Hacking Happiness (17 page)

“Why is my foot wet?” I said, interrupting Bard as warm liquid seeped onto my right foot. I looked down to see my black loafer had a dark stain.

Bard spoke quietly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Chuck. Look.”

His screen switched to an image of me arriving at the platform downstairs from a few minutes ago. I saw my journey from the train and could tell I was in my game, since my eyes appeared glazed and distant. The camera views switched a few times, from commuters to station cameras and back. And then as I turned a corner, I saw myself stumble where I had kicked the sack of grain.

But it wasn’t a sack of grain. It was a homeless guy.

He had blocked my path, and I had stumbled hard into his arm. And then I watched in horror as I pulled my foot back and kicked him squarely in the face, breaking his nose. Blood poured onto my shoe as he clutched his face in agony while I simply took a step back while my points tallied.

“You weren’t supposed to kick the grain, Chuck,” said Bard. “That’s what the money signs are for. The game disguised Tom as a bag of grain so people would avoid him. Kicking good things means you lose points. But you were too fast. And Tom sat up at a bad time.”

I couldn’t move. That image of me kicking the homeless guy—Tom—kept playing over in my brain. It was an image I knew I’d never erase. And it wasn’t a game.

What kind of man am I?

I stood for a long moment, game-blinded commuters rushing by. For once I heard the sound of shoes on pavement—no sound track, no sound effects. This was reality. And it sucked.

“Chuck.”

I looked up. Bard had cleared his screen and the following words appeared slowly, one by one:

What are you prepared to do?

•

About a year later, on my birthday, Bard said he had a surprise for me.

“Turn on your CPRS game.”

I did, and my commuter sim turned on. Bard had hacked it so it was pointing downstairs, and I followed the arrow to the spot where I had kicked Tom. Instead of a sack of grain, I saw a huge virtual package with the words
The Impossible Idea
written on the side. An icon on the upper-left-hand corner of my vision flashed, indicating it would open if I moved my eyes quickly to the left.

My impossible idea had been fairly simple. I quit my job and volunteered at the Robin Hood Foundation to create an app that rewarded people for kind actions to the homeless in New York City. Gwyneth Paltrow was their spokesperson, and with her avatar in the sim, the game took off. Starbucks joined in, and pretty soon the pay-it-forward mantra went full swing in Penn Station. Within a few months, people donated their Klout perks and accountability bonuses so that actions generated behavior change as well as words.

So now I looked at the spot where I had kicked Tom and my life had transformed by mistake. I moved my eyes to the left, and the virtual package fell open.

And I saw Tom. He was clean-shaven, waving and smiling. He was piped in via Skype and virtual, wearing the Robin Hood T-shirt they’d given him the day we first met. He’d gone from being a volunteer to a full-time staff member and gotten the first assisted-living residence made via profits from my app.

I smiled. “Thanks, Bard.”

Staring at the spot, I blinked three times rapidly to turn off my sim contact lenses. My vision cleared of all icons, layers disappearing between me and the empty pavement where Tom used to lie.

And it was empty.
²

From (Cyber) Punk to Possible

I’ve been a science fiction fan since I was a boy, watching
Star Trek
with my dad and brother, and then seeing
Star Wars
in the theater when it first came out. Years later I devoured the work of people like Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein before falling into a geeky bromance with cyberpunk fiction from writers like Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson. Dick wrote
Minority Report
, which was made into one of the greatest cyberpunk films of all time, featuring Tom Cruise as a police officer who utilized augmented reality technology to stop murders that hadn’t yet occurred. Augmented reality, or AR, is a term coined by Tom Caudell from Boeing in 1990, as noted by Brian X. Chen in
Wired
.
³
Caudell created the term based on a head-mounted, hands-free interface used by workers assembling airplanes. Digital data overlaid on the glasses in front of workers’ eyes let them see reality (the plane) with augmentation (instructions in real time on what to fix). Beyond the convenience for workers, the technology set the stage for combining virtual and physical reality.

There are a lot of desktop-based applications of augmented
reality utilizing your webcam, but my fascination has always been with mobile AR. Whether you’re using your phone screen, a tablet, Google Glass, or eventually contact lenses, the idea of hands-free mobile computing is transformational. When images appear in front of your vision based on what you’re looking at, the technology simply feels magical.

I first wrote about AR for
iMedia Connection
in the article “Augmented Reality: What Marketers Need to Know.” Here’s how I described the future of AR:

The seminal promise of AR is as the touchstone technology allowing social networks, geo-based tracking, and the semantic Web to converge. Put less geekily, think of AR as your personalized digital butler, who will get to know your behavior so specifically that it can prethink your choices based on your friends, location, and how you search online. The cyberpunk fictions have come to reality with AR, and the cultural ramifications are as powerful as the marketing opportunities.
⁴

At the time I wrote the piece, most of my marketing friends felt AR was gimmicky and only useful for gaming applications. But I saw AR as a type of wearable computer, an idea that’s pretty simple—you take the mobile phone you’re already carrying (which is a computer) and put it in front of your eyes to access information. The big differentiator for augmented reality, however, is how digital data can be placed over what you’re seeing on your mobile screen based on what you’re looking at. In this way, as I often say, augmented reality’s main staying power comes in the fact that it’s a
browser
⁵
versus just an application. It lets you look at digital data you can’t see unless you’re using AR technology.

I call this greater world you look at via augmented reality the Outernet. Instead of having to turn on your computer or look down at your phone, when you’re using an AR-based technology, the
Outernet is already all around you. You’re used to this idea, for instance, if you’ve got an Xbox and use the Kinect gaming system. I wrote about this in
iMedia
: Kinect recognizes your movements using AR with video games as you play in your living room. Using something called haptic technology, you don’t even need a controller; using your hands and body, the system recognizes your movements that characters in the game respond to.

There’s another great AR game created by Georgia Tech called ARhrrrr that lets you kill zombies by using your mobile phone and their augmented reality app. By pointing your phone at a physical map that serves as an image marker for the game, the system recognizes your movements as you move around and try to kill zombies. An intriguing feature of the game also comes when you place a physical object on the map, like a Skittles candy. The creatures in the game react to the candy that acts like a bomb in the augmented environment. A consumer application of this technology would be for a coaster at a restaurant: Kids could play an AR game while waiting for a soda.

Technology oftentimes gets adopted faster for the pragmatic uses it offers versus a more gimmicky application. In that sense, one of my favorite augmented reality apps is New York Nearest Subway from a company called acrossair. I’ve lived in the greater New York City area for over twenty years, and I still get lost in SoHo. When you look through your mobile phone screen using New York Nearest Subway, you see a visual icon based on the nearest subway transit station. So if a floating letter “N” is in the right-hand part of your screen, turn to the right and head to that train. It’s a great way to get a sense of how pervasive AR will become in the future with these types of applications.

The possibilities for AR technologies are limitless in the same way that Internet applications know no bounds. The primary reason the technology hasn’t become ubiquitous yet is that it’s only available on smartphones, and things like phone processor speeds
have been slow up until the past few years. But those issues have been diminishing as time wears on. There was also an era when physical markers were needed for augmented reality to work (black X-shaped boxes similar to QR codes). Then image recognition came into play, where you can simply hold your phone up to a photo or object that is recognized by the AR tech and projects a digital image over your screen.

Here are some other examples of how augmented reality is currently being used:

• In cars—General Motors created an AR-enabled windshield.
  ⁶
  
• In surgery—the Scopis Surgical Navigation System provides guided visualizations.
  ⁷
  
• In retail—German AR company Metaio provided Ikea with an AR-enabled catalog.
  ⁸
  
• In dating—the short film
  Sight
  shows AR and facial recognition used for dating.
  ⁹
  
• In art—projection mapping on walls uses AR light shows to entertain.
  ¹⁰
  

The Future and the Financials

“We believe that physical real estate will become a valuable commodity once augmented reality–capable devices are ubiquitous.” Wedge Martin is a cofounder of GeoPapyrus, an AR company that lets you publish and interact with social content such as photos, videos, audio, or websites by browsing physical elements (frames, windows, buildings, books) from the real environment around you. I asked Wedge why he created the company.

Right now, people pay ten thousand dollars a month to advertise on a billboard when they have no idea how many people will look at it. We want to find ways to increase
engagement for these types of environments as well as other physical spaces. In essence, if we increase people’s interaction with the physical side of things, we’ll be bringing “social networking” back into the real world—that place where people walk around and get fresh air we feel has been hugely underrated as of late.
¹¹

Wedge and GeoPapyrus are addressing an idea I wrote about in Mashable a few years back called Virtual Air Rights (VAR). Here’s how I explained this concept in the article “Who Owns the Advertising Space in an Augmented Reality World?”:

Look up in Times Square and you’ll see the earliest version of a banner ad. Real estate developers pay massive sums to secure air rights for the empty space above buildings. Monetizing by building up (as opposed to out) in crowded areas like Manhattan, they also get to dictate what advertisements appear in the air that they control. Augmented reality (AR) has made it possible for this same paradigm of advertising to exist via your smartphone. Multiple apps feature the ability for ads to appear on your mobile screen as miniature virtual billboards assigned to GPS coordinates.
¹²

Virtual Air Rights will be a fascinating subject in the coming years. As an opt-in experience like the one GeoPapyrus provides, VARs provide a huge economic opportunity. In essence, the Outernet is a blank canvas ready to paint, and advertisements will come to look more like experiences or content than billboards.

Along with opportunity, there’s going to be controversy. After the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking created an app called The Leak in Your Home Town. Just point your phone at the BP logo after downloading the app and it
bursts into flame. It’s an amazing bit of geekish parody, but an area of law we’ll hear more about
¹³
in the years to come.

For instance, in the near future you’ll walk into a grocery store wearing an augmented reality–enabled device and only see the brands you want to buy. You’ll input your grocery list and, if you’re a Pepsi fan, you’ll only see their products in the soda aisle. Items from Coke will essentially disappear, appearing as an empty shelf if your device looks in their direction. The physical real estate at the ends of aisles in the grocery store known as endcaps will also be highly desirable
virtual
real estate.

Our faces are also billboards, and there’s the possibility that people will screen other faces they don’t want to look at utilizing AR. Irritated by Democrats? Using facial recognition, you’ll only see images of a donkey over people’s faces if they vote Democrat. Taken to the extreme, this could even lead to a form of virtual racism if you don’t want to see people of a certain race or background.

In terms of facial recognition and AR, I asked Senator Al Franken his thoughts on the issue, per his role as chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law:

Facial recognition technology is a big deal. It can help us catch dangerous criminals and secure sensitive workplaces. But it also places a tremendous amount of power in the hands of governments, companies, and private individuals. The technology already exists that will allow a stranger to identify you, by name, by simply snapping a photo of you on the street. That’s a problem. At a bare minimum, facial recognition should only be deployed commercially—and on a strictly opt-in basis.