According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.
Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.
The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a "fun mode" that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends' visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity.
For a while, it's genuinely amusing ("Look! It's dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!"), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve amusing glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold – but you can't customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn't be very 2010.
But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin.
My goggles would visually transform homeless people
Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
What's more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.
At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it'll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.
And don't go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It's a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut's vanished and you've got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.
Some people will say there's something sinister and wrong about all of this. They'll claim it's better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they've never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they're right, we'll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.
In other words, over the coming years we're all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there's no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I'll scarcely notice
