Suddenly, D Skully spotted a girl’s face illuminated by the light of her phone screen in a small car parked down the street. As she remembers it, he went and knocked on her window to confront her, and as soon as she was caught, the car peeled off.The two of them were playing Ingress, an alternate reality game (or ARG) run by a Google startup called Niantic Labs. Ingress is like a giant game of Risk or Capture the Flag, only the game board is the entire world. The goal is to capture as many “portals,” or in-game waypoints and locations, and hold them for your team for as long as possible.
This is the future of technology. It’s all about the complete blending of technology into the real world, and vice versa.
People want to be superheroes and princesses and explorers and athletes, and technology will increasingly allow us to become these things.
This will come from Universal Daemonization, from completely immersive games that are eventually taken over by simulations that the player cannot distinguish from reality, and eventually by moving the mind into permanent instances of these types of reality.
I think people will play multiple games with reality as the canvas. Through Universal Daemonization and augmented reality, we’ll be able to see people who have a high rudeness rating as monsters, or people who are rated as beautiful by their friends as goddesses, regardless of their external appearance.
We’ll see humor and status and wealth and curiosity in tangible ways like never before, and the environment will suddenly gain a fourth dimension of experience and history, with people able to see kisses and fights and murders that have happened in the exact locations they pass by.
Augmented reality, powered by Universal Daemonization, will soon be upon us, and it’ll be extraordinary.
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