schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

Jamais Cascio writes in worldchanging.com:

The intent isn't to cut people off from their immediate physical experience, but to allow people to maintain non-physical contact with distant experiences -- the health of a sick relative, or weather forecasts, or traffic levels on one's blog.

This is one of the best summaries I've seen of what is opening up in regard to being able to stay in touch with ourselves and our world, as we are and as we could be, by overlaying our experiences of these  through the now much more available and useful technologies of augmented reality (annotating physical space), virtual worlds (living in shared spaces which intersect the real), and simulations (playing with complex interacting systems and what they produce). The comprehensive anticipatory design science envisaged by Buckminster Fuller now seems doable, so we can know the details of our environment, be able to share those and use them for driving shared simulations, and collectively engage in the politics of decision-making.

Such tools can exist in the context of an individual's web browser, but also in multi-screen immersive theaters, with the live presence of people interacting with themselves and manipulating the instruments of the reality-studios enacting their story. The latter could recall the long now of the all-night Javanese shadow puppet play, which mixes the current, the topical, the humorous, with the mythic and timeless.


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