Institute For The Future

Filtering Out Temptations

When was the last time you looked into the refrigerator or at a store shelf with every intention of grabbing a healthy snack--only to wind up with dessert? The problem, of course, is that even while salad might sound good in theory, in practice, in the moment, chocolate sounds a lot better now. But, what if you could filter out the tempting but unhealthy foods, and only see dessert?

 

A few months ago, IFTF Research Fellow Jamais Cascio wrote a great, if somewhat unsettling piece for the Atlantic about one potential application for immersive augmented reality in the coming decade:

 

The emerging technology, called “Augmented Reality,” enables users to see location-specific data superimposed over their surroundings. Long a staple of science fiction, it’s trickling into the real world through the iPhone and similar ultrasmart mobile phones...

 

Here’s where the first familiar online phenomenon shows up: spam. Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages. AR systems will be used for spam too, whether via graffiti-like tags, ads that pop up when you look too long at a shop, or even abstract symbols stuck to a wall or worn on a shirt that, when viewed through an AR system, turn into 3-D animations.

 

Fortunately, just as Web browsers have pop-up blockers, AR systems will filter spam. Moreover, they’ll likely be able to filter out physical ads, too, such as billboards—a capability that many opponents of visual clutter will find deliriously attractive.

 

 

 

In his article, Jamais focused on the potential to filter out people--to, for example, have augmented reality glasses that place big red X's over the faces of those with opposing political beliefs. As I said, it's a troubling forecast.

 

But that sort of filtering technology could also be incredibly helpful. It seems to me, for example, that those sorts of filtering technologies would be incredibly useful in filtering out triggers--in placing big red X's over chocolate cakes or whatever your personal weakness is. Trouble quitting smoking? Thanks to your augmented reality glasses, the cigarettes behind the gas station counter now look like boxes of crayons.

 

There's a more general point that I think is important to highlight about augmented reality, particularly as it relates to behavior change. One of the most important uses of augmented reality, particularly for helping spur motivation, will be in giving us tools to filter out the distractions, temptations and other things we want to, but often have trouble, avoiding. We can already see this sort of thinking on our computers through applications like Self Control, which let users block websites like Twitter and Facebook for a set period of time--and then, no matter what the user tries to do, prevents that user from taking a quick break from work to glance distractedly through an array of newsfeeds. These programs operate on the premise that while working sounds like a good plan in theory, looking at Facebook sounds a lot more interesting right now.

 

Most of what I've read about augmented reality focuses on how we can pack more information, more data, more distractions into right now. But I think in the next decade, some of the most powerful applications of augmented reality could be in filtering out reality and making our lives less cluttered.