AR vs VR: Celebrity Death Match
Why augmented reality is trash but virtual reality is a magic future
The top line of my LinkedIn profile says I work in AR/VR. For the uninitiated (don’t feel bad; it’s a self-aggrandizing pretentious minority who think this is something anyone outside of game nerds or technophiles actually cares about) this stands for Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality. If that still means nothing to you, still don’t feel bad. Because, kind of same. But a quick explainer nonetheless:
Augmented reality is like Google Glass. Remember those? Put some indisputably ugly glasses on your face and welcome The Google to tell you All About The World Around You. Or whatever those were supposed to do. AR (as wearables) promises to interrupt your field of vision — in the real world — with ever more information about the things around you. What one does with that information, or why one would need it, is still fuzzy to me, but seems to be an important Tech Business Bet in the circles that care about such things.
Virtual reality, on the other hand, absorbs your entire field of vision. It supplements the real world with a fake one. It’s immersive: a completely alternate space. Your attention, your vision, and even your (stationary) movement are reflected in what I can’t describe as anything but The Matrix. Unlike in the Matrix, however, you do not need to become a weird infantilized larva of your real self in order to play.
While both technologies provide an alternate “reality” and have commonalities in terms of the technology required to make them work, they provide extraordinarily different experiences, serve entirely different purposes, and should neither be lumped together nor treated as equals.
Because virtual reality is clearly far superior to augmented reality.
Wait, what?
At first glance, virtual reality may seem scarier. It seems to ask for more, either from sheer immersiveness or its demand that you suspend your disbelief and skepticism or reject your innate preference for physical reality. In contrast, augmented reality, overlaid as it is on physical space, seems to ask for less. It’s just a little frosting on your everyday experience; a gentle nudge, a soft ping, something extra, rather than something entirely new. But it’s exactly virtual reality’s all-consumingness and augmented reality’s additiveness that makes virtual reality fundamentally innocuous and augmented reality fundamentally insidious.
I say this as someone who spends lots time thinking about how human-computer interaction works in different dimensions of space and as someone who spends lots time thinking about the ways we have built technology to interact with, or demand interaction from, humans.
The interactions that we’ve become native in are flat. They mimic paper, or stone carvings if we really want to get originalist. These 2D interactions have also become ubiquitous. In the same way that we used to carry with us checkbooks, datebooks, and address books to pay, plan, and connect, we now carry a smartphone to do all the same tasks and more. But while a checkbook, datebook, and address book all require you to initiate an interaction in order for them to execute a task, a smartphone does not: it interacts with you of its own volition under the guise of convenience, efficiency, and productivity.
Imagine if your address book jumped out of your purse every time your college friend took a picture of her dog. Or if your checkbook vibrated when your bank statement was issued, or your friend finally remembered to set aside that $10 she owes you for beers. Or if your street map dinged while you were walking because an accident happened fifteen blocks away. This is highly absurdist yet when our smartphones do this, distracting us from whatever ostensibly less important real world experience we’re having at the moment, we don’t think twice. We may even be glad of the distraction from what must be perceived by technologists as the insufferable realness of the physical world.
In the same way that our two-dimensional devices are constantly by our sides in our daily lives, augmented reality wearables are the next logical extension of this always-on, always-connected technological programming. But rather than confining our interaction and notification space to a device that can be put away at will and must be dug out when needed and so on and so forth, AR postulates it would be more convenient if these notifications and updates appeared in your field of vision the moment they happened.
Other instantiations of the technology suggest these “glasses” could show you a menu from a restaurant you’re standing in front of; provide you with the best route while walking to your destination; let you know which friend is approaching, in case you’ve forgotten the names of your friends. More ambitious versions could place simulated avatars on the street, like PokémonGo but with humans (or, idk, raccoons, or more likely, advertisements). I am not sure why they would put virtual raccoons on the street, but they could. I also wasn’t sure why they put Pokémon on the street, but they also did that.
AR wearables promise unsolicited pop-ups about anything and everything around you. I imagine a glasses-lens version of the screen pop-up notifications on the newer Mac OSes: Slack pings and calendar reminders and uninformative software updates that slide in and out as they happen, diverting my attention from the work I am supposed to be doing but which may not be as important and is certainly not as new. Why even give you the opportunity to ignore an unwanted text message or an unnecessary calendar reminder or — gasp — an ad? Rather than confining our efficiency and productivity and multi-tasking to an accessory, what if it became an integration? Augmented reality extends the behaviors and habits of smartphones from a measly two dimensions to all-encompassing three.
And of course you could put the wearables away, much like you can put your smartphone away. But as we know, when you put it away, you spend much of your time wondering what you’re missing. Even when it’s not in front of your face, it commands much of your attention. We’ve been well-trained by its constant barrage of input to be convinced that if we don’t know immediately, we have missed out. The dynamic of smartphones, and of AR wearables in the same tradition, defaults us in, challenges us to opt-out, and subsequently suggests that that would be our loss.
AR wearables will not critically examine or question whether the behaviors we’ve adopted with the ubiquity of smartphones are good or constructive or healthy. It simply extends the same interaction model — all of the information, all of the time, everywhere you are — into an additional dimension, making it all the easier to be in your field of vision for more of your waking (or maybe someday, sleeping) hours.
This is not to say there aren’t real uses for being able to simulate on top of a real environment. Landscapers and interior designers (and fashion designers, and artists…) have probably the strongest claim to “augmented reality in three dimensions would be a useful tool for me”. But for the average person, there’s not much that face glasses could provide that your phone doesn’t already do. Or, frankly, that just walking into the restaurant and asking to see their menu wouldn’t also achieve. So who benefits from you wearing glasses that are capable of constantly feeding you information about (a) your physical surroundings and (b) things happening elsewhere in their multiverse? And how do they benefit? I will leave those questions as rhetorical, though they have decisive answers.
Because augmented reality needs to operate on top of your existence in meatspace, it will always be an overlay and an intrusion and a distraction. It’s not quite something you engage with, other than perhaps to ask a question, or execute a specific but discrete task, more likely to dismiss some kind of notification. It engages with you, and whatever semblance of control it lets you think you have over it is on its own terms. Yes, you can disengage, but then you’re reminded that when you’re away, you’re missing out and there’s no point at all.
Fundamentally, augmented reality’s inevitable end state is an increased cacophony of distracted technological chaos.
In contrast, virtual reality both requires and imposes focus. Yes, you can become overstimulated and unfocused within a virtual world, but it is, at least, your entire world. You have come to this world by choice, for a purpose, and when you leave it, your intention is to disengage. It doesn’t miss you or need you when you’re not there. It doesn’t demand that you keep thinking about it when you’re gone. If you are not engaging with it, nothing is happening, there’s nothing to miss.
Because virtual reality requires focus and is all-encompassing, its raison d’être is diametrically opposed to that of augmented reality. We come to virtual reality to leave the real world behind for a moment or an hour or half a day. Distractions and information, the pattern of engagement demanded by smartphones and, eventually, AR wearables, in a virtual world would serve only to tear us out of our daydream and back in to the real world that we’re seeking to avoid. AR wants you to be distracted and unfocused, because it is that compulsion — that addiction to constant updates, that FOMO — that drives its adoption. VR needs you to be completely focused, because it is your complete buy-in to the alternate reality it offers that makes it a compelling and irresistible experience.
Because so much of the design tradition of VR comes from gaming, in which you need to be focused on executing your objective or else you fail, space and navigation is used intentionally. Every parsec (which is a unit I am freely borrowing from scifi whether or not it is the appropriate unit to use) of virtual space serves a purpose in helping you achieve your objective. Wasted or, worse, misused or misappropriated space actively makes your objective more difficult (in an un-fun way) to achieve, which translates to a poor experience and a bad game. Virtual reality understands your space is valuable and distractions are detrimental to the user’s experience.
Virtual reality creates space: augmented reality sees space as an opportunity to impose its own needs on you invades it.
Virtual reality is by default opt-in. You engage with the space: the space does not engage with you. If you do not want to be in that alternate reality, you simply don’t choose to be there, or perhaps, choose to be elsewhere. This is an affirmative choice, and different than choosing not to be there. Choosing not asks you to make a negative choice, and is what smartphones or AR wearables require you to do when opting out of engagement. “Fine, don’t play with me, then.” In the language of consent, virtual reality requires your consent to engage. Augmented reality assumes it has it, which by definition violates it. This is the different between opting in and opting out.
Because of the simple fact that VR is immersive, you cannot exist in it in parallel with existing in the real world. Therefore in order to exist in the real world, VR has to be a temporary state. In contrast, because AR can and indeed must exist in parallel with the real world, its tendency therefore is to seek to be a ubiquitous, if not permanent, state. Because you can exist in AR while simultaneously existing IRL, AR wants to maximize its on-ness and occupy as much of your RL as it possibly can. While VR may also want to maximize its on-ness, it is definitionally constrained and all virtual reality design must, by necessity, take into account that you have opted in to being there and can — and have a right to — leave at any time. A simple example: you could go to the bathroom with AR glasses on. It would be very difficult to go to the bathroom with VR goggles on.
Even those words — glasses and goggles — indicate the states of reality the technology seeks to occupy. Glasses are something we wear in our natural state, to see or to protect our eyes. They might stay on all day or just while we work or go outside on a sunny day, but they are seamlessly integrated with our real worlds and daily lives. Goggles are something we wear when we are out of our natural states, for example when we are swimming, or in chemistry class. Goggles facilitate unreal or supra-real experiences, and we take them off when we return to normal. They bestow superhuman, but temporary, powers. Glasses — augmented reality — seek to be necessary, even permanent. Goggles can never be anything besides temporary.
Virtual reality’s possible and arguably desirable end state is rich alternative universes in which our creativity and exploration and even our socializing can thrive — if we design and build correctly and responsibly.
There’s a dystopian version of this rumination that takes the worst vices of the attention economy and imposes them on virtual reality technology. Think of the humans orbiting the tragic remnants of Earth from their space station in Wall-E, distracted by the fabrications in their headsets so they don’t notice the demise of everything else around them — including themselves. But the attention economy only functions if it can demand our time, our emotion, our attention. Augmented reality can demand these things because it sits squarely in between us and everything around us. Like our phones in our pockets, it can let us know when it wants our attention and we will have to provide it. Because virtual reality is necessarily a separate space,by its nature it is less likely to become toxic and detrimental to our lives and health, at least not any more than video games. But this does not mean our virtual spaces can’t be co-opted by the darker imperatives in technology.
As we imagine and design the futures of these technologies, it will be critical to question each choice: does this preserve space, or invade it? Does this demand attention, or serve imagination? Can the user consent to the engagement? Who benefits, why, how?
These are expensive technologies to build, develop, and use. Thus, it is easier for larger organizations with larger piles of cash to invest in exploring the possible realities of our collective future. But it is exactly these explorations and their broader technological ecosystems that we need to be skeptical of. I would like to see what virtual, or even augmented, reality could become in the hands of artists, creators, advocates, journalists, and changemakers. I would like to see what these technologies could do without the (false) imperative of infinite scale, without being tied to conventional exit strategies.
Virtual reality promises new spaces that we still have the opportunity to define and describe. Let’s not fuck these ones up, too.
