Weekly Metaverse #136: Should you need a permit for an AR concert?
Plus assembling Christmas gifts, AR style.
I missed last week! I am sorry! Life and work just got crazy there for a bit. That’s why I worked diligently through Christmas to bring you this newsletter. Also I’m just at my mom’s house, and we’re not doing a whole lot here. I’m watching my fantasy football team head towards a first-round playoff exit, and my mom is yelling at her cat to stop scratching the furniture.
But in one fun piece of metaverse-related-sitting-at-home-on-Christmas news, I just saw a PokerStars VR ad during the Vikings game. As we’ve seen in the past, vice-related applications are often the leading use cases for new technology, so that feels like it augurs well for VR’s continued move towards the mainstream. As someone who used to play online poker seriously, though, I can’t imagine doing it in VR… the best part was the ability to play somewhere between four and a dozen games at once, and that seems impractical in VR.
All the World’s a Stage
Shakespeare meant that metaphorically, but Gorillaz took it more literally, holding an AR concert in Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.
This is what the metaverse is all about - crossing the virtual world with the real one in a way that creates an experience that’s more than the sum of those two parts.
Can you imagine what it would take for a band to have a live concert in Times Square? I’m pretty sure it’d be tough to get a permit for that sort of thing, and even if you could, the costs would be astronomical once they make you start paying for security.
Via AR, though, you don’t even have to be as famous as Gorillaz - once the technology is a bit more developed (and more importantly, cheaper), your favorite local band whose shows are usually at dive bars can suddenly play an AR concert in Times Square from their garage. You don’t even have to be in Times Square to experience it - people who can’t make it could attend in VR.
All of this raises some interesting questions about logistics and responsibility for this kind of thing, though. You probably wouldn’t want to have a concert in Times Square because of the security costs, but couldn’t you end up with the same size of crowd (and thus security needs) for an AR concert?
Imagine it’s 2040, and more than 50% of people wear AR glasses almost all of the time. Blink-182 throws an AR concert in Times Square, and tens of thousands of rabid, aging millennials decide to attend. They pack the area and surrounding streets, but some of their frail, old bodies can’t take the excitement. A number of heart attacks happen, but the scene is madness because the city didn’t prepare for it. EMTs can’t get to them in time, and several pass away.
Could this tragedy have been averted? That raises some thorny legal questions.
Blink-182 has just decided to create an AR experience that’s only visible at a certain place and time. Can the city force them to get a permit for that? They’re not actually going to be there or even set anything up. Telling people that they can’t put up a digital experience certainly seems like a pretty aggressive restriction on free speech.
On the other hand, safety is generally more important than free speech in America - you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater, after all. But what if we swap out Blink-182 for BTS? Can you force a group that’s not even in the country to get a permit? If they choose not to, what can you do about it?
Maybe you try to control things on the attendee side - tell folks they can’t come to watch the BTS show and will be fined if they do. Except again, that runs straight up against the constitutional right to assemble, which is one that any judge in the US is going to be hesitant to override.
But let’s say you do find a judge who is convinced that the likelihood of serious harm is so great that they allow police to stop people from attending - how exactly do you go about doing that? Everyone’s wearing AR glasses, so how can you figure out which of them are there for the concert? You can probably make some guesses based on who’s looking in the direction of the virtual stage, but it’s 2040 - there are AR overlays everywhere, so even that’s not a reliable indicator.
Now let’s throw in another wrinkle - the concert is announced via whatever 2040’s equivalent of Twitter is an hour before it happens. I don’t even know what you’d begin to do about that, so I’ll just leave you to ponder it, dear reader. If you’re a lawyer, I’d love to hear from you (bet you don’t hear people say that to you too often, lawyers).
The Most Important AR for the Holidays
I know, I know - I’ve said repeatedly how great AR holiday decorations are going to be. That’s only the second most important holiday use case for AR though. Taking the number one spot on the AR holiday list is…
Assembly instructions! There’s also an app called AssembleAR that allows you scan the bar code from your IKEA box and get AR assembly instructions. As someone who builds first, eventually realizes that I put something on backwards, then has to undo several steps, I am ready for this.
It’s a great reminder that there’s a lot of information that we currently view in 2D that’s just objectively better in three dimensions. Think about how much our ability to convey information has improved with every new form of media.
At first, if you wanted to know what happened in a football game, you read a written recap. When radio came about, we suddenly had the ability to hear things live (and to convey a lot more about what happened, since there was no longer the limit of column space in a paper). TV gave us the ability to see what was happening all over the field, not just what the announcer was describing. At each stage, we layered on more information. The next generation of information is the third dimension, and it represents a comparable shift to radio or TV.
But also here’s some AR Christmas decorations:
Metaverse News
Haptic hydrogel "skin" simulates touch in VR and AR (New Atlas): Getting haptics right will make a huge difference in VR immersion, and this is a pretty interesting approach.
An App Wants to Subtitle Life for Deaf and Hearing-Impaired Users (Wired): AR has the potential to be a huge boon to accessibility. This same functionality will work for live translation of foreign languages as well.
Rams-Broncos Christmas Day Game to Feature AR Enhancements (Sportico): Too bad I don’t have any fantasy players in that game.
Mayo partners with augmented reality medtech company (Beckers Hopistal Review): Not a lot of detail here, but when as big a name as Mayo is getting into AR, that’s definitely a good sign.
Augmented Reality-Enabled Cold Spray Robot from AFRL Wins Defense Tech Award (Executive Gov): I give it maybe ten years before the idea of someone actually sitting in a big piece of industrial machinery instead of controlling it via AR just sounds ridiculous.