Augmented reality has been a popular theme in Sci-Fi since…probably forever, and quite often with a negative connotation.
To quote two examples, restricting the topic to Italy in the '90s, so, if memory serves, when the concept was really new (links to IT Wikipedia, use your favorite translation service): Silicon Mirages by Massimo Pietroselli, winner of the 1994 Urania prize (and a FOAF!)
Everything is controlled by a central entity, and revolves around small, pleasant villages, everyone has a fulfilling life - until someone discovers… Razzi Amari by Stefano Disegni e Massimo Caviglia, 1992, the first musical in comic book form - a cassette was included with original songs.
Similar premises, intermixed with political satire, in the usual style of SD and MC.
They even considered suing the Wachowsky sisters…
Staying in the '90s, a partly different perspective is explored in Virtual Light, by William Gibson.
EtA: “Razzi Amari” is impervious to my translation abilities. It literally means “Bitter Rockets”, but it’s a wordplay on an Italian idiom, (vulg) “Cazzi Amari” - “Bitter Dicks” said about a bad or unpleasant situation or a difficult hurdle.
Here’s some irony for you. I recently scanned in all my paperbacks. Cut off the spine and fed them to a scanner, saved as CBZ (just a zip of all the scanned images). No OCR, but maybe in the future.
(For those that haven’t read the book, there’s a subplot where a library is digitized by tossing all the books into a shredder, then blowing the shreds by a camera, which digitally reassembles the books.)
I could see this being useful for home remodeling, esp. kitchens and baths. Seems the current practice for the remodel industry is to get you to sign a breathtakingly expensive contract before you get any idea what the final product might look like, not to mention all the miscommunication, or lack thereof, between the designers and contractors.
Rainbow’s End was a good shout for this one, but what it really made me think of was 1993 video game Syndicate, where an extension of this technology - to include doses of mood-altering chemicals - is omnipresent. “Why change the world when you can change your mind?” It’s also used by the player-controlled squad to create a disposable swarm of brainwashed civilians to use mostly as human shields… Man, we were on some nasty shit in the 90s. But it’s one more thing I could see the techbros wanting to Torment Nexus up.
and think what it does to traditional architecture, everything becomes block concrete as there’s no value in anything more. That means it becomes a horrible environment unless you are wearing the googles / glasses / implants whatever. It makes it very hard not to be plugged in. Then wait for the compulsory advertising on every surface, the ‘free’ version with mind-destroying popups on every surface or the ‘premium’ version where the viewer is permitted some rest-bite. Inescapable hellholes for the proles etc. It doesn’t pan out well.
