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So, how rapidly is the Digital Universe expanding?
Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.
This explosive growth means that by 2020 our Digital Universe will be nearly 50 TIMES AS BIG as it was in 2009. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars.**
What will your job, business, social life, privacy and security look like in a world where all media, knowledge and culture is digital, online, semantically interlinked and in the hands of various data custodians?
THINK ABOUT IT.
**For more information, check out this interesting video by market intelligence firm IDC.
It’s finally here — our view of the real world need not be limited by what our naked eye can see. Gadgets and terminals are not the be-all and the end-all in our quest for more information, real time access to data and most importantly, a reliable secondary storage mechanism for our memories. Why miss out on the physical world if you want to be immersed in and enjoy the benefits of digital media? Why not just augment the physical world with it? Yes, it’s the new buzz word, but Augmented Reality is here (and here to stay). The potential for this technology is undoubtedly endless, but what we’ve seen so far has mostly ranged from gimmicky and cute to somewhat useful. Nothing groundbreaking so far — no mass adoption of wearable technology or any of the entertainment possibilities. However, it’s just a matter of time when some of these implementations become part of our daily lives. If you hate how people are constantly distracted by their iPhones and Blackberry’s, brace yourself, because it’s about to get much worse.
Augmented Reality, just like any other technology will have some incredibly beneficial uses and some absolutely useless ones. However, all forms of Augmented Reality will likely be accompanied by some risks. Here are just five potential problems we can expect in the years ahead:
1. Profiling: The use of facial recognition technology, combined with geo-location and augmented data will lead to a seamless integration of our online and offline lives. As a result of these developments, a person walking around in the physical world will no longer just be a person, but will be their physical self along with a digital profile and other information that either the person itself or others make available online. Imagine walking into a social gathering and getting ignored by a bunch of people because you have self-identified yourself with a political or religious affiliation that they don’t particularly care for. Or worse — imagine being singled out for additional security screening at the airport because of it.
2. Unauthorized Augmented Advertising: Advertisers and tech companies are drooling over the possibilities of monetizing objects & spaces in the physical world by augmenting digital ads onto them in real-time. Think of the physical and intellectual property rights implications if the technologies that drive augmented advertising do not come with inbuilt controls — controls that would prevent advertisers from augmenting their marketing messages on building surfaces and other physical objects (including private or public property or other trademarked or copyrighted material) without adequate permission.
3. Augmented Behavioral Targeting: Ad targeting based on real world behavior using a combination of geo-location data & publicly self-disclosed information via social media services is just around the corner. For example, let’s assume you live in Los Angeles, travel a lot and have been checking into the local airport via services like Gowalla, Brightkite or Foursquare every time you leave town. Let’s also assume you have been checking out websites selling home security systems lately. Thanks to your online activities and your eagerness to share, you get served an ad that states “Given your busy travel schedule & the rising crime rate in LA, don’t you think it’s high time you installed a home security system?” (Actually this example may not be that bad considering sites like Please Rob Me have emerged). It does raise questions though. Who would have to provide privacy notice and choice in this scenario and how would you control what information is collected and how it is used for advertising that blurs the boundaries between your physical and virtual worlds?
4.Physical danger: Augmented Reality, like any mobile media technology presents some real physical safety issues. If you think mobile phones are currently a distraction while driving a car, think of an augmented windshield feeding you driving directions, along with more data about your surroundings than you may need. Or imagine crossing a busy street in an unfamiliar neighborhood, while simultaneously using an Augmented Reality interface to look for that hot new restaurant, checking out what people are tweeting about it and being bombarded with ads through it all.
5. Spam: Yes — where there is a marketing opportunity, there will be spam, deceptive advertising techniques and social engineering tricks to dupe gullible consumers into paying for things they don’t really need. If you think too many legitimate Internet companies (that are sensitive to your privacy concerns) are harvesting all the data you publicly share on the Internet, there are even more scammers out there doing the very same thing. Be ready to be tricked and duped by too good to be true augmented offers in the real world — offers that will lure you in ways that unsolicited email from online pharmacies or belly-fat banner ads only wish they could.
The above list is by no means an exhaustive one. The dangers (much like the benefits) are far too many to be cataloged in one blog post. However, the sooner we start preparing for some of these problems, the more we increase our chances of arriving at timely solutions. There are a lot of smart people out there working incredibly hard on building the exciting future of augmented reality. Let’s hope there are also a few that are working at least half as hard on solving some of its incidental problems.
