Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

In order to further our understanding of the behaviors developing around mobile technology, we have been reaching out to experts across the globe for their unique insights. By doing this, we are able to escape ourselves and become exposed to new perspectives.

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and tech consultant based out of Portland, Oregon. Previously, she was involved with PR and digital strategy at Wieden + Kennedy and has blogged for the Discovery Channel. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers.

With all the hype surrounding augmented reality, we asked Amber to clear things up and help us put the technology into perspective.

Amber: In a way, augmented reality has been hyped for years. It's been used for military and corporate purposes, and it's been quite expensive. But augmented reality really started as virtual reality. It was a little too early for its time. For one thing, the idea of the interface was not stable yet. The idea of wearing a heavy helmet on one's head is not socially, economically, or physically feasible.

Now that mobile devices and webcams are available to enough people to make augmented reality a more common occurrence, AR speculation has blossomed once again. iPhones and other mobile platforms now contain locative technologies, accelerometers and ongoing connectivity. They've become a common and affordable interface, allowing augmented reality to finally have more than a few common platforms to stand on.

Virtual Reality is often defined as an opaque experience that is separate from the real world. But mobile devices are melting into our reality instead of taking us away from it. We are using information to connect us to people and to plan the experiences of our future self and those around us. We are using personal mobile devices as video game controllers for the world around us. Virtual Reality has dissolved into actual reality.

We are gaming animals. All throughout history, games were substitutes and simulations of war. Now our wars are fun. They're soft wars. The race to get the most followers and most views on a website. The race to share. They're still very evolutionary, we're just playing the game on a different platform that doesn't involve us physically as much as mentally and strategically. We've become emperors of our own empires, sending out robotic troops to scrape websites, gather RSS feeds and plot trajectories on digital maps. We have robots that grab and tell us our stats. We count our troops. We have Facebook walls that, when printed out, would span the length of Egyptian temples. They'd also contain as just as much history.

The first augmented reality was spice, and that was a heavy market for the Europeans, who had a quite a lot of bland food. Augmented reality is hyped a little like that. Marketers find it tasty, and business writers like to sprinkle it onto a lot of the passages they write. It makes the tech go down faster, so to speak. For more on that, I'd watch Bruce Sterling's keynote at Layar.

Stay tuned for more of Amber's thoughts on the topics of location based services, the internet of things, slow data, and more.