Imaginary Computing

Computers are melding into our minds.

Through voice-control, computing disappears into our imagination. There is no need for screen or keyboard. We issue verbal commands and they verbally respond. Any visual imagery is supplied by our ourselves. In one of those gloriously twists of innovation, computing has become like radio, a theatre of the imagination.

In virtual reality, the computer colonises our imagination by wrapping it in a complete and sealed world. It creates a vast cognitive space where no physical space exists.

In a VR world we can exercise control just by looking. Gaze-control involves issuing a command by staring at a particular spot. This feels uncannily close to telepathy.

Voice control is steadily growing. The second generation of Amazon’s Echo is about to launch, Google Home is establishing itself and Apple’s HomePod is on its way.

Virtual Reality is on a similar growth curve. Oculus Rift is getting a run for its money from Sony’s Playstation VR and HTC’s Valve, while Samsung’s Gear VR is as portable, if not quite as affordable, as Google’s Daydream.

Like any truly new behaviour this crossing of computing into the imagination creates surreal situations.

We are to be found walking around apparently talking to ourselves as we compose shopping lists, request songs, dim lights and order pizza or a bedtime story.

In our VR headsets we twist and contort and freeze and jerk as we explore. A room full of headset wearers is a strange sight. Each lost in a private adventure, it feels voyeuristic to watch too long. Our mind has disappeared into the non-existent space leaving our bodies performing that weird dance in the physical world.

Soon we will visit friends in those headsets, work on projects, be present in distant locations and walk around places we have never been to. The military will use VR to prepare soldiers for future trauma, therapists will use it to take the damaged back to the source of trauma and protestors will demand we witness the atrocity first hand.

This coming together of software and imagination is a form of singularity that involves neither soul-catcher chips nor mind uploads. While our bodies occupy a physical space, our minds are in the vibrancy of our own imagination or immersed in someone else’s. Far from delivering an eternal future, this is about being in two presents simultaneously. This next stage of computing is like a mindfulness of absence.

Manuel Castells wrote that in the Network Society sometimes we would use networks to avoid going places and at other times we would go places to network. Soon we will network in our minds and put our minds into the network.