Caleb Munyasya

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Graffiti has always been a thing that people have a love or hate relationship with. The public canvas on the inside of a tunnel provides a great place to spray an inspirational life slogan. The city block covered in gang tags or the trains stained with foul language are found across many large cities. For one it’s an art form, yet for another its vandalism. On one hand in affords the city some character, yet the government will have to pay to get the wall scrubbed eventually.

Now Augmented reality is opening the door to what some believe might be the solution to some of these concerns. Makers of the acclaimed mobile game Subway Surfers, Sybo, along with mobile publisher iDreamSky have teamed up to create Mark AR (Robertson, 2019). The app will allow users to create virtual graffiti using their smartphones and post these creations on the windows, walls and doors of real buildings. These creations will remain there and will be tagged on a map so that user’s friends and followers can go and view the creations.

Technically, the software will be hosted on Google’s ARCore cloud anchors that was created specifically for the use of augmented reality platforms. Google’s cloud anchors will save the image along with critical markers of the location so that users can point their camera’s and view an image or object apparently stuck to the location (Hollister, 2019).

Watch the below video to get a feeling for how the app will function.

This technology of course opens, literally, an entire new realm for marketing, social interactions, advertising and social communication. The video shows a free coffee tag, the ability to import images and post funny comments for your friends. However, at the same time, the anonymous tagging of inappropriate comments or images on city monuments might not be a sight to behold.

This might be something that really catches on, as AR lets us view the real world in such different ways. It lets us manipulate the environment, virtually, that might make it ever so slightly more interesting to walk around. Yet it’s annoying enough to walk into a crowd where everyone is taking selfies, walking around with a screen literally interpreting and adapting how you view that which in front on you might be pushing that boundary even further. Besides, who is responsible when the next nude picture of a celebrity gets posted on the parliament building? And is covering someone’s house in racial insults considered vandalism or abuse?

I am interested to see if you think it’s a good idea to have virtual art everywhere and how you think it will affect how we interact with the (real) world.

Sources

Hollister, S. (2019, September 12). Google takes one tiny step closer to the world beneath the world. Retrieved October 13, 2019, from https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862572/google-arcore-persistent-cloud-anchors-ar-augmented-reality-layer.

Robertson, A. (2019, October 12). Is the world ready for virtual graffiti? Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/12/20908824/mark-ar-google-cloud-anchors-social-art-platform-harassment-moderation.

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Interaction with our devices has been constantly changing. From joysticks and buttons for video games, or the keyboard and mouse with your computer, Amazon Alexa for voice commands or the Apple pencil for your iPad. There have been constant innovations to make interacting with our digital lives convenient and seamless. But Facebook is already working on a greater future, one where we don’t really have to say or do anything.

Mind-reading technology…sort of.

Facebook recently announced that they will acquire a neural interface startup named CTRL-Labs. The technology they have been working on is embedded in a wristband. As your brain wants to perform an action, such as a mouse click, the neurons contained in your spinal cord send an electrical signal to the muscles in your hand with the command do maneuver in a certain way. The wristband is able to decode these electrical signals and consequently convert them into a digital signal that is outputted to another device (Bostworth, 2019).

Facebook is betting on this technology being suitable for its virtual and augmented reality experiences. Head of Virtual Reality at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, commented that this technology will allow humans to think beyond controllers to interact with machines (Bostworth, 2019). These efforts should significantly enhance the feeling of ‘presence’ which is a term coined to estimate how effective a virtual reality experience is in convincing one that they are present in another world.

This technology brings us a step closer to the sci-fi future where we can have internal dialogues and see technology bring these to life. Yet there are some ethical concerns around privacy as neuroscientists such as Patrick Kaifosh, co-founder of CTRL-Labs, continue to make these concepts a reality (Statt, 2019). Should companies be able to understand our thoughts? What about our unconscious thoughts? What will the effects be of having access to such data?

Concerns for these things have real life effects. As we see the shift to data-driven companies, the potential access to what we are thinking opens a lot of possible doors for targeted advertising and even manipulation as the technology is able to ‘look inside’ to some degree. As always, the technology is fascinating, but controlling our social feeds tends to already be problematic, access to brain activity is at a whole other level. Besides that, health and socialization impacts are enhanced as we can increasingly do more with less and less movement. What does this mean when our working lives can also migrate into the virtual world?

With far greater plans in store, we are seeing the first steps being taken so we can interact with an entire world, basically by thinking. The types of interactions this technology will create are definitely going to be profound, however we are weary of the direction we are moving into, and whether or not people are willing to give technology such access.

Sources
Statt, N. (2019, September 24). Facebook acquires neural interface startup CTRL-Labs for its mind-reading wristband. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-labs-acquisition-neural-interface-armband-ar-vr-deal.

Bosworth, A. (2019, September 24). Retrieved from https://ben-evans.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b98e2de85f03865f1d38de74f&id=2f219512e6&e=01b8264757

Virtual Graffiti: real Art, at real locations- but you need a screen to see it

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