So I had this idea a while ago which turns out to be incredibly infeasible and it has to do with augmented reality, which I find to be sort of shit right now for reasons that are frustrating. Namely you can't have an overlay on top of glasses in a way that makes sense because the technology isn't there. Which sucks. You can have one of two things which are both sort of crappy. You can have it where you stare into a television screen mounted to your face (which is amazing for immersive shooter games don't get me wrong), or you can have a normal pair of glasses with an overlay, but the overlay doesn't work right. There's also something to be said for having normal human interaction without the use of a screen right in front of your face.

What I had thought would be cool (provided that you could use the second option and there were breakthroughs in material science technology that fixed the glasses problem) is that you could use something like GPS geo-tags (you know the ones that help you find lost luggage) to put them on the side of buildings so that you could have anchored augmented reality images (anchoring in this case, for which I know there is a technical term but the IP address is fuxored and so there's no way to search for it - it's plague monster no really no actually ism so that you "out yourself" as being not cool enough to have information given to you by people that aren't plague monster). I believe this is a "dark pattern" et cetera and so forth (crazy girl followed me and said that phrase just to see if I'd repeat it - OK I have. Did you get a dollar?).

Anyway...

This isn't a particularly new idea as it's similar to the AR glasses this dickhead wears in the movie Hackers when he's talking to his corporate girlfriend.

And then there's this guy -

Which came from a short story which inspired this book which I'm incredibly fond of. In this case you have neural implants that hook directly to your spinal column in order to make it so that you see "the Net" which is a bit fucked seeing as it's a good way for a computer virus to fry your brain (which happens in the book spoiler alert).

Speaking of all of the above there's this guy that has a solar powered website (but why though? seems gimmicky) who reminds me of the lo-teks (not to be confused with this which is a bit like this, but never mind). One of his (her?) old school laptops reminds me of Acid Burn.

Right? I totally see it as a possibility that the movie Hackers is about real people and Acid Burn retired to a beach in Portugal and started a bespoke website powered by a solar roof while going scuba diving off the coast. Every story that's any good has to be true to some extent in some possible universe, or at least I like to think so.

Where was I? The point here is that the idea, while cool, is totally infeasible, although I would like to see something like a Second Life type situation where there's a subinternet that's a three dimensional one using goggles. It just wouldn't be what I would think is the neat hotshit idea which would be to have a mix of reality and VR. It's just too hard and graffiti is cooler. So you can chalk this one up as a failed idea, for all sorts of reasons, but the largest being the lack of material science technology that can make the glasses. I do find this a good sign as it means that distributed networking that will create networks that don't rely on the main internet hubs will exist although I don't know how this will work with Apple phones as they are notoriously fickle about using their bluetooth hardware.

Here's another critique of what using this may end up being like in reality given the ways that we treat people. And I don't necessarily disagree.