The NGI Policy Summit hosted a series of policy-in-practice workshops, and below is a report of the session held by Sander Veenhof and Leonieke Verhoog, creators of Futurotheque.
Sander Veenhof, Augmented reality artist and Leonieke Verhoog, Program Manager at PublicSpaces took their session attendees on a trip to the future. They did this ‘wearing’ the interactive face-filters they created for their speculative fiction and research project the ‘Futurotheque’. The AR effects transformed them into citizens from the years 2021 right up to 2030, wearing the technical equipment we can expect to be wearing during those years. But besides the hardware, the filters foremostly intended to visualise the way we’ll experience the world in the near future. Which is through the HUD (Head Up Display) of our augmented reality wearables.
As users, we tend to think of the future of AR as more of the same in a hands-free way, but this session aimed to look beyond the well-known use-cases for these devices. Of course, they will provide us with all our information and entertainment needs and they can guide us wherever we are. But will that be our navigation through the physical world, or will these devices try to guide us through life? In what way will cloud intelligence enhance us, making use of the built-in camera that monitors our activities 24/7? What agency do we want to keep? And in what way should citizens be supported with handling these new devices, and the new dilemmas arising from their use?
These are abstract issues, but the face-filter visualisations applied on Sander and Leonieke helped to visualise the day-to-day impact of these technological developments on us as individuals, and have an interesting discussion with the session participants. After a dazzling peek into the next decade, the conclusion was that there’s a lot to think about when these devices are going to be part of our society. But fortunately, that’s not the case yet. We still have time to think of ways to integrate these devices into our society beforehand, instead of doing that afterwards.