Sight

This is getting posted around a fair deal, but not a lot of commentary on the content and the implications for the future.  I really hope you watch it, because I'm about to spoil it.


Any how the protagonist is a fairly average appearing person living deeply embedded in an augmented reality life.  He doesn't seem particularly interesting in some ways, but there are hints at more sinister elements to come.  It goes from creepy to rapey at the end, and really gets to the heart of how will we know reality from fiction in the future when we are all fully augmented?  I think that this thought was what made the first Matrix so compelling, we where down the rabbit hole with Neo as he discovers that all the life he thought he had lived was not real.  The discovery that Plato's suggestion that what we where seeing was just shadows on the cave, was jarring and starling as a viewer but still in a sci-fi not really ever going to happen kind of way.  This provides a much more real, and terrifying example of the near future.  This is more akin to some of my favorite anime Ghost in the Shell, and dealing with the terrifying possibility of our prosthetics being used against our will.

Projects like Google Glass, have real and useful applications outside of the douchbaggy ukulele sunset serenade that Google envisioned, with their product concept video.  The Project glass is just an overlay, and added bonus to your actual eyes, if you extrapolate out and embedded that system into your eyes, literally usurping your native vision what are the implications of that level of access straight to your brain?  You don't know, and this is one terrifying version of what it may be like.  This short is a visual 1984 of how perpetual, embedded augmented reality could be abused.