Human Communication

“How people will interact with the world around them,” according to Gartner, is set to change due to personal computing. Now,“every lake or mountain anyone can see from their own door” can potentially “become an excitement in their imagination” to paraphrase Nobel Laureate for literature William Butler Yeats.

Emerging toolkits mean developers can ‘place’ internet-based digital content into the physical world and have it ‘persist,’ to stay in the same location, viewed via augmented reality (AR).

Great technological discoveries make their own conceptual room. Now let us look at the absorbing language and thought potential absorbed into this emerging new medium.

Augmented digital content meets the physical world in Bladerunner 2049 © Columbia Pictures

‘Esprit de géométrie,’ Spirit of Geometry - Anchors

Choice of enabling developer kits, frameworks, and programming languages are proliferating. One cross-cutting concept can be identified, a necessary traversable conduit to channel internet-based content to our physical world, that of ‘ANCHORS.’

Broadly anchors in this context are real-world scale coordinate systems for expressing geometry. Anchors work with data recorded by sensors from a mobile device or headset that track common frames of reference, triangulate relative position, and create geometry in 3D space, mapping a real-world location. Content can be ‘anchored’ to for instance horizontal or vertical planes, an image, 3D objects, a 3D map, geographic coordinates, and even a face. Developers becoming a type of explorer of those near-at-hand immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. New functionality now opens including ability to;

• Position and orientate (pose) ‘placed’ virtual content in the physical world.
• Mediate between the user’s gaze direction or hand position.
• ‘Persist’ digital content (stay in place over time between sessions).
• Share content location between devices.
• Compose and edit what happens around a point in space.

Critiquing Anchors

Anchor setting is hard to achieve given demands not least on computer vision tasks of plane finding and motion tracking. Location error can occur via ‘DRIFTING’ of virtual content not reflecting where you are. Created 3D maps can compliment occlusion APIs by adding the illusion digital content is being blocked from view behind physical surroundings or by providing further map intelligence — such as vegetation, water, or building segmentation — changing how the digital content interacts with specific map geometry.

The new prime meridian is the individual. Once mature these anchoring tools can conjure experiences that provide moments of joy, delight, surprise, beauty, humor, imbue with story, and exalt the everyday via computing, a creative infrastructure — but how so?

‘Esprit de finesse,’ Spirit of Kindness, Places Made Important

To say the world ends at discussed Cartesian and Euclidean space is an impoverished view of human experience.

Ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes enlightens, mapping is human language embodied in geometry. Ancient Greco-Roman Strabo in Geographica teaches that the only wise man is the poet, moreover, Homer was the beginning of geography. From this perspective, the role of human language is elevated subsequently so too are those who master it, namely those great poets.

Or defined another way it is the marriage of the ‘esprit de géométrie,’ the rigor of the geometer and the ‘esprit de finesse,’ the spirit of kindness wrote Blaise Pascal, 17th century mathematician and philosopher. Those with an intuited creative impulse as Nobel Laureate in Literature Henri Bergson outlined — The imagination of great creatives. It is both the anchor and ship, at once steadying and buoyant.

Places are made important only by the light of the mind which is now playing upon them, not so much just celebrating the world, more that the great creative is at hand to proceed with the celebration.

This seedling technology stack has everything to do with place, as anchoring filters the internet into the physical world, into the topographical mind. With the authority of inheriting a corpus of Irish place literature, the millennia spanning Dindsenchas tradition — the narratives of place, the lore of place, how the imagination of great creatives affect their environment.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney both affirmed, we have all lived in important places, Homer’s Iliad was simply a local row.

Portrait of Walt Whitman © US Library of Congress

Towards Democratic Vistas

American poet Walt Whitman in one of his masterpieces ‘Democratic Vistas’ set out that the greatest art is non-subordinated soul world literature of first-class creatives — whose measurable outcome is whether it has helped any human soul if it has created joy.

All of this, through Whitman’s lens, is foundational for democratic vistas. For these digital technologies it is where great creatives inoculate, transmute joy into place for individuals to experience.

The Universalis Cosmographia Map, a masterpiece union of the geometric and the creative, which changed the way we see the world and gave the New World her place-name, America, incorporated text from Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI by the collaborating poet. Book VI, ends with the line;

“Anchors are cast from the prow; sterns cushion on sand” — The Aeneid Book VI, Virgil / Seamus Heaney translation

How this rhymes true today when such a diverse range of groups of people with the enunciating tools are casting digital anchors intertwining lands with new technology. In some sense as a result a New World, Mundus Novus, is emerging from under your feet.

This ample geography has the potential to dazzle the imagination, into the marvelous as people may come to know it, and it will not wait long for metres.

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