[The Future of A.R.]

The Rise of the Trans-human.

Lets imagine its the year 2025. The new Augmented iLenses have just been released for sale. You ask your smart home device to order them for you. 4 hours later they show up on your doorstep. In anticipation you open the box, carefully put in the contact lenses and download the corresponding app on your phone to walk you through the setup process. The lenses have you do some calibration exercises for adjustments to acclimate you to the technology. 15 minutes later you have checked all of the recommended applications you would like to be integrated into your lenses and set up corresponding accounts for full use of the device. Now you are off to take on the world, part human, part computer. You suddenly realize you are now a cyborg, no longer just human, but Trans-Human.

You decide to go out for a walk and try out your new eyes. Before you walk out the door you notice there are 3 floating holographic boxes floating alongside your doorway. A reddish box represents the Lyft app, which can be used to summon an autonomous vehicle. A white box functions as an extension to your home pod, which can be activated to switch your smart devices into sleep mode, dimming the lights while your not home. A 3rd box acts as a folder containing multiple apps like Amazon, Airbnb, Weather, Calendar, and News for last minute alterations and updates before leaving.

You open the door, walk outside, and look up at the sky. It’s cold and cloudy. An icon appears, it shows you the Temperature, Visibility, and Humidity. A second icon appears with a sun and cloud, you gesture it on to see what it does. Suddenly, the cloudy day is transformed into a noticeably sunnier day. Rays of sunlight are now superimposed shining through the clouds and giving off a convincing amount of light to fool your brain into thinking that it’s actually the sun.

You flick your index finger in an upward motion to recall your home screen, you open the Lyft app to summon an autonomous vehicle, it arrives within seconds to the end of your sidewalk. You instruct the vehicle to take you to the Starbucks five blocks away.

As the car proceeds to your destination, a Starbucks menu appears giving you the option to pre-order your coffee so it will be waiting for you when you arrive. You make your selections and the window fades off into the ether as you hear the pinging sound notifying you that your Apple Pay has been charged accordingly.

You look out the window and notice a couple of “Real World Gamers” running around frantically in a park. You laugh at the absurdity of of the spectacle yet you have to admit to yourself that it looks like a good deal of fun.

A “Real World” Augmented Reality gaming movement has taken the world by storm. People wondering through public parks and fighting off virtual adversaries has become a common activity. Some of them choose to play the games cooperatively, where large groups of people can interact and strategize in a mixed reality co-op mission together. With the ability of A.R. visual devices to allow users to navigate in darkness, some of these mixed reality gamers choose to play at night, where they can allow the devices to illuminate the world around them, to simulate gameplay on an alien landscape of luminous objects and topography.

Your travel time was only a few minutes. Traffic is not as congested as it used to be five years ago. There are far less commuters due to employers utilizing virtual workspaces compounded by autonomous vehicles now moving in tandem with one another cutting travel times down substantially. Along your commute, there is a status bar that is projected in the in the top corner of your field of view indicating the traffic efficiency. At 100% efficiency commutes can be cut down by 40% in some areas.

The car drops you off in front fo the coffee shop. You grab your coffee and sit down at a table. You gesture up to pull the app store in your field of view. You scroll through the most popular apps. Among them are apps to turn every day people into avatars of your favorite movie characters. Apps to build and personalize your own avatar for other people with augmented reality devices to see superimposed on top of your body. Other applications can give you the ability to inquire about physical objects by aiming your gaze at them, turning the entire world into an immersive, interactive museum. Grocery stores now have apps where you can shop in a virtual rendering of a store by scrolling around and picking up products that can be shipped to you within a couple business days. Runners can now face off against fully rendered ghosts of themselves in the past by recording a previous run they did in which their smart devices were keeping track of their past running pace throughout the entirety of the run. Another app allows you to have checkpoint bike races against other people in real time from across the globe. Your heads up display gives you real time feedback on your position in the race and algorithms adjust checkpoint intervals individually for each competitor according to the gradient to make the race fair and competitive.