A place where codes, pixels and atoms collide with space-time.

Published in

The Startup

9 min readApr 2, 2018

It has already torn a hole.

We are spatial beings. We evolved for thousands of years; from Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes, cell by cell, accident by accident, dimension by dimension, into the apex predator of our home world; the mighty species in front of whom angels in the creation myths were made to bow. We evolved to navigate complex environments by making sense of the space around us. We constantly consume and construct on these spaces- giving rise to civilizations and societies that became the wombs of our wisdom. Steven Johnson said, “Our thoughts shape our spaces and the spaces return the favor.” We have traversed the entire globe and have launched rockets out of our pale blue dot. With our cognitive mental maps, we can shape and plan the future to fit or transcend the space that we live in.

Despite our evolutionary advantage of being spatial beings and having stereo vision to look at a three-dimensional world, imagine the insult when 8 billion people have to look down on two-dimensional rectangular devices to consume information about the space around them?

What’s the problem with 2D though?

It is lossy.

Let me tell you a story as an effort to inspire a little awe in you.

See this famous picture. The pale blue dot.

It was February 14, 1990 and the Voyager I probe of NASA was making ready to leave the solar system out into the vastness of interstellar space, out from our communication reaches forever. It had been floating in the space for 40 years, having outlived its mission. At a record 6 Billion kilometers away from home, the farthest a human made material has ever travelled, at the request of the famous astronomer and author Carl Sagan, NASA commanded Voyager to turn its camera homewards and take a photo. Voyager calibrated and clicked this photo. Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space.

Out Of the 640,000 individual pixels that compose the frame, Earth takes up less than 1 pixel. All our history, wars, boundaries, inventions, religions, billions of humans and our egos; everything scaled down to just one pixel of a digital photo.

Carl Sagan had said that such an image would not have much scientific value as the Earth would appear too small for Voyager’s cameras to make out any detail, but it would be meaningful as a perspective on our place in the universe.

After completing its primary mission with the flyby of Saturn on November 12, 1980, Voyager 1 became the third of five artificial objects to achieve the escape velocity that will allow them to leave the Solar System. On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium. The spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and return data. At a distance of 21 billion kilometers from the Sun as of January 2, 2018. Voyager 1’s extended mission is expected to continue until around 2025 when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments.

This obscure photograph of earth presented as a 2D photo inspired awe and struck wonder across the world. Millions of people were inspired by emotions they couldn’t comprehend or even write down.

Carl Sagan famously gave out a speech then.

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

The feeling of awe, the psychological wonder, and ecstasy is relatable to the overview effect; which is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.

Even the 2D representation of our achievements like these could inspire so much awe and curiosity across millions of people across decades. Imagine the implications if all of history were mediated to us by a medium that was more than just two dimensions?

Which way to the beach, where is the nearest ATM? Which is the best cafe around here? Who is this guy? How to change this flat tire?

On a daily basis, humanity collectively scrolls thousands of miles down Instagram feeds. Too much information that requires multiple scrolls. Too much information abstracted in that second tab of a website. Data about our 3D world, abstracted to second pages and multiple tabs spread across multiple apps, presented back through a 2D device. Having to look down at the phone for information and having to look up at the world to apply that information seems to be a mighty insult to the most superior species on earth. Having to swap our attention back and forth multiple times in between the world and information, we realize that the medium of our data consumption hasn’t yet grown on par with human evolutionary scale.

Thinking along those lines, 2D becomes an insult. Our computation needs to be spatial. We need to acquire data and process them by just looking around. Not by looking down. Our spaces should become our mediums of computation.

The friction in between the digital and the physical, between pixel and atom, between reality and surreality, the friction that requires us to scroll multiple times in a 2D display, the friction that arises when you can’t just look at the street and see where it goes, instead you have to pinpoint and drag around a map app in your phone to localize yourself- This friction is the result of a bad design. Imagine a world where the buildings and the streets would talk to you just as you look at them.
The technology is finally here, ready to take away that friction associated with the attention swap of 8 billion human beings.

Augmented reality (AR) changes everything.

AR doesn’t change what we used to consume. We consume information to make decisions. “Which is the best restaurant around here”? “Which is the best place to spend my summer vacation”? We will keep on consuming data to make decisions. Our intelligence has designed our planet, and intelligence stems from information. With AR, What changes, will be the way we consume data. It will do away with the friction and it will enable us to compute in spatial scales. It will be the path of least resistance, where the landscapes will talk to us, and the roads will digitally mark themselves before our eyes.

The digital and physical realities will converge to enable spatial computing — a form that does justice as being a valid input peripheral into our biological processors.

Controlled by the laws and codes creating all these AR experiences, from the suffocating dusts of the vast digital wasteland our social media has become, a blend of artistic programmers and storytellers would emerge, filling the whole world with a kind of enchanting magic; the world would suddenly be filled with all kind of possible and imaginable magnificence. The collective imagination of these technicians will drive a shaft so deep into our slice of history, marking a before and an after.

Development kits would emerge enabling and inspiring anyone to make the world their canvas, edit and modify reality to produce art, transcending art to the numinous, channelling creativity that refreshes the soul, spawning a new breed of digital cavemen who would draw graffiti across the orange evening sky lit with fire.

Suddenly humanity will acquire tools to be omnipresent, to digitally teleport across the continents, to be there to live and claim the moment, enabling global Tele-presence. All of this by not looking down at the phone, but by gazing directly at the world around. Slowly but surely, everything emerges, like a second layer of air, everything- the backstory of people, the history of places, the how-to of every object- everything pulled out from the rectangle that was our phone; to the origin point of the data itself.

This technology enables the convergence spot between metaphysical infinities, where atoms from the real world and pixels from our digital world could collide with each other, enhancing our analogue reality.

This is, in all ways, an operating system for reality itself.

Short-circuiting space and time.

There was no way Abraham could know what happened to his family back in Canaan. Same goes for Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad.

Fast forward a few centuries and we can see that Christopher Columbus on his expedition had no way of knowing what Queen Isabelle was doing back in England, in real-time. The distance was too great for a pigeon to cover.

Decades later, Napoleon, who was on a war front in Egypt, could send and receive letters from his wife Josephine, who was in Paris, and it only took a few weeks.

Years later, Telegram cut short weeks into days.

Telephone cut short days into minutes.

Our instant messaging and social networks cut shorts minutes into microseconds.

With technology, we are shrinking the space-time in which we live in.

There is a singularity ahead, fueled by the pace of our information intake.

Today, our messages, broadcasts and impressions travel at light speed, short-circuiting both space and time.

On par with Einstein’s theory of relativity that explains gravity as a consequence of folds in the space-time blanket, our presence here is measured by the relative effect we have on our spaces. The proof of our existence in this particular snapshot of history is measured in the degrees to which we have manipulated and utilized the space-time around us. This includes these writings we make, monuments we raise and the songs that we sing. The pyramids that were raised, the wars that had been waged and the digital version of ourselves we are constructing and mediating across the digital realm; everything imparts an impact in the space-time.

All these 3D impacts in the world are collected and recorded and mediated through 2D mediums. Stones, books, phones. Therein lies the limitation, preventing technology from operating at biological scales. The transmission loss associated with this 2D medium. The irritating friction. A lossy compression of all our spatial efforts in this multi-chromatic stereo world.

At any given era in the human history, our reach across this metaphysical space-time fabric is defined by the telescopic reaches of the technology we create. Technology depends directly on the way we store, consume and process information and knowledge. It is a feedback loop. We create the technology, we utilize it to impact and shape the real world, we study the result and then we modify the technology. It really matters how we collect the data and analyze them.

Our medium for data consumption has never transcended beyond 2D since millenniums. For the first time in the history of this planet, augmented reality will change the way human species acquire and consume information. This powerful paradigm shift in perspective will soon accelerate our evolution into the next realm.

Internet will slowly wither away and die.

The internet holds the collective wisdom of humanity that has been accumulated for countless centuries. Spread across millions of computers, held together by protocols that have matured and organized with time, the internet is the single most invention that has enabled the exchange and free flow of ideas, transcending all hurdles. Suddenly, the concept of time and distance was shrunken to a nutshell of singularity; we could literally transmit terabytes across multiple time zones, and it ushered a new era where the mediation of thoughts and ideas transcended space and time, collaborations and revolutions evolved online, and the interactions in this digital world started to shape the real world around us. It influenced people, places, and events.

This version of our digitally transcendental life, our 2D signal based nirvana where we are all immortal and constantly building and customizing our afterlife as mentioned in my previous post, living as electric signals being carried away by meticulous routing protocols, to be displayed on 2D screens for consumption- will come to an end once we embrace AR. The next would be a magic show we all will collectively participate in. We all will be Dorothys transported to the Oz and Alices tumbling down the Rabbit hole.

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