The Augmented World Has Won: How AR Will Change Humanity
The market for AR-technology is developing rapidly and, according to some analysts, will become one of the main drivers of the economy within this decade. What the augmented future will look like, with what ethical and legal difficulties we will face and why it is important to start thinking about this now, we speak with Alexandra Tanyushina — a researcher in digital philosophy.
Augmented and Virtual
ForkLog: Where is the boundary between augmented reality (AR) and the analogue?
Alexandra: To begin with, one must ask what exactly we are augmenting? When the term “virtual reality” (VR) appeared, philosophers immediately ran into problems: the very notion of reality seems to imply all possible existing objects. When we talk about AR, there arises the idea that we are augmenting the physical reality in which we live. But to the real one you can add only the unreal — that is a glitch in our conceptual dictionary.
ForkLog: In everyday usage people usually recall about devices, which augment our visual perception.
Alexandra: With AR we really mean something added to our visual sensory field — virtual digital objects. But this can relate to any perceptual experience: olfaction, touch, and so on. And many researchers now say that augmented reality is not limited to visual categories. The earliest technologies resembling modern VR and AR were indeed multisensory. In 1957, Hollywood cinematographer Morton Heilig developed a similar device, and he called it the “Sensorama”. If you look at preserved photographs, our first association will be with a 5D cinema: screen, audio accompaniment, some sources of smells, kinetic devices so that the person facing the screen feels tactile effects. The Sensorama provided a stream of a wide variety of stimuli. Bearing this in mind, we, including as potential developers, should not fixate on visual perception.
ForkLog: Niantic founder John Hanke, in a piece The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality sharply contrasts AR and VR. What do you think about this radical separation?
Alexandra: I would start with an earlier article that laid the conceptual foundations of this division. It is the 1994 paper by Canadian researcher Paul Milgram and Japanese scholar Fumio Kushino. It presents the famous scale of “virtuality — reality”. Instead of a boundary, a continuum appears, and the technology we are interested in lies somewhere between these two poles. That is, virtual reality is entirely generated digitally, and real reality is an entirely physical space. This article faced criticism because it conceptually separated virtuality and reality, which points to the terminological problem we mentioned. Therefore many philosophers insist that instead of the word “reality” we should talk about “physicality.”
As for contemporary attempts to conceptualize augmented reality, we see that technologically AR is developing faster than VR, so fully developed VR spaces seem to philosophers to be more of a theoretical exercise.
ForkLog: And what about the ethical dichotomy between virtuality and augmentation? In his manifesto, Hanke argues that one should not strive for VR, because it would lead to atomization, escapism, and degradation of social skills. And with augmented technologies we would all be catching Pokémon, strolling a lot, socializing, and a utopian future would arise. Isn’t Hanke biased? In Keiti Matsuda’s short film Hyper-Reality, the dystopian augmented future is depicted rather creepily.
Alexandra: Yes. And the ethical dimension here is significant. We assume VR to be a wholly new digital world where other laws may apply, including physical ones. But in the case of AR or XR, we imply that changes will touch our everyday life. How to arrive at laws, ethical and legal codes that might govern augmented spaces is a major question. Perhaps the dark side of AR will reveal itself very soon. Exactly as shown in the aforementioned short film, there are so many virtual and augmented objects in the world that the viewer wants to step out of it, pause the video and take a break. It contains so many stimuli that they literally overload the nervous system.
The Augmented Reality Builder’s Code
ForkLog: Are there any steps toward this code of rules? What, for example, is proposed?
Alexandra: There is an ethical code by philosopher Erik Ramírez. It covers both virtual technology and augmented reality technology. Ramírez notes that AR is developing rapidly and, crucially, it is already integrated into our social practices, so he pays it somewhat more attention. He describes various provisions on norms for modelling digital objects: how they should look so that, for example, they can be more or less ecologically integrated into our familiar visual experience, how they should be distinguished so that a person can easily tell a virtual object from a real physical object — by color, making them semi-transparent, and so on. Ramírez discusses which digital products suit children and which — other age groups, what can be added to our familiar sensory experience and what cannot. A very interesting study. It will, of course, require further augmentation, so much remains to be studied, including drawing on the latest psychological and neurobiological research and practical applications of augmented reality. But the code exists and legal institutions and AR developers are paying attention to it.
ForkLog: It feels as if the experience of coming augmented reality returns us to a mythological state where everyone communicates with entities that reside solely in the human subjective sphere, that is, people literally see ghosts. Can we expect significant consequences from this?
Alexandra: Yes. And here philosophers, who especially enjoy fantasizing, begin to say that AR is not only reality mediated by a screen — we can also imagine that we will not simply have an image transmitted to the retina, but it could be sent directly to our brain via neural chips. Content would be perceived by users as entirely subjective. And if it is accessible, say, to large corporations developing such technologies, then we would be dealing with quite fantastical plots — we will leave that to philosophers who enjoy playing with such mind-benders. But there are ethical concerns even at this stage.
Not a Second-Rate Reality
ForkLog: Which topics in the philosophy of augmented reality interest you? Which authors would you recommend reading?
Alexandra: I am personally especially interested in questions related to ontology. What we discussed earlier is largely about ethics and knowledge. But if we dig deeper into metaphysical problems, the question arises: what are augmented reality objects at a fundamental level? What are the things we see through our smartphones and AR glasses? Many philosophers ask these questions. David Chalmers, the author of a book on VR philosophy, for example, is a virtual realist. In his view, digital and the objects we are used to share a similar metaphysical status. Naturally, this thesis is not easy to accept, so many philosophers argue with Chalmers and try to refute him.
I believe ontology, one way or another, yields ethical consequences. And conversely — our metaphysical views are always a result of ethical beliefs. If we turn to the same Chalmers, he certainly does not merely delve into the ontology of digital objects and makes dubious claims that virtual reality is real, while augmented reality is the same reality as the physical one, merely existing a little differently. After these assertions, he goes on to lengthy chapters about how we should live with these propositions. What are the implications for our ethics, for our everyday social interactions, that lead us to truly understand how augmented reality becomes part of our familiar reality. In other words, this is not a second-rate reality.
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