“The engineers of the future will be poets.” - Terence McKenna
“I believe that Augmented Reality will be the biggest technological revolution which happens in our lifetimes.” ~ Tim Sweeney
ACT III – Places, Chapter I
AFTER people and products, places represent the most obvious deployment scenario for narrative holography. Humanity has its existence in time and space, and the very word culture derives from a Latin word coll for a hill. We have linear lives in the temporal dimension, but our spatial lives are multi-dimensional, including life lived on land, in the air and under the water. Our homes are fundamental building blocks for the lived experience but so too are our neighborhoods, our cities and ultimately our nations. We are surrounded by space, but ever widening circles ripple outwards from us conferring that space with life, intimacy and belonging.
And just as people and products have their problems – human absence, product recall, sales returns – places have theirs too. For a start, many places are too far away. Places that we live in are too anonymous. Destinations that we visit are closed, or disappointing. Even Rome, the Eternal City, is just a heap of rubble in a certain slant of late afternoon sunlight. Remember, the Japanese opened an office in Paris to treat disillusioned tourists from their own homeland. Yes, we’ll always have Paris - but often not in way we have imagined it.
When you stop to think about space, it divides out into abstract emptiness, specific places, desirable destinations and comfortable locales. It is the wish fulfillment of every venue owner on the planet that guests come to treat their space like a home from home. Hospitality revolves around this dream state. Theaters, arenas, cinemas, shops, museums, airports, train-stations and all public spaces of gathering crave this. To be sought out, to be destined like a target – Santorini for the wedding, Venice for the honeymoon. But sadly, not everywhere is destined to become a destination – and even those that do, have some problems in the process.
Time is money in the old adage. But as very little time is left to be saved after automation does its thing, space is the new money. Space – empty space and all there is of it. The world’s atmosphere is simple empty space. Most every home, office, shop and building is made of space. Some of that space is storage and some of it consists of gear – but most of it is sheer empty space, pure spaciousness. After energy, money, raw materials, technology and ideas, space is the ultimate ingredient in a human life.
The lockdowns taught us how precious this space is, how basically our human lives are a sequence of movements in space from home to work to vacation. Destination spaces are places that defy cyberspace – we go there not because of but despite their virtual lives. We could visit Paris, Rome and Venice virtually but we physically port ourselves there to have the experience. Spaces encapsulate our human experiences and some spaces are timeless through accumulated human desire.
The spatial realm is the opposite of the metaverse, not an escape from the space you’re in but a return to the rich possibility of where you exactly happen to be now. Every place has its spatial realm potential, the empty space it houses ready to transform into richer presence. Imagine for a moment visiting the Circus Maximus in Rome – in reality just a completely empty space without even a suggestion of its former world renown as a charioteering Mecca – and seeing it come alive in all its once-living glory. That holographic experience could begin with a single chariot appearing in the now vacant stadium, a tiny glimpse of the centuries of history vanished into air.
Yes, places are spacious and every place carries with it a special history and a special futurity. Holograms are a portal in that past and that future. The spatial realm can recreate the full life of any given place, and not just in tourism terms but in sports, culture, retail, navigation, municipal and regional terms. Mere space becomes a real place and a true destination when its spatial potential has been fully uncovered and realized.
Human space is a fragile concept and over millennia certain places have been overcrowded while others have been abandoned. There is more than enough space to go round – it’s just not evenly distributed or experienced. That too is something the spatial realm may help with. The first space we should concern ourselves with is the home – that part of the planet we most often reside in. Home is a familiar space but that does not mean much. How can the spatial realm evolve our own homeliness?
Home is primarily a space of shelter. Secondarily it may be a place of entertainment and education, a storehouse. The smart home paradigm has struggled to lift off over recent years, and mostly it’s been focused on security, sustainability, convenience and other mundane features. Nice to have, surely – but we’re not necessarily dreamy. The spatial realm extends beyond the mere smartness. Efficiency may be a necessity, but it is hardly a vision. What if the empty space in and around your home were not merely performing chores but dreaming things up?
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A quick note from Author & Holographer Paul Duffy
Coming soon - to pretty much everywhere - will be holographic habitats that will become an integral part of our daily lives, seamlessly merging with our reality through the use of augmented reality (AR) glasses.
These remarkable devices will revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. While a fully virtual metaverse holds great promise, so to does the Spatial Realm. Many would argue, an augmented world holds greater promise given the true cyber-physical fusion that keeps us connected to the real world in ways not possible through the metaverse.
Today, you can get a great glimpse of this future by viewing AR experiences through your smart phone. It's amazing what's already possible. But, when light weight AR glasses become the norm - as indispensable as your smartphone companion matching our near manic dependence of the smartphone.
...To be continued...