As I anxiously await Brunner’s Rick Gardinier to send over his next installment of his augmented reality musings, I find that my mind has been wandering into the realm of far future tech and science with the child-like excitement I had when I first read Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines.

For some reason, perhaps my instinctive desire to hit the next button whenever an iPhone story shows up on my radar, the applications and all around cool-factor of augmented reality on the iPhone never hit me until Rick’s article, and wound up spawning subsequent conversations on the topic with Sean and Steven on the CobWEBs podcast.

Whatever the reason for my newfound excitement, my mind is filled with questions on the implications of these technologies entering into the mainstream (questions that we won’t get the answers to in the next ten years, if Gartner is to be believed – but I digress). A lot of these questions are only going to make sense to the esoteric, bleeding edge early adopters – hence why I share them here.

Mob Mentality
We all know that Friendfeed, just like most other tight knit online communities, is prone to bouts of mob mentality (and even Robert Scoble came around to finally admitting it’s existence). I saw a little bit of it almost break out last night over a public declaration of disinterest in Louis Gray’s twins, though it most certainly was not as bad as previous mobs on record.

Part of what lets these flash mobs exist is the anonymity factor and comfort of the familiar crowd.  When it’s socially acceptable within your tight-knit community of faceless avatars to say what you think un-self-censored, you will.

Add to this the factor of a propensity for impulse: the barrier between someone’s keystrokes and their brain (particularly for early adopters and geeks) is often much thinner than the barrier between the brain and the mouth.

Online speech is the closest thing we have now to indexable thought, and in an inevitable world where the barriers to human input are broken down even further, the foot will be all that much easier to place in one’s mouth.

In that future world where augmented reality is mainstream, we have to assume that the computers are at finally wearable, and that the augmented reality is persistent and customizable as if it were an instance of Google Maps.  The user / wearer gets to choose which skins or reality overlays they walk around and view the world through.

The most obvious theoretical reality overlay would be a Twitter overlay (or future-modern equivalent real time public lifestream) that is easily accessible to those who come in contact with you.  We’re seeing glimpses of this reality now, since there is a certain level of transparency with having a Twitter and Facebook account, but I have to wonder if we wouldn’t self-censor ourselves to the point of a psychological repression, for fear of literally wearing our errant thoughts in a scrollable bubble floating eternally above our heads.

Will We Still Have a Sense of Reality to Augment?
Dutch blogger Timi Stoop-Alcala wrote in response to Rick and others on the topic of augmented reality in a much more metaphysical way on the topic that frankly dives deeper than I did. She paused to reflect on the metaphysical aspects and abstractions of living in a persistent world that was not really there:

We’re living in a time where the most prosperous societies are immersed in digital visual culture. While this immersion has given birth to new ways of seeing the world, it has also been largely transformed into what theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord would refer to as the ‘fascination for the spectacle’ that is constantly being fuelled by a commodified view of the world.

Visual seductions reinforce the public’s ‘pleasure in spectatorship’. The dominance of the visual dimension makes us more likely to see — and look — at the appearance of things, not at their underlying relationships.

If this is one significant context wherein developments in AR take root, I wonder how it will then affect our social and signifying practices. With which eyes will we view our environment, how will  we assign meaning and how will we define our experiences of the world? Will augmented reality also augment our understanding of worldviews? Will it enrich meanings in our lives?

If the world becomes our interface, and yet the reality it represents is actually illusory, then what is augmented reality actually resonating, mediating and recreating?

Allow me to wax poetic: unaided and un-augmented by virtual reality technologies and digital technology in general, will we still be able to look deeper in the heart of a flower, tremble at the abyss of poverty, and glimpse the history of a raindrop?

If you’d have asked most people in our circle whether or not these would be pressing concerns in our lifetime only two or three years ago, most would have chuckled and said decisively, “No.”

Knowing now what we do – remember, we’ve been talking about the business and marketing applications of augmented reality – about the march of technology and Moore’s Law, these are concerns and salient discussions that will be on the public’s doorstep sooner, rather than later.

By all means, have fun with the discussion and the science-fiction-y meanderings for now (I know I’m having fun). Keep in mind, though, that these threads may be practical soon enough.