From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Apr 27 2002 - 16:33:46 MDT
In reply to: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 15:31:27 MDT
I was wondering when that aspect - augmented reality,
or, as I prefer, the less value-biased "overlaid
reality," which I suggested to IEEE reps in the early
'90's at one of the Meckler VR cons - would show up in
Vinge's work.
I have a short article somewhere on disk that I sold -
altho they never paid me the $600 or so they owed me
before they suspended operations - to Amiga User
International Magazine in the early '90's, in which I
described exactly what you were just saying. I was
banking on the passive proximity chips as one of the
driving technologies, at the time. They were up to
256 bits or more of return code at the time, and the
only drawback was that you had to get really close or
use a really powerful pulse to fire them off. I
assumed that that problem would be fixed by now -
which hasn't happened yet, so far as I know.
Basically the proximity chips could be put anywhere,
embedded into just about anything, and even then could
have provided a unique ID for every piece of property,
physical or intellectual, on the globe, making
stealing for fencing purposes uneconomical. In the
early '90's they were already used for that purpose by
the British Motorcycle Association, who sold a kit to
its members for about $50 U.S. and coordinated with
the police who had hand-held readers tied to a
universal database.
Failing to solve the pulse power problem, however, you
could use either a universal broadcast power grid to
keep a little on-board capicitor charged, or make it
just smart enough to tune to whatever broadcast power
was locally available - as in local FM radio stations
- for the same purpose, using a tiny trickle of
current to build up a charge for one or more ID
chirps.
Instead of trying to embed the actual info to be
displayed in the chip, then, I assumed that the chip
would simply tell the user's wearable system where to
look in the universal index, which would be duplicated
on non-rewritable media and available worldwide via
cellular, satellite or whatever.
The other stuff you described - virtual fashion,
virtual faces, virtual art and architecture, virtual
pressence - I used to give lectures about as part of a
set of private seminars put on by "World ???," (can't
recall the name now), later Virtual Ventures, I
believe, under the auspices of the Learning
Alternative. I also projected how juveniles might
hack the system and greatly annoy school authorities
or cops. (I had a dream during this period that
evolved into the plot for a novel that I never wrote
in which someone uses a virtual agent derived from an
on-line game character to represent them, and then the
"real" person dies or disappears, leaving the agent to
carry on. Everyone using the overlay glasses sees the
agent as just another person.)
Anyway, thanks for reviewing the book. Now I will
have to spend some money, obviously...
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