Future Proofing The Mirrorworld (Pt 1): Building for Human Needs

Our two existing “great platforms”, the web and social media, have fundamentally improved the ways we organize our lives, do our work, and interact with people. Undoubtedly, they’ve also created a lot of global-scale sociopolitical ills: misinformation, cyberbullying, trolling, information breaches, cyber warfare, to name a few.

While the gatekeepers of these platforms have been massively scrambling to fix the damage they’ve done, more progressive players deep in the tech world have already envisioned, and started building the next great platform.

People in tech circles call it many things: the AR Cloud, the Mesh, the Virtual Cloud. But Wired founder and top editor, Kevin Kelly, has cited the most descriptively elegant term for the this next big platform: “The Mirrorworld”.

Simply put, the Mirrorworld is a digitized, virtual, one-to-one scaled version of our physical world made accessible through augmented reality enabled devices, from our everyday smartphones to tech-powered goggles or glasses.

If I were to safely assume, the purest intent of the Mirrorworld is to enhance our real life experiences by seamlessly providing real-time information of our surroundings — objects, people and places — as we spatially navigate the physical world.

A dystopian scene of the Mirrorworld, as portrayed in Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Hyper-Reality”. The future will not be kind to epileptics.

If done right, it has the potential to be THE pinnacle of digital innovation, exponentially more world-changing than the web and social media combined. But more fundamentally, the Mirrorworld could be a fresh start for humanity to build a new digital platform without the baggage that the web or social media has accumulated for the past decades.

And I think our tech leaders can do it right if they build it with human needs at the core. Not for corporations. Not for nation-states. Regular people, like you and me.

So imagine the possible practical use cases of the platform in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in a specific scenario of one navigating an atypical urban setting:

Physiological

• You’re hungry — the display will navigate you towards the closest restaurants that match your usual cuisine preferences
• You have to do a number 2 — your glasses will signal you to the closest public toilets that’s rated “clean”
• You’re feeling hot and tired — the system will find you benches that are currently under a shade with the right ambient temperatures to help cool your body’s existing temperature

Safety

• You’re about to cross the street — a warning flashes that a car is about to beat the red light and could possibly hit you
• You’re about to enter a dodgy neighborhood — real-time crime updates are displayed overlaid on the surrounding buildings where they’ve happened.

Belonging

• Your wife and parents are calling you (because they’ve been alerted that you’ve entered a dangerous neighborhood) — you put up a virtual video conference call on your display
• You want to assure them you’re safe — you share what you’re currently seeing on your display — showing that you’ve avoided buildings that are “tagged” with crimes
• Your wife is reassured, and decides to lighten up the moment by sharing a video of your kid playing — her point-of-view is displayed on your headset

Esteem

• You get a message from your boss asking for an urgently-needed file for a client pitch — you access your virtual “briefcase” using hand gestures and easily send over the file
• You pass by a rundown historical landmark — a tag appears inviting you to read more information about a city-wide proposition asking for more funding for restoration efforts for this landmark. As you read, your display virtually transforms the rundown landmark into what it would look like refurbished.
• The compelling virtual visual of the restored landmark convinces you to vote for the proposition — on your screen you “submit” your vote using hand gestures.
• There’s a sense of accomplishment getting your boss off your back, and doing your civic duty.

Self-Actualization

• You spot a half-done graffiti-filled wall, and an artist staring intently at the space, seemingly stumped. Being a frustrated visual artist yourself, who never had much of an outlet for his hidden talent approaches the guy and converse.
• You learn that he’s actually looking for amateur collaborators that can help him finish his painting — you take a stab at it by opening up a “graffiti AR app” and sharing your display with him.
• You guys start jamming — painting over a virtual wall using hand gestures, looking at a piece of art only the both of you can see.
• After finishing the virtual painting, the artist says he loves the work you’ve done together, takes a snapshot of the work, and promises you that he’ll recreate the painting on the wall physically — A warm feeling of purpose creeps up on you: you actually get to use your hidden talents for something.

Sounds familiar right? Presumably the web and social media were built on the premise of enhancing our access to these needs, but it quickly got bogged down by economic and political interests to remain profitable, but not necessarily sustainable.

Perhaps the key to creating a “human-first” Mirrorworld is to building it through a massive collaboration of big tech, governments, civic leaders, NGOs, and other special human interest groups, and not within the silos of corporate technology labs.

Seems like a big ask, given that you can’t even get these players to agree on more pressing global issues like climate change. But I do feel that there should be just as much effort put into figuring out the societal benefits of the Mirrorworld as solving the technical aspects of building it.