Augmented (Fashion) Reality

Earthquakes, global warming, patent lawsuits… it’s all a bit much, sometimes. Even a sober-minded “moral guide to the future” needs a break. So today, we talk about fashion.

Fashion may sound like an odd subject for a futurist to think about, but it’s often an indicator of broader cultural trends around sexuality, material technology, gender roles, and money. Moreover, it is in many ways the polar opposite of the kinds of long, slow trends that I tend to think about, which makes it interesting simply as a counterpoint; Stewart Brand famously put fashion at the top of his pace of change chart, with “nature” at the bottom.

Fashion is also an example of rapid-iteration evolution. Is there a better example of natural selection in action than Project Runway? (Okay, not natural selection, but you see what I mean.)

Let’s start with a scenario:

It’s 2020, and at least half the people you pass on the street have some kind of Augmented Reality device in operation. Most of them use “arglasses,” which look like a normal pair of eyewear, with again-trendy thick frames. Some still use a handheld system—they’re the ones trying not to look too much like tourists (or crime-victims-in-waiting) by holding their phones out in front of them. A handful have opted for the fancy new digital contact lenses, with all of the AR capability of arglasses but none of the bulk. You do have to carry a little pocket device that takes care of the computational smarts, but you probably do that already, anyway.

Augmented Reality is finally on the good part of the hype cycle, having recovered from the disappointments of the early 2010s. One very useful addition is the ability to recognize the signal of nearby smart tags, the advanced RFID tags that seem to be everywhere now. . .

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