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Deaugmenting Reality: When Less Is More

Following up on my entry about augmented reality, I did a little more reading and found the concept that deftly summarized what I’d been clumsily chasing: the Virtual Continuum, where you have the completely real on one end of the spectrum, the completely virtual on the other, and in the middle, a Mixed Reality, with pieces of the actual and the virtual worlds blended together:

Great, huh? So what’s it have to do with online communities and social media? Assuming that our connections to the hive mind (the shared community of people, knowledge, awareness, and experience present in our social networks) will only get stronger and more ubiquitous over time, it’ll probably be useful to see how that connection is going to work, and how it’s going to change how we interact with each other.

(Not that I have any notion of being right about this. Remember, some folks initially thought that the telephone’s primary use was going to be for broadcasting concerts and speeches into homes. No one can screw up futurists’  predictions better than people.)

One thing I want to take on with our current conception of AR is the idea that “more information” (adding contextual data over our sensory input) automatically means “better information,” leading to our being better informed, with stronger interactions, and ultimately making better decisions, etc.

Leaving aside fears of technology dependence and instead shifting to concerns about the limits of multitasking, distraction, and continuous partial attention, I think that AR, done poorly (think “the typical YouTube user’s implementation of annotations”), brings a very real danger of information overload, and that we should stop to see if there are any instances where we should stick with abstraction over reality.

Consider the fighter pilot. I recall an interview with some Vietnam-era combat pilots, who upon taking to the sky, would immediately start turning off alarm buzzers, bells, and other warnings, so that when they entered the chaos of a dogfight or ground attack, they wouldn’t be distracted from the truly important stuff.

Jump ahead a few technological generations, where in the latter part of the Cold War, there was a concept for an in-cockpit virtual reality display, which completely replaced an external view of the real environment, with a projected view of simplified geometric shapes and color-coded flight paths marking safe corridors through enemy air defense.

This was as much an artifact of the state of late 80s computer graphics technology as anything else, but it also sought to reduce information overload, by replacing reality with a simplified virtual view. In the nature of efficiency, it removed everything except the core bits of information needed to complete the mission.

(Of course, there’s a trust issue of relying completely on a virtual view, but that already happens today. For example, submariners have nothing but a virtual view; even pilots, in certain situations, are instructed to trust their instruments over their eyes, because of optical illusions that can lead to fatal crashes.)

What benefits might a deaugmented reality view of the world have for people who aren’t combat pilots? This could easily fly off into absurdity (e.g. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, that black out your vision at the hint of danger so you don’t see anything that might disturb you), though one idea I’d had is a real-world version for photosensitive epileptics — they’d detect triggering frequencies of light, and block them out. Or, a simplified view of crowded social situations, where people are replaced by color-coded silhouettes, noting people to approach or avoid.

(Perhaps I’m merely making a case for high-tech blinders. But even blinders can be useful sometimes.)

Anyway, I just wanted to throw out the concept of deaugmented reality, and the idea that sometimes you can add by subtracting. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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