A Day Made Of Glass(Future World)

Materials manufacturer Corning put together a futurist video last month called "A Day Made Of Glass," which has spiraled into stratospheric popularity on You-tube. Today’s smart phones do a pretty good job keeping people organized and socially connected, but there may be a better and more intuitive way to accomplish these tasks. Imagine a world where technology and your everyday life work together to create a new reality. What if you could simply look up at the sky and receive weather information, or respond to a text message and check your to-do list without ever pulling out a phone or other electronic device? It may sound too futuristic to even be plausible.      It is possible, in near FUTURE
The choice boils down to open versus closed, or seen in a different way, quality versus mediocrity, but before I describe that choice, I want to provide some context on this week’s object – an augmented reality protocol.

In the late 20s, as the cost of heads-up displays dropped and their sophistication increased, it became common for people, organizations, and businesses to interact with each other via virtual or augmented reality interfaces. To begin with, these interfaces often had some grounding in physical reality – such as a bank branch overlaying account management interfaces on its walls – simply because that was more familiar to users.
But not everyone could who wanted to overlay AR interfaces onto the world actually owned real estate, so they often had to ‘ground’ their interfaces on top of physical spaces owned by others. Popular choices included billboards, posters, monuments, and public buildings – all of these might be used to show some student’s art portfolio, a portal into a massively multilayer game, or live video from a political rally.
The problem was that any given physical space might have hundreds or even thousands of competing AR interfaces and media grounded on top of it. Navigating these interfaces was a difficult process; turn them all on at the same time, and you’d be confronted with a nightmarish melange of colors, objects, and animations – until your glasses crashed from the processor load.
There were two schools of thought regarding how to manage this. The first, favored by organizations such as OAR and So-pol, was to allow anyone to create and ground interfaces, and to simply recommend to users (based on their stated preferences or friends) which interfaces to display at a given time; in practice, most users delegated their preferences to third parties.
OAR and So-pol were sorely outgunned by Glass Networks and its competitors, which preferred a ‘walled garden’ ecosystem in which interfaces had to be approved before being grounded, with preference being given to high quality interfaces, along with existing real estate holders, advertisers, brands, and so on. The end result was a much cleaner and consistent experience, but one that was markedly less open than the alternatives.
For a while, it seemed that this battle would play out in a similar way to other open versus closed platform wars in the past, such as Apple vs. Android, with most experts believing that Glass Networks would walk away with the lion’s share of profits and users.
But this time was different. Whereas previous platform wars took place in what seemed like entirely new, purely digital, spaces, AR was intimately linked with the real, physical world – and all the economic and political concerns that stemmed from it.
These concerns weren’t high on any users’ minds during the early years of AR when people were still marveling at the possibilities and the tools and resources required to create good interfaces were still expensive – but as time went on, a large number of people became increasingly concerned that the potential of AR to reassert notions of the ‘public space’ was being submerged by purely commercial concerns. Social historian Andrea Galloway elaborates:
“Today, it’s hard to realize exactly how much the public space – by which I simply mean the streets, marketplaces, squares, and mass transit links of the world – was effectively ceded to or owned by the highest bidder. AR held out the promise of reclaiming public space without the expense of buying the actual real estate – something that was profoundly important to many, but deeply threatening to a few. Glass stood on the side of the corporates, and OAR and So-pol on the side of the disenfranchised.”
This brings us to the choice that players of Erica Lin can make in The World of Glass. In 2032, Glass was the world’s dominant AR platform, the darling of venture capitalists and the earnest friend of every brand and advertiser in the world – but it was clear to everyone that it was facing a growing backlash.
Player could either choose to continue Glass as a closed ecosystem that favored corporate interests – and make billions in the process – or to adopt the same open protocols as OAR and So-pol. Riches and fame on the one hand, or a much needed shift back to the common good on the other. It’s easy to see what the right decision was for society, but less so for an individual who had everything to lose and little to gain.
In the end, Lin kept Glass as a closed system – a walled garden that continued to provide a slick, simple, and restricted experience for users for many years. Other sites attempted to compete on the basis of the freedom of expression they gave to the public, but it wasn’t until the late 30s that competitors managed to bridge the gap between openness and simplicity through consensus environments that displayed and merged different AR interfaces and media based on the user’s preferences, and those they were interacting with.
Every player makes a different decision, but if World of Glass showed anything, it’s that the emerging consensus-based politics of the 21st century only proceeded in fits and starts – and that the way an individual perceives the world and their choices has ripples that affects everyone.