Surrounded by unseen presences

Last year I wrote a review of Margaret Chan’s book, Ritual is Theatre: Theatre is Ritual, about Chinese Spirit Mediums in Singapore. Here’s an interesting clip that I just found on YouTube:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, probably provoked by reading William Gibson’s latest novel, and by some articles about gaming technology.

Gibson was one of the first to discuss how virtual presences might manifest themselves in the real world. In Count Zero, it was achieved through biochips physically implanted in the brain, allowing a virtual entity to possess a human (a process shown again, using a slightly different technology, in the Matrix sequels, where Agent Smith manages to leave the Matrix and take over a human body).

I ‘m not going quite that far here, but I’m wondering where we’re going with the convergence of:

• virtual communities
• customisable online avatars
• augmented reality (AR)
• ubiquitous wireless access
• unobtrusive personal/mobile computing
• omnipresence

AR and mobile computing are now pretty much ready to go. I find this French clip very interesting for several reasons:

• the computers and goggles that the people in the clip are using are pretty unobtrusive; if they walked past you in the street you wouldn’t necessarily notice anything unusual;
• the “locative art” is multi-user; they are all seeing and interacting with the same virtual objects;
• the virtual ‘life-forms’ don’t do much in this clip… but what could they do?
• the augmentation of reality isn’t confined to adding in objects and entities; it also redraws the location – for example, at the end of the clip, by redrawing the actual walls, adding in water, and so on.

The clip suggests to me that this kind of technology and experience will be mainstream soon. Probably the first steps will be to move gaming, and environments similar to Second Life out into the real world; keyboards and monitors will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.

The extension of Second Life et al into augmented reality is one element of what I find interesting here. In Second Life, I have an avatar – which could look realistic, or not. In augmented reality, I will be physically present in one place, but why should I not have one or more avatars roaming other ‘real’ places. As artists get closer to bridging the uncanny valley, my avatar could be completely realistic. It could potentially use game-style AI to model my real behaviour, even when I was not actively controlling or monitoring it. To someone else immersed in AR, it may not be possible to tell if this is the ‘real’ me without taking off the goggles.

I will also be interacting with avatars. Some will belong to people I know personally in real life. Some will be people I only know from online interaction. Some will be intelligent agents, and others will be AI-driven NPCs. This is where things get a little strange, because the motivations and abilities of all but the first group are essentially unknown. If you and I know each other only from online interactions, then we are each dealing with a construct we ourselves have developed, interpreting the information we have given each other as well as observed behaviour. I cannot know whether you are in fact a real individual. Thus, in Second Life one avatar, Wilde Cunningham, is actually controlled by a group of people; if I were to meet Wilde without knowing this, his behaviour might seem very erratic, and part of my sense-making would be to rationalize and explain variations in his speech and actions. Other, seemingly real, persons may not have any real-world person controlling them; they may be software controlled, but I still may not be able to tell without exiting AR.

This leads me to omnipresence. We’re already accustomed to this: through internet chat like MSN, Skype, Twitter, and so on, our friends are ‘always there’, to be contacted when we need them… IF we can get their attention! How is this going to work in AR? Will be call their name and see their avatar materialise before us? Will we constantly surrounded by their ghostly shapes, which only solidify as they interact with us?

Other issues involve dealing with avatars and agents who have better software, faster connections, wider knowledge, and superior connections… there are a lot of variables here.

Where this leads me is to wonder how behaviour will change once augmented behaviour becomes normal. Believers in voodoo – the metaphor used by Gibson – as well as the tang-ki mediums of the Singaporean Daoists, all believe that we are surrounded by unseen enitities who can be called upon. Some are friendly, some are not; some are predictable, some are not; some are powerful, some are not.

Do these traditional beliefs give us behavioral patterns, metaphors, and tools that we can draw upon as we design systems from e-commerce to e-learning, or social and gaming systems? Will we find that people tend to default to this kind of behaviour and sense-making?

My feeling is yes. Although the pieces for widespread AR are all present today, they haven’t been put together yet. When they are, people are going to find it very strange. After all, to someone from my grandparents’ generation (of that ‘rational’ but un-computerised world), explanations from a traditional spirit medium and from an AR-enabled person, of their respective experience of the world would seem equally incredible and incomprehensible – but sharing many similarities. I suspect that as people try to cope with the very different AR world, they will look backwards for tools and concepts that help their adaptation. I also suspect that unanticipated consequences will result!

Update

This clip gives an excellent introduction; the book it’s introducing is already being advertised on the sides of buses here in Singapore: