Who owns your visual identity in Augmented Reality?
Every morning after you wake up, you make a decision about your visual identity. You choose clothes that you feel will make you look professional, chic, casual, or sexy. You then go to the bathroom to style your hair and maybe put some makeup. You have control of your image.
That’s what you do to present yourself in the physical world. At work, school while shopping or passing by other people on the street.
That control gets even stronger when you put your image online. While posting your selfie on Instagram, you could first open an app like FaceTune to adjust the brightness of your teeth, get rid of some skin imperfections and maybe even go as far as to change the outline of your face to make it look more skinny.
When you make a FaceTime call, or you use Facebook Messenger to video chat with your friends, you may choose an option to add a digital filter to make the experience more unique. In all these cases, you are the one controlling your social presence.
But what happens to your image if others look at you through their own digital lens?
What if the next time you video chat with your friends, they will be the ones who have an option to put a filter on your face? And what if that filter gets so advanced that they will be able to swap your face with a famous actor? It is not a question of “what if?” but rather “when?”. The same technology that lets you put the dog nose and an animated tongue on your video can be used to augment anyone around you. That technology is called Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that overlays computer-generated images on top of your view of the real world, thus creating an augmented view of the reality.
With an advanced version of AR called Mixed Reality (MR), you could control the look of your family, friends, and any person you pass by on the street. Every woman you see could look like Scarlett Johansson, and every man could have a sporty body of Cristiano Ronaldo. You could choose their hair color, makeup, and style of clothes they wear or even go as far as to swap their face with one of a famous actor like it has been done in a recent deep-fake video with a face of Tom Cruise.
Few companies, Microsoft, Meta, and MagicLeap already provide glasses that allow you to look at the world directly and see things that are not physically there.
Mixed Reality headsets HoloLense 2 from Microsoft and Magic Leap One from Magic Leap allow you to see and interact with digital objects and blend them into your surrounding space.
Rony Abovitz Founder and CEO of Magic Leap stated that his technology could go even a step further and remove objects from your surrounding environment and swap them with something that you like.
“Magic Leap is…giving you complete control over your environment…, you can erase things you don’t want to see, you don’t want to see a billboard that is physical, you can erase that make that your twitter feed.”
src: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTqF3w2yrZI (min: 7:36)
Although MR is still in its early stage, in combination with face tracking and Artificial Intelligence, it can soon be used to alter the image of everyone you see around you.
So what will happen once this technology gets to a level where you will be able to manipulate and distort what you see according to your liking? Will you create a world filled with strange-looking characters from the X-Men universe? Will you decide who wears the digital costume or will they decide how they look through your glasses?
This choice will not be yours, it will be imposed on you by companies that build this technology, and their decision will not be random but rather driven by the best performing business model. They will examine both sides of the equation to see who will pay more, you or the viewer. The result could be a store where you purchase your digital skin, similar to the one offered by Fortnite for the purchase of their game characters.
If the choice ends up being in the hands of viewers purchasing digital skins and then putting them on anyone they choose, we might get new and unique challenges.
Recognition
If everyone sees a different version of everyone else, how do you socialize when you are in the same space? You see one person, they see another.
Complements
You can’t compliment a person on their look or clothing choices, because you are the one making a choice. You could always say “I like the way I made you look today :)”, but that would be creepy…
Lack of variations and surprises
You can’t possibly design everyone person you meet, so you might end up having a lot of clones. That would quickly make your world dull and boring.
Tattoos
If you don’t see the way people actually look like, you will also not see their tattoos. It might be the end of the tattoo era :-)
Commerce
Today people buy expensive clothes to differentiate themselves from others, but since you are the one purchasing digital skins for the people around you, will you be spending thousands of dollars on expensive brands that only you can see?
It is also possible to have a hybrid model where both options are available. You could become a premium user which would allow you to manage your own identity or be a standard user in which case others could decide how you appear to them.
There are many more interesting and random effects this shift of image ownership could bring.
How do you think this world would look like if you had full control over its visual design? Leave a comment.
