Some speculative futurology. One of our collective techno-fantasies is a future in which fully simulated reality is a thing. Think the Matrix or even recent movies/books like Ready Player One. Plugged-In Reality, as it were. But it's not clear, I think, that this kind of virtual reality is actually something we (as humans), would actaully use all that much, outside of some very niche applications. The thing is this: the reduction of information presentation and manipulation to two-dimensional depthlessness is actaully super useful.

Think of all the things you can do on a desktop or a flattened screen: you can have multiple tabs open to browse the internet (as you probably do right now), along with multiple windows running mutiple programs in parallel (a internet browser, a file explorer, and a spreadsheet, say), while at the same time being able to simply walk-away and go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, say. This is a whole world - worlds, even - of choice. With a flat screen, what one essentially has is the advantage of multiple dimensionality folded into the flatness of a screen.

Virtual reality, with it's added layer of depth - which would simply 'double up' the existing world - would actually lack this aspect of multi-dimentionality, losing the power of abstraction even as it adds a third, spatial dimension of depth. It is in effect more inconvenient, and not less. You lose the ability to swap between multiple streams of information on the fly, stuck as you are in the 'one world'. So VR is or can be pretty restrictive in comparison to the enfolded multi-dimentionality of screens that we currently work with.

On the other hand, augmented reality, in which the 'real world' is supplemented by additional information streams, has the advantage keeping the multi-dimensionality offered by screens, while still staying in the real world. AR turns the world into multiple screens. To a large extent I think the tech world has realized this, although I'm not sure popular imagination has quite caught up. AR - in it's nascent form in Google glass, textile electronics (mini computers woven into clothes) or in the dashboards of certain cars (see below) - much more than VR, might be said to be the true realization of the integration of computing into society.

That all said - and here's the true speculative bit - the real advantage of VR is the ability to, as it were, come up with things on the fly. Want to ride a unicorn? Just virtually conjure one into being and ride off into the sunset. But given the shortcomings of VR in the other respects mentioned above, one mid-way point between VR and AR might be something like microbots - specifically microbots in the vein of the ones in Big Hero 6! Microbots retain the real advantage of VR, without, for all that, being 'virtual'. In my science fiction fantasy of the future, everyone at birth is given one million microbots to do as one will, augmenting real life in real, tangible ways.

Anyway, jsut some fun thoughts inspired by some refcent reading. Here's the Big Hero 6 clip I have in mind:



An example of AR I have in mind: