It is an amazing sight to witness people visiting new places just to hunt for a Pokemon. Pokemon Go takes advantages of mobile phones characteristics to bring the real world as the main scene of the game, instead of using a virtual reality setting. This clever and innovative idea continue the narrative of Pokemon stories, where the main characters explore the world to find more of these little animals and overcome as a team challenges. With Pokemon Go, gamers are simulating these characters in our own reality. As a consequence, sometimes multiple gamers must overcome some challenges and therefore meet at a place at the same time. Playing this game requires a lot of skills, including social, problem solving and soft skills.

The barrier separating the virtual and the real world has been blurred so much that a new a form of reality has been created. In this new world, virtual tools are given an active role. The interaction can occur between human and computer, but also computer to human; giving the illusion the computer can “take control” and give instructions to the users independently. Such reality is referred as “hyper-reality”. Watch this video to witness how hyper-reality could become quite intrusive as well as very inelegant too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

This idea has been applied for a while now. From my circle of friends, It is  not unusual for owners of smart watches to stand and walk around, it they have been idle for too long. The watch monitors its level of activity (or lack of it) and adapt to the circumstances and the environment. In this case,  the watch’s movement and body status.  The reminders are triggered by the environment and not scheduled. RainAlarm apps can push some information based on changes to atmospheric pressure. Pokemon Go suggests a Pokemon may be present based on the GPRS position of a  device. It would be feasible to extend this hyper-reality to our fridges, so that they automatically order more milk, when we run out.

What is interesting with hyper-reality is how humanity has embedded within a technology the functionality to command them to achieve some tasks. The  behaviour of these individuals is likely to change and to be passed on to the next generation. It is hard to establish whether it is likely to be positive, but it could affect the path of humanity. Without the use of hyper-reality humanity could go other path. Perhaps it could enhance our survival as a race, perhaps it could have a deliberating effect.

Another aspect to consider is the need to use hyper-reality has a survival tool. In prehistoric time, our survival was quite simple. We needed to prevent to be eaten by our predators to stay alive. We needed to find food, shelter ourselves from the elements and avoid diseases.  We needed to stay fit otherwise we would perish. In our age, where abundance exists for some of us, we need to be reminded our body needs exercises or hunt for something. Hyper-reality encourages us to search for some monsters born from our imagination or instructed to exercise. Technology may have contributed in make us idle, now it is helping us to combat this trend. That is a very interesting point and worse researching its effect on our society. 

Hyper-reality could be positive too. It could help us managing better our home and communicating with our relatives; this video will show you that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPH1sAY8Vhg. There are such a huge number of data that can be collected and stored about us, commercial firm can analyse our habits without our consent. Product or services placement could become much more effective. Our smart devices could already suggest a place to eat if we are visiting a city without our consent. Google Maps is very good at using some type of machine learning to identify our patterns of consumption.  So our Pokemon or future games based on the same idea could guide us to a certain shop or public places at a certain time, then we may be purchase something we may have not done otherwise. So thirty years later than predicted, Big Brother is watching us even more … George Orwell was not that wrong.

How comfortable are you with that level of possible control?

Can such tools used to educate the younger generation ?