Society, Culture & Augmented Reality
We are about to learn how society will accept Augmented Reality as an aspect of our daily lives. There will be good and bad. What should we think about?
Sometimes, a new significantly advanced technology comes into the public sphere and gets resoundingly rejected. This is culture at work. If that technology is quite good however, it will often find niche market opportunities and slowly evolve over years, even decades, before it once again pushes into wider society.
Such is the case with blockchain, Web3, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The arrival of Generative AI (GAI) via Claude, ChatGPT and a number of open source AI tools pushed AI into the broader public sphere even though Ai tools have been around for decades.
Now, Apple’s Vision Pro has arrived that mixes AR and VR. Unsurprisingly, humans have been using the headset in weird ways. Humans love to play with technologies, it’s an important part of how they evolve and get socioculturally acceptable. Whether or not Apple’s Vision Pro gains market traction is yet to be seen. But we may well see a whole slew of new AR glasses come out.
Should this indeed be the case, it signals a significant sociocultural moment for humans. It indicates that as a society, we are indeed interested in becoming more entrenched in living in two worlds simultaneously, more so than ever before.
Google was the first tech company to push AR glasses into the broader public sphere. Anyone seen wearing them were quickly labelled as “glassholes.” Which quickly lead to them being withdrawn from the consumer marketplace. They’ve gone on to be adopted in niche markets like manufacturing and healthcare. And proven quite useful.
If we are indeed moving towards a new era of living more deeply intertwined with our digital and physical worlds, what might be the implications? Certainly some AI tools will be embedded, such as personal AI agents that can take actions on our behalf.
The Sociocultural Implications of Augmented Reality In Everyday Life
Humans have long lived in two worlds. We all have our own internal realities and then we have to navigate the physical world. The way we figured out how to survive in these two worlds was language and telling stories through language. This way we found common ground to form social groups and evolve the technologies that we imagined in our internal realities.
We then created culture, which includes political and economic systems, militaries, aesthetics (literature, arts, architecture), norms, religions, traditions and customs. Culture si constantly evolving and changing, but remains fundamental to our survival and how we work together.
Augmented Reality adds a whole new layer to how we live in these two worlds, perhaps in a way, creating a third liminal space between the physical and digital. We may be able to offload certain mundane activities while enhancing our understanding of the physical world around us.
This is new for humans. It then raises a lot of questions as it means those using AR, combined with Artificial Intelligence, image and audio capture and other tools.
How will we feel about people wearing AR glasses in social settings? Especially more intimate experiences such as house parties and work gatherings. Will we be suspicious of someone recording events that could be used for public shaming or, even more insidiously, blackmail at a later date?
Does it create more digital divide with those who don’t have AR glasses and devices feeling less equal and therefore missing out?
Will people in the workplace or other social settings talking to someone with AR glasses, knowing they can access instant information to deliver insights, feel they are at an unfair advantage?
Could someone with AR glasses use them to read body language to gain advantage in a negotiation in the real world? Is that ethical? What do our cultural norms think about that?
Can our brains, our psychologies, actually manage and deal with living in two worlds over the longer term? There’s enough research that indicates our brains aren’t really adapted to dealing with VR headsets for more than an hour or so.
What if we’re using AR glasses and have a brain chip implant? Does the chip help us to better manage the challenges of dealing with all that information and processing living in two worlds? Right now, we have no idea.
We are in the very early stages of bringing technology more closely to our bodies and augmenting our cognitive capabilities. What we don’t know yet, is if culture perceives this to be of enough value as a tool to advance the survival of our species.
The companies making these devices dislike considering unintended consequences, preferring to focus on perceived advantages. And right now, they can only be perceived, they are not really known because humans haven’t done the human things we do with new technologies. Which as always, is both good and bad things.
There are some excellent use cases for Augmented Reality and they will continue to grow. There will be some bad things that happen, that is inevitable with any technology. The big questions that remain to be answered will be how society accepts, adopts and then changes how we engage with living in two worlds more consistently. We used to go to the internet, now the internet is coming to us ever more personally.
AR went quiet for a while and sputtered around like a floating ember from a fireplace. Now it has begun to burn as a fire itself. There are more AR glasses in and coming into, the market. How we will adapt socioculturally to them will certainly be interesting to watch.