard to make the underlying infrastructure of this type of interface a reality.

I think every day about how to build these capabilities, without them becoming overwhelming like you see in the video.

Everything from how to interface (gesture actually sucks: non-haptic, unnatural), to how to serve contextual data using natural visual input without relying on engineered visual markers (QR codes etc...).

We have come a long way from the infrastructure perspective (mobile visual mapping and re-localization) and are really looking forward to having better visual interfaces - though they are years away from becoming mainstream.

One other thing that nobody has commented on, that is critical to these systems working is having content. 3D content is an order of magnitude harder to build than 2D content, so that is also a big focus of ours.

3D content is an order of magnitude harder to build than 2D content

Not really. It requires a different process and a different training regimen. ZBrush makes 3D content creation easy enough that you can be done with the dog model in the video in a matter of minutes, but only if you're trained with ZBrush.

but only if you're trained with ZBrush

Only proving my point - but not really taking it far enough. If I asked the average designer to give me an image of a dog for my website/app etc... they could do it incredibly easy. Either get a dog and take a picture with a regular camera, maybe crop and edit or find/edit many of the ones you see now in well known software.

If I asked that same group to make me a 3D model of a dog it would be literally orders of magnitude more complex. Knowing a 3D interface takes quite a bit of time. Building the model, especially if you want any kind of accuracy, even moreso.

That group isn't qualified to do the task that you're asking them to do.

There are different types of artists. A 3D artist isn't the same as a 2D artist, which isn't the same as a designer.

It wouldn't make sense to ask a devop to write you a website, then claim that webdev was an order of magnitude more difficult than devops.

That group isn't qualified to do the task that you're asking them to do.

Again, this is my point. The number of 3D content developers is staggeringly low for the amount of content that needs to be created. Irrespective of that, for comparable skill levels the time it takes to produce 3D content again dwarfs that of 2D content - often cause you need a lot of structured 2D content for it to be shaded and texture mapped/baked correctly.

for comparable skill levels the time it takes to produce 3D content again dwarfs that of 2D content

In my experience, the skill levels can't be compared like that. A 3D artist is a difference in kind from a 2D artist.

It's not nearly as difficult to create 3D content as you're suggesting, though.

you need a lot of structured 2D content for it to be shaded and texture mapped/baked correctly.

Actually, this isn't how ZBrush works. You can paint your model in whatever fashion you want. There's no structure needed, and no baking process. The final step is to convert the high-res painted model into a low-res exportable version, which is largely an automatic process.

Your points appear to be (a) many more people are trained in Photoshop than ZBrush, and (b) ZBrush isn't Photoshop. That's true.

It's not nearly as difficult to create 3D content as you're suggesting, though.

Not to go all "appeal to expert" here but I've been 3D modeling since the mid-90s. My company is deep into 3D rendering, scanning and content generation. Creating something in 3D is trivial. Creating something that looks like something with accurate scale, correct UV mapping and polygon normalizing is a highly technical skill which increases in difficulty logistically.

It takes our expert modeling team at the absolute fastest, 1 hour to build a single 3D model of a small 5 foot long sofa, without baked textures or high quality detail. Compare that to lighting and taking a photograph of the same sofa in a studio. Actually this is an interesting comparison because we have worked so heavily on this particular problem.

I know how Z-Brush works. All I can say is that it is not how you create content for VR/AR - it's not high enough precision and it's really only suited for "organic" 3D modeling. Characters? Sure. Environments, engineered objects, interfaces? Absolutely not.

No the point is, "content" as generated today - by your average Joe in the form of 2D images and text, or by retailers/designers in the form of 2D product pictures, is trivial to produce and takes marginal skill. The content of AR is 3D. Your average Joe cant produce it at all, most retailers/designers have no clue how they would start, and those who do know can't find enough 3D modelers to keep up with demand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPf1V-_Z6E8#t=33m34s

I appreciate how much thought and effort you've put into your replies. It's reciprocated. But I think at this point we should agree to disagree.

This is comparable to showing me this and saying that Paint is a good tool for content creation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EemkRXpoeEg

Ben is the outlier of outliers - the guy is a design genius and worked years at Weta.

Best of luck.

Wonderfully done. Both this and the Domestic Robocop one they did six years ago linked by 'Karunamon. I appreciate the density. Lots of detail to read into.

Two pieces this was reminiscent of and I'd suggest, if you're interested, are:

  Black Mirror
    especially Series 1 Episode 2 "Fifteen Million Merits" 
  and 
  Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem

That "speech" in that Black Mirror episode for me is up there with the "Network" rant.

> All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'd break us. We're too numb for it.

I saw this last week. I couldn't tell whether it was utopia or dystopia, yet recognized how many of the present-day technology and trends will result in something like that. Seeing it all together in a first-person perspective like that was startling.

Dukkha, that is, the existential anguish (Sisiphyus) is present, whether technology is sophisticated enough or not. Technology cannot address dukkha.

It also resembled some of the psychedelic experiences I had, yet not quite -- for example, the way colors overlay the streets and grocery store aisle is close, and yet, the sense that the symbols overlaying are conscious, sentient, and alive is missing. The way you move through space and have the visual and audio overlay change the space around you reminds me of some of the way journeying happens. It is also interesting how, when the devices rebooted and the colors of the world bled out, gives the same kind of contrast that some people feel when their initial spiritual awakening experience fades. Lastly, in a psychedelic experience, there is a connection between the inner experience and the outer experience; this set of technology does not give that sense.

You need to see "Enter the Void"

How come?

it's entirely shot in a continuous first person like this video, but incorporates explicitly psychedelic elements. the first scene of the film has the protagonist smoking DMT and showing the visuals, which persist to some degree through the film

Sure, that's great. Or I can meditate or do a ceremony and get a first-hand journey like that. Why watch a film?*

In Hyper-Reality, it's showing an experience where mainstream access to VR and AR gives mainstream access to some of the psychedelic experiences, and what that says about our civilization, and what's coming in the future. When I read the Wikipedia entry for "Enter the Void" does not seem as interesting to me.

* I do watch films like this. My point though isn't that Hyper Reality resembles a psychedelic experience, but that it gives us a glimpse of the future where pseudo-psychedelic consciousness shift is available in the mainstream, and part of the fabric of every day experience.

No pressure, just thought you might like it. It's got a take on reincarnation that you might find interesting to think about.

It's an extremely visual film -- as an experience it's nothing like its Wikipedia entry :)

Ok, I'll check it out sometime.

Out of curiosity, what's the take on reincarnation? I saw it draws some ideas from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Is the take it has something that is a twist on those ideas, or is it more that it's bringing the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" out in a visual display that's interesting?

I know nothing about the Tibetan book of the dead, but it portrays the experience of death as an infinite psychedelic experience. (At least that's how I surmise it -- others might justifiably disagree.) To me this seemed prescient because I've heard of DMT users they've lived out entire lifetimes during their trips... Got me thinking that maybe, since our brains (proportedly) release DMT when we die, it could be a different sort of experience than just entering an infinite blackness.

I'll have to check out Vistas of Infinity :)

Oh I see: http://filmmakermagazine.com/142-gaspar-noes-enter-the-void-...

Check out the book, "Vistas of Infinity" sometime.

This looks so hyper-active that I'd honestly be completely overwhelmed by the amount of 'information' pushed at me that I'd just end up a blubbering mess lying in the fetal position until somebody turned 'reality' off.

(I mean, obviously that doesn't say anything about whether it'll happen or not, but I really don't want this to happen. It looks like an incredibly scary and above all vapid state to be in.)

EDIT: Btw, wasn't this posted a few days ago? Can't find it, but I'm pretty sure I saw this around here. (Then again, maybe I saw it on reddit.)

This is the reality companies would like you to embrace, only on the web and mobile because AR is not yet here. The video isn't that far from the way an average non-tech person experiences their smartphone and the Internet.

About the amount of information - humans are good at tuning things out. Banner blindness, and all. But what really bothers me about that vision is the amount of bullshit that's pushed on people. All forms of interruptions trying to make you buy more stuff or interact with some useless crap (also known nowadays as "user engagement"). AR could be an awesome tools. Maybe it will be - if we can keep the people who ruined the mobile and the web out of it. I don't see how to do it though, especially if we're talking commercial devices for non-tech people.

As a counterbalance, here's a video from 7 years ago, which makes me appreciate the idea of AR / VR on many different levels: https://vimeo.com/3365942.

> All forms of interruptions trying

Yes, exactly. What really struck/scared me was how this kind of AR would really prevent me from concentrating on anything for more than 1 second at a time.

I'm sure commercial interests would want this type of thing, but presumably they'll need some humans to actually pay attention to things so that they actually have some pool of people to recruit programmers from... but maybe they aren't thinking that far ahead. Maybe the 'dead end' for humanity will just be some type of AR where there's no way out because there's nobody outside AR enough to do anything else than just sit there in rapt attention. Hmmm... maybe I just had an idea for a dystopian sci-fi novel.[1]

[1] Yeah, somebody must have thought of this before.

EDIT: Just grammar and things. Plus, I discovered that I actually really like the word 'actual'.

Sounds very similar to wall-e.

Also all these things trying to grab your attention will be layered over time. You'll get used to them and it will be completely normal at some point to have all that stuff blinking at you trying to get your attention.

I imagine dropping someone from the year 1916 here today would generate a similar reaction.

Normal at the societal level.

Still lowering our IQ by a good 5-10 points.

Reminded me of the BBC "Sherlock" series, which attempts to represent visually Holmes' mental experience of gleaning information, hidden to normal people, from his highly developed observational skills. Specialized domain knowledge and active attention can indeed provide a kind of "information overlay" represented in this film, and without depending on a device. But I wonder how close to Holmes-style powers we can come through training ourselves to see beneath the surface?

Interesting observation. I got the impression from Sherlock (the series) that it's not really something that he can control, it just happens. That and, it's quite "low key", but definitely does affect his life in bad ways, but -- let's face it -- this is entertainment, so he doesn't end up destitute on the streets as a madman, but rather ends up as a sort of quaint Victorian (anti-hero)-hero who's "just a bit odd". Plus, it's fiction. If you had that kind of thing happening all the time in real life, you'd go insane or be autistic[1].

[1] Let me just be clear that I don't mean that in a derogatory manner. I'm not even a layman when it comes to autism, but I've read a couple of well-regarded books (by professionals in the field) and they describe it (among other things) as being in a state of constant sensory overload where e.g. repetitive actions become a sort of coping mechanism to deal with the overload.

I think that you're right, that it's supposed to "just happen". But I don't think it causes him any distress - what distress he does experience is caused by his having to live among normal people, who can't keep up. His conversations with his brother show that the latter experiences this impatience even more keenly.

This is faithful to Conan Doyle's stories, where his Holmes is always many steps ahead of the normals, and resorts to recreational drugs to deal with something like boredom from lack of stimulation.

In another TV adaptation of the Holmes stories, "House, MD", the main character shares a similar frustration with having to live among people who are merely highly intelligent.

True, he probably doesn't feel any distress, but he's somewhat shunned by society as a "weirdo", I think. (Not as much as he would be if it weren't fiction, but...)

Anyway, I'm off for the night, so I'll just leave this marvel of Sherlockia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5JEJiiSZCM

Oh, quite right. The original, an eccentric; House, an "ass"; BBC Sherlock, somewhat sinister and creepy.

I also asked myself whether I've seen it here a few days ago or perhaps it was on some other site - seems like this alone suggests how I'd handle a higher dose of information overload... :-)

Perhaps it's the generation gap - even though I love software technologies and do it for a living, looking at the younger generation in the family multitask across several applications while talking on the phone and watching TV makes me wonder if there's more here than just trading depth coverage for breadth coverage. I wonder whether they've actually extended and adapted to handling the current of information that would overwhelm me.

> EDIT: Btw, wasn't this posted a few days ago? Can't find it, but I'm pretty sure I saw this around here. (Then again, maybe I saw it on reddit.)

I think a bunch of folks have submitted this one (yep, click past on article).

Lost Memories https://vimeo.com/49425975 and its sequel https://vimeo.com/152889154 are also pretty good and focus a bit more on the human side.

This was my general reaction to shopping malls when I was a child and teenager.

The little shopping cart dog in this video reminds me how much I hate "gamification" in everyday products and services. It's rarely something that enhances your experience, and is there simply to separate you from your hard earned dollars.

If I want to be "gamified", I'll play the video game I purchased on my gaming machine.

Yeah but that scene was so on point! Especially how there is a cut to the next scene and the dog is wearing a hat, implying some achievement.

Such a great series of videos. Extremely well done, and horrifying because it seems plausible (even if only a little).

Haha it certainly was. I noticed that too. Even worse a part of me totally wanted to deck my virtual pet out in a top hat as well.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? We don't decry this stuff because it doesn't work, we decry it because it does.

With years of practice, I've metaphorically calloused myself against a lot of these things now. For instance, I'm nearly immune to the stupid "play half a commercial, post link to 'see how it ends'" technique I see every few months. By "immune" I don't mean that I no longer feel the draw, but that it is no longer anywhere near enough for me to actually do anything about it. But it took effort, and I find myself wondering, is there anything else I'm giving up to have that metaphorical callous? What are the consequences of the brain adaptations necessary to function under this constant cognitive assault?

(And I'm not at all sure the answer is easy. "More alienation" or "less empathy" are really snap answers, but at the level of detail I'm interested in, also vacuous. I'd really love to know but probably never will.)

Series of videos? There's more than one (and that other old one about making tea)?

Sorry I was including the other videos he has done, on his project site here: http://km.cx/projects/

Thanks!

If you think that is bad, take a look at the book "Metagame" by Sam Landstrom. The story itself is a bit far out there, but the parallels to what we see coming are a bit frightening.

>It's rarely something that enhances your experience, and is there simply to separate you from your hard earned dollars.

That describes 90% of the internet.

Heck, that describes 90% of social life.

I thought the part where her device was rebooted was chilling. I had never considered that a fully augmented reality could lead to a real world stripped of all its aesthetics to make room for AR target images to support the graphic overlays. And if everyone is lost in their own audio visual world, why should a grocery store even play background music anymore? It would be a sterile, alien world with your visor or whatever turned off.

What you seem to call aesthetics I personally call "ad litter". I think this type of AR-enabled world could be much prettier than the one we have today. Imagine how beautiful it would look if all ads moved to virtual reality and you turned off your AR set.

Speaking of which, one of the best features I could imagine for full-field-of-view AR would be an ad blocker for physical world.

But not just ads - artwork, facades, human-readable street signs, just about anything could be on the chopping block to enable a better AR experience. Imagine grinding the friezes off the Parthenon and replacing them with checkerboard patterns to enable 3D animated ones.

Lately I wear my headphones at the grocery store, and on the train. Part of it was culture shock; returning to the US and suddenly being able to understand everyone in a room, all the time. It was super overwhelming.

Now I keep doing it because I hate people. I hate human interaction. I hate the shitty music and adverts I hear in grocery stores. I prefer the self checkout and I can usually pack my bags better anyway.

I don't think that's a loss - I wear headphones when I go grocery shopping to avoid the background music.

Btw the creator Kickstarted this video: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/723600195/hyper-reality...

This same person did another movie along the same lines a while ago - this one in the home. I think the hyper-reality got quite a bit more hyper since last time...

https://vimeo.com/8569187

There's an interesting mechanic there. The person is seen modifying the advertising intensity while something to do with money comes up on the UI. It looks like you get paid to sit in crazy ad land, use the "service" for free with less (but still ridiculous) ads, and presumably, you'd pay for ad-free.

The implication you'd have to pay to not have your wallpaper be made of ads is by far the most depressing part of this video.

Reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits) that takes place in the future. In your room there are ads everywhere, and if you're not looking it stops and yells at you. To not see them you have to pay money.

My Amazon Kindle and Fire Tablet already do this. I would need to pay $15 for the ability to skin my Fire's lockscreen.

(Although it's much easier to not look at my devices, than to not look at my apartment's walls.)

What I found most disturbing in this short is how devoid of a personality the protagonist seems to be. She appears at times bored, annoyed, exhausted, lost – and all of these, yes, are marks of an individuality still present – but what happened after the AR hijack was revealing: after a moment of disorientation, once her AR system got back online, she simply walked to the closest AR stimulus, and promptly entered the game. This one happened to be a game of a Catholicist theme, but could probably have been about anything else. Her lack of pause, her willingness to enter a new game just for relief, for purpose, show how empty the protagonist is.

This world seems one where the self is constructed mostly from the gamified narratives of the AR system, whose creation mechanism is not revealed, but appears to lie completely beyond the reach of its consumers. Here there are, I think, hints of a free, wildly competitive market not only of goods and services, but most importantly of identities.

If something like this is in reach of our (imminent) technology, I hope we have the sense to avoid it becoming a reality.

You have to use your hands? That's a babies toy!

Seriously though. People are too lazy to use their hands to navigate an invisible interface. It's a lot more work than using a mouse and keyboard.

I don't know that it's laziness, as much as just fighting human evolution. With nothing to actually touch, touch-based interfacing with things isn't very easy. Our fingers are literally designed to feel input, not to act as a simple stylus for our optic nerve.

And anyway, this type of invisible interface makes you look dumb (http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-10-12).

Probably future UI will be people touching themselves and only occasionally waving in the air.

Creative, well done. Pretty much what we have today without all the AR.

... and people wonder why we use ad blockers.

(Btw, I agree that this was incredibly creative, imaginative and well-done. It's just really really scary.)

If anything I would appreciate an AR that FILTERED content.

Remove ugly things from the world and replace them with beautiful things. I think that might be something that people would put weird glasses on for.

Or auto format poor code

The extreme isolation here got under my skin. The immediacy and tangibility of all these illusory elements is frightening, particularly for children born into this environment.

Even if we solve the design issues, we remain sequestered in a simulation where there seems to be no respite. Guess I'm a sucker for authenticiy, whatever that still means.

Congrats to the filmmaker here for dramatizing extreme virtuality with nuanced storytelling.

Authenticity is...

http://catandgirl.com/?p=2291

Is "hyper" used in the "hyper-active" sense?

The video is portraying augmented reality (as satire about current marketing practices and corporate attempts to minmax everything). If I understand Baudrillard correctly, Disneyland or "reality" TV are hyperreal. To be hyperreal, wouldn't you would have to believe all the augmented ads/etc in the video were reality?

Reminds me a little of Porter Robinson's flicker (music video).

Recently I read a Scientific American article that suggested there may be a link between navigational ability and memory. If that's true, then push to "Always On" GPS/Navigational Support could have deleterious effects on our capacity for memory (this was one idea in the article)

I know it's supposed to be dystopian but I can't wait until this is reality.

Looks like it could be a Black Mirror episode.

Reminds me a bit of "Flicker", by Porter Robinson (music video)

I want this, but only if I can control exactly what I can see.

probably same way you do with the web, bit of css here and there, some plugin that drops contents from some sources wholesale...

And some people are still asking why use ad-block?

This video is a perfect summary of the state of mobile and the web. As 'cryowaffle said, it's pretty much what we have today, without the AR [0]. That's why I think the whole ecosystem around web and mobile technologies is sick and need to be fought against. We need less ads, less pseudoproducts that in fact are just toys, less routing everything through third-party clouds.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754750

I'm hoping the opposite will happen. That the advent of strong AI will bring us better ad blocking technology, that may even block ads using augmented reality techniques. Imagine all ads in real life replaced by beautiful paintings :)

Strong AI is most likely to bring 2 outcomes: salvation (if we're very careful), or doom (the default outcome). Because <very long argument about intelligence explosion>.

Anything in between is likely moot: at the very least, strong AI has the ability to end all jobs —overnight in the case of desk jobs. Ads and ad blocking are meaningless in comparison: what is the significance markets, money, and labour when the machines do all the work?

> Strong AI is most likely to bring 2 outcomes: salvation (if we're very careful), or doom (the default outcome).

Funny thing is, it's not like AI is going to make a landing here from outer space. It's not some external factor that we don't control. It's us who are building it. Any possible outcome could be avoided if we just stop working on it.

I know this is not going to happen, but I feel this is the kind of obvious thing that ought to be stated once in a while.

> Any possible outcome could be avoided if we just stop working on it.

Except we live in a world where selfish persons will and do use any advantage to get ahead, with little care for side effects so long as they get ahead. For every funded attempt at creating and controlling stronger ai that gets shut down because it's deemed unwieldy, others will not be so cautious. The cat will get out of the bag if we're ever able to create one.

Question: do you feel like anyone controls the behavior of any given international company? Or does the company control the people? These lines aren't so clear imho, just as it won't be clear as we give more and more power to intelligent computer systems.

That is dangerous enough before you even consider that governments are interested in this technology too; particularly DARPA has a history of throwing a lot of money at this problem. Even if suddenly the market decided it doesn't care about AI anymore, you still have countries competing with each other over military dominance.

> It's not some external factor that we don't control. It's us who are building it.

There's also another kind of obvious thing that ought to be stated every once in a while: that at this scale, we don't control shit.

There is no one on this planet who could ban AI research. Not one person, not one organization. What humanity as a whole is working on is determined mostly by factors like economic incentives and existing technology landscape - both of them now push us towards building more and more intelligent software. To stop that, you'd have to nuke the whole planet back to stone age.

rarely do i laugh out loud reading the web, but you got me ;-) very very true!

> Strong AI is most likely to bring 2 outcomes: salvation (if we're very careful), or doom (the default outcome).

Since the latter is so much more likely than the former, and since we're probably biased towards the former -- So long, it's been nice to know you!

And yet you're posting this on a site with virtually no visible advertising (do the job postings cost people money?). There will always be noisy parts of any environment. This video was like walking through a Vegas slot machine hall.

But people will always value simplicity and serenity. I don't see this as the future, but rather a very cynical view of the future.

If there is such a thing as the Illuminati, that is bent on destroying the human spirit - this is what I imagine their plans for the future world would entail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com