BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield. Reality, so quaint but, in so many ways, it just isn't pulling its weight these days.

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KELLYANNE CONWAY:  Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave  alternative facts to that.

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BOB GARFIELD:  Obviously, when reality doesn't comport with ideology or religion or just unrequited desire, it’s easily dislodged By lies, fantasy or unfounded belief. On the  experiential front, when mere two-dimensional media leave us cold, the “holy crap” immersive world of virtual reality spirits us into its 360-degree thrall.

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WOMAN:  Oh my God, oh my God –

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BOB GARFIELD:  And then there’s just plain navigating the physical world, with all its annoying limits of time, space and human anatomy that make it so difficult to find your car in a parking lot or perform brain surgery. How cool would it be if we could just don a pair of goggles and digitally augment ordinary analog reality with information, 3-D images and even a sense of touch? Yeah, well, we can. That thing called augmented reality is here, and more of it, much more, is on its way.

PROF. KEN PERLIN:  A profound redefinition of normal keeps happening, and it’s about to happen again because within five years from now the revolution will be over.

BOB GARFIELD:  That was NYU Computer Science Professor Ken Perlin speaking Tuesday in New York at AR in Action, a conference of augmented reality pioneers and their financiers.

PROF. KEN PERLIN:  We will all be wearing lightweight eyewear that’ll show virtual objects in the world around us in high-resolution, high-frame rate, extremely wide field-of-view. Smart glasses will become socially invisible, just like the glasses that many of you are wearing today.

BOB GARFIELD:  How great is that? Strap on some goggles and manipulate floating holograms with your fingertips. Repair an espresso maker from the other side of the world or see inaccessible structures turned inside out, such as a diseased brain.

PHYSICIAN:  The patient is gonna be in the OR, lie on the bed. We have our spatial [ ? ] ascending camera, so during the process of the surgery you can actually see what’s going on inside the patient’s hip.  

BOB GARFIELD:  This is superimposing MRI images onto an actual brain during surgery?
PHYSICIAN:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  Medicine accounts for many of AR's early successes. This is Keith Boesky of ODG, manufacturer of remarkably compact smart glasses, which are great for watching movies in an airplane or helping a paramedic treat an accident victim.

KEITH BOESKY:  The golden hour is right there when the person just had the accident but ambulances can take a long time to get them to the hospital. So the EMT can have the doctor see what they're seeing and the doctor can walk them through exactly what to do while they’re there.

BOB GARFIELD:  And imagine augmenting sight and sound with touch, through the science of haptics.  Robin Alter of

Ultrahaptics demonstrated how ultrasound can trigger discrete sensations through the air.

ROBIN ALTER:  We are getting better and better. Over the next year, we’ll have more refined textures. So right now we’re at hard and soft and over time we’ll get to cotton and rock and then we’ll get to silk and sandpaper.

BOB GARFIELD:  All very promising, he said, for e-retailing (touch the goods!) and duh, porn. Also, it turns out you can shoot lightning bolts through your fingers.

ROBIN ALTER:  Open your hands and face them down, see if you feel it.

BOB GARFIELD:  I do, yes, there is electricity surging through my hands. Ahrrh!

ROBIN ALTER:  These are sound waves, not electricity at all.

BOB GARFIELD:  This isn’t some world’s fair expo of the distant future. Microsoft, Google, Apple and billions of dollars’ worth of venture capital are already in the market, with various headsets, software platforms and developer tools, uncannily mimicking the wizardry long imagined in literature and film.

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DOROTHY:  To Oz?

SCARECROW:  To Oz!

   BOTH SING:

We're off to see the Wizard

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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BOB GARFIELD:  In 1901, L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame wrote in his novel, The Master Key, about magical spectacles that  project information about the people the wearer encounters. In  the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, ingénue Anne Francis is holographically projected into the presence of the brilliant Dr. Morbius.

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COMMANDER ADAMS:  A statue. That’s  Altaira.

DR. MORBIUS:  Simply a three-dimensional image, Commander.

COMMANDER ADAMS:  But it's alive!

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BOB GARFIELD:  A year ago, fantasy and AR themselves merged in the form of Pokémon GO. Recall the swarms of Pokémon Go-Getters, led by cell phone images invading public spaces to capture Lapras or Snorlax. Pokémon GO spawned mobs with a silly game. What the technology promises is no mere plaything. To NYU's Ken Perlin, we are on the brink of altering human capabilities and behavior on a mass scale.

PROF. KEN PERLIN:  The phones are a transitional technology. They are going to fade away and they are going to be replaced eventually by unobtrusive eyewear. Everybody will wear it and no one will notice they’re wearing it anymore. You don't go up to someone and say, oh, I see you're wearing shoes today.

BOB GARFIELD:  Soon, says technologist and conference founder John Werner, we won't be satisfied interacting with the world without the third dimension.

JOHN WERNER:  We’re 3-D beings, okay? We went from the mainframe to the desktop, to the laptop, to now mobile, held hostage by rectangles. You haven't lived until you started playing with 3-D objects and realizing - you know, I don’t know what it would be like to see black and white your whole life and then suddenly see color?

BOB GARFIELD:  An unbelievable experience, I can now personally confirm. To Werner though, what's unfathomable is limiting our computing to two dimensions, like that bizarre planet in an episode of Star Trek, Next Generation.

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DATA:  The probe’s point of view reveals that the objects exist entirely in two dimensions, on a single plane.

LAFORGE:  They have length and width, but not height, virtually flat.

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BOB GARFIELD:  Werner put his livelihood where his vision was, bolting MIT's Media Lab to join the AR startup Meta. And you’d be forgiven for gulping a bit at his gamble because we've been here before, right?

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MALE CORRESPONDENT:  The gadget will bring convenience to consumers some may have never imagined.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  With simple vocal commands, the spec are being touted as allowing wearers to take photos, send text messages and record video, all hands free.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  It’s just, it’s just really sheer magic.

BOB GARFIELD:  Only four years ago, Google Glass was the next big thing, until it wasn't.

MAN:  Google Glass I would not say was some big success, you know, far from it.

MAN:  Battery life is still beaning. It’s – I can’t keep it on very often, otherwise it’ll die.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  The era of Google Glass has ended, at least for now.

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BOB GARFIELD:  Yeah and, for good measure, the people who did plunk down $1500 for Google Glass were derided as pretentious glassholes. But several billion dollars say the stars are now properly aligned, advances in miniaturization and processing power, the advent of 5G mobile wireless and the ubiquity of indispensable smart phone apps that are all but begging to be augmented into something even more magical. John Werner's meta-colleague Ryan Pamplin.

RYAN PAMPLIN:  So if I wanted Uber when I leave here, I want to be able to reach down into my holographic belt, grab my Uber orb, open my hand, have it show me a 3-D terrain map of the

surrounding area, drop a pin where I want to go or say where I want to go, and then I want the car to come. And when it comes, I want to see a line drawn on the ground of the car. The driver will look over at me and see an arrow over my head and know I’m his passenger. There's a lot of really exciting use cases - shopping, learning, design, manufacturing, collaboration, communication. I really think there's no industry that will go unaffected by this technology.

BOB GARFIELD:  This presumes, of course, that the hardware is affordable and nobody wearing it gets bullied for looking like a dork. The latest generation meta-viewer is still kinda bulky, like a bike helmet with a visor. Microsoft’s HoloLens isn’t much smaller. The industry understands it can’t grow exponentially until the tech shrinks dramatically.

RYAN PAMPLIN:  I would say 2018 you're going to see something that's smaller, lighter, portable and eventually, if you want to fast-forward to, let’s say, 2030-ish, it’s a computer brain interface that's reading and writing to your senses.

BOB GARFIELD:  The year 2030, exactly as distant as 2004, the year of Abu Ghraib and Shrek II. So, wait, what did he say?

RYAN PAMPLIN:  It’s a computer brain interface that's reading and writing to your senses.

BOB GARFIELD:  Yeah, that! This technology promises to give speech to stroke victims or enable you to send a stuck-in-traffic message with your mind. Wow. It can map and store brain activity and biometrics for a deeper understanding of human behavior. Double wow. And it can maybe even influence that behavior. Yikes! This is worth thinking about, hard!

Professor Ken Perlin is bullish about AR's utopian future. He’s the “future is only five years away” guy but he’s also really scared about dystopia.

PROF. KEN PERLIN:  There was a day in March when two things happened on the same day. Our Republican-controlled Congress decided to be absolutist about the rights of telecoms to be able to scrape your data and sell it to advertisers. And the reason that this was so worrisome is that, well, now you no longer have the rights to your own information. And the same day, Elon Musk announced the formation of his new company, NeuraLink, which promises direct brain connections to the information world around you.

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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Musk has taken an active role in developing what he calls “neural lace” technology, which involves installing tiny electrodes in the brain to transmit thoughts.

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PROF. KEN PERLIN:  So, as I see it, under the now new laws, anyone who is responsible for the pipe between your brain and the world around you is allowed to sell your thoughts and capitalize on them and fundamentally read them with impunity, and you don’t really own your thoughts anymore legally.

BOB GARFIELD:  Remember, AR is two-way technology. Users will constantly feed the signals of what they see and, thereby, map the physical landscape of the populated world, including faces in real time, retrievable by anybody for who knows what. In that world, you can augment but you cannot hide. Georgia Tech Professor Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, thinks the ethical implications of AR are one of several reasons the technology will develop much more slowly than its evangelists predict.

PROF. JANET MURRAY:  I can see that people do speak rather casually about a world in which a person is under surveillance 24 hours a day. And I find that disturbing. And I also find it naïve for technologists to believe that that is going to be something that people will welcome.

ROBIN ALTER:  I guess I should in some way be telling you that that's not gonna happen but a very scary future is ahead of us.

BOB GARFIELD:  Robin Alter of Ultrahaptics, the company whose technology generates the artificial sense of touch.

ROBIN ALTER:  Because it’s not just about our personal data, it’s about our biometrics – heart rate, sweat, eye movement, pupil movement, what parts of the brain are lighting up the different points, and you can start to see what they’re thinking, then guide them to buy your product. Do you want them to fall in love? As things move forward over the next five to ten years, it’s gonna be a scary reality of what is possible.

BOB GARFIELD:  Here’s who you cannot count on to exhibit self-control, advertisers. The money that will underwrite AR content is the same that is barraging you now with pop-ups, autoplays, screen takeovers and tracking you every step of the way.

Now, imagine that one inch from your eyeballs, as filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda did in his video called Hyper-Reality, depicting a grotesque carnival midway of audiovisual distraction.

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Put that in your pipe and augment it. It is exactly such side effects that Georgia Tech's Janet Murray thinks will slow down the future.

PROF. JANET MURRAY:  It is delusional [LAUGHS] to think that we're going to have a functional metaverse in five years, as people here seem to believe. That does not happen overnight and it does not happen from a magic leap of secret technology that all of a sudden arrives and, and life is changed for everybody.

BOB GARFIELD:  On the other hand, before you moderate your expectations too much, consider all those big Silicon Valley bets on AR. And remember the words of Philip K. Dick whose Minority Report predicted this technology in all its chilling glory. Skepticism is all well and good but, as Dick once observed, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

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BOB GARFIELD:  That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Meara Sharma, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Jane Vaughan. And our show was edited - by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Sam Bair and Terence Bernardo. 

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Jim Schachter is WNYC’s vice president for news. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield.

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