Atemporality Revisited

Recently I've been thinking about Bruce Sterling's 2010 TED Conference speech, "Atemporality for the Creative Artist." I like how he defines the idea of atemporality, but I think other examples may illustrate his point better. Many of his examples, especially those related to social media, do a great job showing how we've managed to create a world outside of space, but I think there are other ideas and products in the market right now, that will eventually help us create a world outside of time.

Take, for example, the growing ubiquity of devices like the iPad and iPhone. These devices have the potential to be always on and always recording. Couple that with the growing number of surveillance cameras everyone is subjected to, satellite images, mapping projects, geo-coded photos and tweets, etc... and you have entire portions of the world in which a substantial portion of the visual and mental landscape is recorded.

If these trends continue, and the cost to archive this content continues to decline, then without much difficulty you can imagine a future in which you can dial back time as easily as you can change the aperture on your camera.

For example, let's say I am sitting in my office on a beautiful sunny day in 2050. I hold up my future reality recording/augmentation device (or simply adjust the setting on my digital glasses) and dial back time 5 years. I can easily see this same office in 2045, the people that are here, the way the furniture is arranged, what people on the street and in the press are talking about. Enough adjacent content will exist that unrecorded objects can be extrapolated and rendered automatically.

Now, I've abolished at least a part of the concept of time and definitely changed the nature of history. I am well on my way to an atemporal world.

Augmented Reality at Method Engine

On January 25, Richard Alvarez, Method Engine's Director of Technology, hosted one of the first Augmented Reality (AR) seminars in Chicago.

Now that Flash has a toolkit for building Augmented Reality applications, the technology is much more accessible to marketers. Some early adopters like Lego and McDonald's have executed very exciting campaigns that utilize this technology.

During the seminar there was a passionate discussion about the future of AR and how we as marketers could leverage the technology to create applications and campaigns to help our clients build better relationships with their customers. You can view PDFs of the presentation here:

The State of Augmented Reality

Stay tuned for more. We intend to follow this new trend closely in order to bring relevant aspects of it to our clients.