In the beginning there was Reality. There were rocks and water and air and lazy willow trees that whispered to the wind. There was human connection in real life. Laughter and love and all that kind of stuff. This was pretty good. We liked Reality.
But…
Then we came up with a new idea: Augmented Reality. What if reality was somehow better? What if we added a layer on top of it? This is the futuristic sci-fi glasses (the Ray-Ban Metas today). This was the Vision Pro. This was notifications and Instagram and all of these other things we could use to enhance our reality by ladling all kinds of slop on top of it. The idea was that this was going to make reality way better.
But…
Augmented Reality is, maybe, worse than basic Reality? Maybe stuff like the Metaverse (RIP) is not good? Maybe it’s subtracting instead of augmenting? That seems to be the general vibe these days. It is basically what I think.
So…
Perhaps what we need now is Augmented Augmented Reality. MORE reality. Not a layer on top of it. But something that pulls us deeper into it. Not glasses or feeds or notifications. No online universes, no headsets. Just the ability to live in the moment, in actual Reality. And to have better moments in that Reality. To appreciate them more. To pay more attention to them, instead of the things we have layered onto Reality.
How do we create a device that enables that? Is it even a device? Is it music? A religion? A language? A state of mind? I kind of doubt it's a black and white phone or an overpriced paper-like tablet (but let me know if I'm wrong).
The obvious retort is that we're overthinking it; that the real solution is to get rid of it all, to strip life back to the basics. No screens, no texting, whatever. This might work, but it also feels lazy. Is it really true that all of the new things we build to improve reality must make it worse? Is it true that all of our new tools must strip some important part of the process away? I don't think so.
So what gets us there? How do we create augmented augmented reality?
We are not sure. Although we have written a few ideas for doing so on a personal level:
Any other ideas? Email us.