Your Reality Is Augmented
+8* ThoughtsPublished April 25, 2010 at 2:56 pm No CommentsThis column was written for the magazine “China Electronics Business” and inspired this month’s talk at eComm.
This year seems to be the coming of age of three different technologies: augmented reality, stereoscopic & browser-based 3D and location-based services. Hollywood and Silicon Valley are abuzz with them. Truth it, the world has been “augmented” for a while and “reality” has become elusive. This column will attempt to give you a clearer view on how the world is turning into a sensory carousel, for what purpose, and how to train yourself to see things as they are.
Visual Augmentation
Vision is the sense on which human beings rely the most in daily life, hence the most important. The point here is not about glasses; it is about how images are re-worked to look better than they are. While not always advertised, it might be used to deceive or to serve viewers. This is done by companies but also individuals: anyone registered to an online matchmaking site is likely to use his or her best picture, which means that anyone met through such service will never look as good as their profile picture. A famous example of this is how it has been used by the company Unilever with their “Dove Campaign For Real Beauty” in 2006. They produced a video showing how a combination of lengthy make-up, hairdo, lighting and skillful Photoshop work to lengthen the neck, enlarge the eyes, could turn a “pretty, but ordinary girl” into a “strikingly beautiful billboard model”. The campaign was widely popular.
The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was enhanced digitally to make it more enjoyable by the TV crowd – vastly superior to on-site attendees since an estimated 2.3 billion people were watching. Taking this idea to the extreme, some movie-goers experienced a state of depression after watching the movie “Avatar”. The reason was that compared to the beauty of the movie’s fantasy world, so called real-life seemed… gray and imperfect. As most urbanites do not get many chances to experience our very own Earth’s nature, the gap is indeed tangible.
Auditory Augmentation
We might be less familiar with how this sense work, and more tolerant to abuse. With audition the first industry that comes to mind is music. Are we being tricked there too?
It is arguable that it is for everyone’s auditory benefit, but it is also deceptive and sets unrealistic expectations about performers. The fact is that live performances, though thrilling, often sound worse than studio recordings. Are performers having bad days? The reality is much simpler: studio recordings make it possible to adjust their singing thanks to a piece of software. This software, named Auto-Tune, corrects the pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. Quoting Wikipedia: “It is used to disguise off-key inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed singers to perform perfectly tuned vocal tracks without the need of singing in tune.” It is reportedly used by major artists and performers who now simply expect imperfections to be corrected, offering a kind of auditory “plastic surgery”.
We have come a long way since Milli Vanilli’s singing duo – a best-selling pop act of the late 80’s – were found out to be only photogenic front men.
Olfactory Augmentation
In a world where odors are generally something to be suppressed, how could we be tricked? Discussing with a friend working in the perfume industry, I learned to my surprise that many supermarket bakeries were using a special fragrance to be more appetizing to visitors. Researching more on this topic I came across the company DMX, which is a “world leader in multisensory branding”.
One case study is on the “French Bread Scent”, which “may provoke your customer to plan a whole week’s worth of menus surrounding this one basic food staple.” Business benefits are obvious, and apply also to related businesses: “an appliance retailer in the Southeast realized the value of gourmet scents when they found that the faint smell of home cooking in their store boosted sales by 33 percent.”
As reported by DMX, “while vision is unquestionably our most powerful sense, when it comes to garnering an emotional response, scent is a much more powerful trigger.” So if your bread does not taste as good as it smelled, try to remember the fragrance in the store!
Gustatory Augmentation
This one is rather easy: flavour enhancers such as the famous monosodium glutamate (MSG), widespread in Asia, is now reportedly used in processed food and many fast food chains.
So tasteless food can be promoted to tasty food, regardless of their nutritive value. We’re not far off the dystopian future of the movie Soylent Green, where overpopulation leads to a lack of resources and most are fed processed wafers of dubious origins.
Tactile Augmentation
With all the touch technologies coming about, this might be the next frontier to create a tactile reality closer to our liking. Several aspects of tactile enhancement are already used in product packaging: roughness, softness, slipperiness, warmth, coarse and fine surface finishes, compliance, sliding friction and thermal contact properties are all part of the touch palette and affect how pleasurable, exciting or indulgent a product feels.
And just like designs can be patented, a recent case involves a company registering a “velvet textured covering on the surface of a bottle of wine”. Can you fake touch? Though I did not find useful examples, it is certainly possible to affect the sense of touch with vision, sound and temperature.
Sixth Sense, and more
The common classification of human senses, attributed to Aristotle, counts only five of them. However, as surprising as it might sound, neurologists do not agree on the number of senses due to the variety of definitions and several more could be counted as “senses”: balance, acceleration, temperature, motion, pain, time and possibly more.
There are already ways to simulate some of those – one example is the “Haptic Pen”, developed by a tinkering researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. It is “A device for providing tactile feedback in a stylus that is able to simulate the sensations of pressing a physical button.” In other words: it “feels” like pressing a button, while nothing is actually moving. Such inventions are expected to enter the realm of consumer products soon, as the spread of touch screens will look for more sophistication.
What can we do about it?
If you have followed me thus far, you might start to distrust your senses and question the intentions of makers of numerous products. But if an augmented reality is more pleasurable, why not simply let it be? The key issue is that pleasure is not necessarily beneficial: just like food can be very tasty but not nutritious, the problem is the increasing disconnect between our instinctive sensory reaction and the long-term effects of sensory abuse.
Are we unconsciously creating a reality in which nothing can be “naturally” as perfect as they look? All sorts of media have been promoting characters that fit narratives, which in turn affect our behavior. If we try to live by such high expectations, are we condemned to pursue illusory goals and being eternally dissatisfied, as our reality is unlikely to match a more perfect fiction?
I wish I could provide an answer to this, or a path of action, but it would imply whether future-gazing abilities or a much deeper understanding of human nature than I have. We might live to see a comeback to “natural reality” or witness a development toward more reality augmentation. Which do you prefer?
@benjaminjoffe
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+8* | Plus Eight Star finds how digital and analog life already blends in Asia. Follow us at @plus8star.
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