Augmented Reality or Diminished Reality: What’s Your Pick?
Just a few days ago, the tech giant Apple held its much-awaited WWDC event, where the Apple Vision Pro was unveiled. Yet, among all the announcements, it was the launch of the new AirPods that captured my attention most — after all, let’s admit that the device to bring augmented reality to the everyday consumer has not been created yet. Let me explain why.
Editing Reality in Real Time
Active (or selective) noise-canceling allows us to be aware of our surroundings without fully blocking out environmental sounds. The new AirPods will smartly detect if a noise is disturbing (like loud traffic noise), and selectively choose to minimize it compared to other sound sources that may be more “useful” to us: for instance, the voice of someone addressing us directly or a bicycle’s bell indicating it’s about to pass by. Think of it as a sound mixer for our ears: an algorithm can turn up the useful sound volume and turn down the noise.
The unveiling of the new AirPods brought me back to the concept of diminished reality technologies and reminded me of an app that I used extensively six or seven years ago (I adored it, lost it, and if you recognize it… please reach out to me). This app captured environmental sounds and “edited” the auditory environment in real-time, much like how Photoshop manipulates an image. As a result, you would only hear a modified version of your environment through your headphones.
Creating Space and Peace in its Absence
The application offered several filters and options. For example, you could choose to eliminate all types of sound except for human voices. Alternatively, you could “bring closer” everything that was far away, moving it to the auditory foreground, giving the sensation of exercising a kind of telekinetic power over sound. The experience didn’t just increase the background noise volume — it was subtle, making it feel as if we could warp space to bring any sound object closer.
Lastly, the filter I loved the most allowed for the obliteration of all sounds within a three-meter radius around you. This soundscape just vanished. It was as though the world began to exist only beyond three meters from you.
I started using this application daily, in the city or on crowded Parisian metros. Activating it would immediately bring me into an artificial bubble of silence that physically and positively impacted me: my breath would deepen, my heartbeat would calm, my shoulders would relax. It offered a simple and elegant solution to a problem I didn’t even know I had: chronic sensory pollution.
The World is Getting Noisier, and Noise Pollution Is Taking Away Healthy Years From Us
Siren noise levels can serve as a proxy of city noise levels because emergency services, like ambulances, fire, and police, need to make their sirens heard over the ambient noise. In the past 100 years, sirens have become six times louder.
Today, the European Environment Agency ranks noise pollution as the second most harmful environmental exposure to public health, right after air pollution. Long-term exposure to transportation noise is estimated to cause around 11,000 premature deaths and 40,000 new cases of ischemic heart disease. The World Health Organization reports that over a million healthy life years are lost in Europe (precisely 1,616,000) due to noise pollution. In the span of a lifetime, for someone like me living in Paris, that represents 11 years of healthy life.
Research shows that noise induces an automatic physiological stress response by increasing the activity of the amygdala in the brain. Stephen Stansfeld, a world-renowned noise expert and professor of psychiatry at Queen Mary University in London, explains that the human stress reaction to noise is likely based on evolution, as noise has always been associated with a potential source of danger. In short, regardless of your sensitivity, your brain registers noise as a promise of imminent dangers: living in chronic noise is living in chronic stress.
In 1910, Nobel laureate Robert Koch predicted, “One day man will have to fight noise as fiercely as cholera and pest.”
What about visual pollution? And what dangers do we face from constant exposure to visual stimulation?
The incessant flow of images on our screens or advertisements in public places overwhelm us, and according to Naomi Klein: “The problem is you can’t turn it off, because it is in the streets, it is right in front of your face, on the subway and even on public toilets, the point is to take choice out of the equation.” In other words, we are given no choice to escape this visual stimulation.
Evidence of the harmful impact of visual pollution on our health and quality of life has been brought to light, notably by the research of Milan K. Jana M.SC and Tanaya De of the Central Institute of Drugs in Lucknow, India: “The effects of exposure to visual pollution may be vast and penetrating. They include: distraction, decreases in opinion diversity, and loss of identity, traffic congestion, health hazards of diverse kinds, irritability and psychological disturbances, eye fatigue, loss of sense of hygiene and aesthetics, feeling of civility, thus overall loss of quality of life of the residing community.”
In response to this over-stimulation, more and more of us are using online ad blockers. Cities and collectives have organized to reduce exposure to ads. For example, in 2007, Sao Paulo passed a law to ban advertising and also to reduce and regulate the size of commercial signs among other measures. The No Ad app released in 2014 was developed to replace New York subway ads with works of art.
Diminished reality as a response to sensory pollution
Often at the end of my conferences, someone would approach me to share their ecstatic expectations of a fantasized augmented reality technology. “I could read my emails while talking to someone and following the latest stock market movements!” I’ve heard. But humans are not made for multitasking, and it’s likely that a substantial increase in information flows will harm the brain before enhancing it.
I’m not anti-augmented reality, in case you were wondering. This technology promises exceptional advancements, especially in healthcare practices. However, this vision that more would equal better, bothers me, and inevitably reminds me of the short film HYPER-REALITY, released seven years ago, in which we discovered a world where every square inch was “augmented” ad nauseam.
In conclusion, if I had to choose, I’d prefer to reduce the noise before adding more… Wouldn’t you?
BUENA VISTA: The effects of visual pollution on our wellbeing
Noise and Health | Harvard Medicine Magazine
European Environment Agency publications on Noise
Burden of disease from environmental noise, World Health Organisation
The Origin of Anti-Noise Day in the 20th century, Canadian Audiologist
Author Talks: The Power of Silence with Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz, McKinsey
Can cities kick ads? Inside the global movement to ban urban billboards, The Guardian
Free app NO AD swaps New York subway ads for street art
Naomi Klein, interview vidéo No logo, 2003
