Mobile outdoor augmented reality

tinmith.net

I can imagine a sci-fi plot in the not too distant future where augmented reality becomes a part of daily life, so much so that instead of buying pretty things, people just buy basic objects in real world and upload hi-res skins for their objects that others can see. Instead of buying a $200 lamp, I can just buy a $10 one and upload the corresponding skin to aug-real network. When my friends visit my home, they can choose to see the real-life version of the aug version. Most people will end up just defaulting to aug version because it's so much prettier. This is no different than Myspace profiles and extending them to the real-world.

There are a far few novels that cover this - for example: Fast Times at Fairmont High/Rainbow's End (near-future) and The Golden Age (far-future). The latter is interesting because covers the automated mediation of the interactions of people experiencing different realities.

Gibson's Virtual Light and his more recent works feature something along those lines.

In Spook Country, people create virtual sculptures that exist at a specific point in space that you can go see. It's "there", but you can't see it unless you're hooked into the right part of the network that feeds the information to you.

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