Response for Living In Augmented Reality

I apologize if I went a bit off the philosophical deep-end with this paper, but with so much of Buxton’s writing being about the future of our personal interactions, these were the ideas that popped up for me.

This quote really struck me: “What actually provides this [heating] is invisible and is likely unknown (heat-pump, gas, oil, electricity?). All that we have in the space is a control that lets us tailor the climate to our individual preference.” While I see what Buxton is getting at in this quote, talking about the importance of seamlessly integrating technology into our personal existence, this mindset comes with a price. By moving towards a lack of knowledge about technology, we remove ourselves from being able to understand its effects. With his example, by not knowing how your heating works, you fail to realize that by heating your home you are releasing pollution into the air, water, etc. I think it is a major flaw in our cultural mindset that we should strive to not concern ourselves with the inner workings of what we are a part of, because by removing ourselves from these things, we neglect responsibility of our actions.

I find it interesting how with all this discussion about Ubivid almost 15 years ago, there has been very little implementation of it in terms of public, seamless interactions. With the rise of cellphones/smartphones, it seems we have traded public, fixed interaction systems for private, mobile ones. Buxton notes on page 7 that the main issue to be dealt with was to deal with the lack of movement possibilities for the digital presence. While this is solved by making the screen portable, I wonder if the technology will move towards a more seamless integration of digital individuals in “physical” social groups, or if it will just push the individual to be more removed from the physical realm. Out of all the interactions discussed with Ubivid, the only one that seems to be widely used at this point is the “Sitting Across the Desk” example, the move private and removed of the interactions. It is definitely important to note that this is also the easiest and cheapest of the interactions to achieve, but is cost the only limiting factor in our implementation of Ubivid, or are there other factors as well?

It seems that with this paper, I have taken a pessimistic philosophical opinion on the future of Ubivid. This is not because I am against it in any way. I would love to see the bridging of the digital and physical world to happen in a seamless manner. It is just that most of the technology I experience at this point bridges these two realms at a major expense of both. I guess this is why I am in HCI, to change this fact.