Personal Agency: The Achilles Heel or Infinity Gauntlet of Spatial Computing

Amid growing public debate about spatial computing and multimodal AI models, including concerns over the deployment of deep fakes, there’s a sense that technology is becoming something that happens to people, rather than for them. Changes feel too fast to manage—or even to understand - and the future appears daunting. According to Ipsos Global Trends 2023, commissioned by Accenture, people in the UK increasingly agree with the statement “I fear technological progress is ruining our lives.”

This chilling, but apparently increasingly prevalent, feeling perfectly encapsulates the nervous, even fearful, look I get when talking about spatial computing with those not exposed to the technology. Those not instinctively enamoured of the idea of the digital world sitting alongside the real can understandably become apprehensive at best, downright scared at worst. Some fear the worst aspects of our digital lives today becoming inescapable.

In light of this, I want to explore the core factors that will determine the future of mixed reality and spatial computing. Will they lead to a failed, (possibly dystopian) cultural future, or emerge as a broadly positive, even supremely exciting force involving a cross-section of society?

These core factors are twofold: maximising respect for user autonomy and minimising the dangers of convenience creep.

The roots of a dystopian future

"Hyper Reality," a brilliant short film created in 2016 by Keiichi Matsuda, has been oft cited in the past eight years, and for good reason. In its concise six minutes, it paints an all too feasible future dystopia where the intrusive nature of our digital lives has escaped the confines of our screens to, sink its increasingly predatory claws into our very perception of the real world.

Many will envisage just such a future even when they are open to being drawn to the excitement and expectations for Mixed Reality and Spatial Computing.   They will fear a future based on their own current lived experience where companies decide what we see and experience.  A key feature of these more dystopian futures is one where hyper personalised advertising is a pervasive and inescapable and where our physical life and real-world objects are warped to promote what apps the technology thinks we’d prefer to see.

For those of us eager to help shape this future technology in a more human-centred way, we need to consider what makes a dystopic vision like this so feasible and then actively work to create an alternative which is both commercially and socially exciting.

The Power & Peril of autonomy over our digital lives

The means by which we can sidestep this dystopian path lies in an intrinsic respect for the user and a laser-like focus on what makes spatial computing/mixed Reality so appealing – autonomy over our digital lives.

Power:

Spatial computing promises a seamless melding of the physical and digital that grants control over how you organize and prioritize your digital life. I’ve previously written about the deep appeal of being able to decide what emphasis different apps or experiences have through MR & Spatial Computing; how we could prioritize the presence of loved ones above app notifications in our digital experience hierarchy. But it extends to how we place applications around us, organizing our digital space to serve us best – be it for achieving truly focused work, immersive entertainment or for shared global social experiences. Deciding which apps or tools we focus on - and how - is a newfound freedom that isn’t available within the windows-based confinement of our digital lives today. You get one program at a time and if you want to move around or share the space you have to devalue it by reducing its presence on the screen.

Peril :

To fully leverage the power of this autonomy, it must be given near-total respect by developers, or you run the risk of the user perceiving themselves as a passenger in their digital life.  Consider Disney not allowing you to take a screenshot. A seemingly small decision to prevent sharing of copyrighted content becomes an unexpected relinquishing of control over how we remember and share an experience. It’s understandable, but where once upon a time you’d take a picture with your phone and move on, there’s no longer that option, and instead, the user is deprived of agency or choice. It’s why I think developers need to tread so carefully when they impinge on people’s sense of autonomy, or at least very clearly communicate the bounds of the experience.

Convenience vs empowerment

I should make it clear that I don’t think most developers act with malice to strip users of their autonomy but simply that even the most well intentioned can give in to decisions made in the name of user convenience. For example, if we look back to "Hyper Reality" – on an abstract level, it feels quite reasonable to have the device camera know what the user is seeing and edit out things that might be unpleasant. But doing so without instruction from the user is an editing of their experience without express consent. This is the creep of convenience that would concern me – I’m not naive enough to expect companies and developers to not make these decisions but simply hope they will be aware that straying too far will poison the overall value of mixed reality and spatial computing.

Conclusion: Inspiration for a positive future

Striving for this level of respect for a user’s autonomy over their digital life in general can feel naive but is it so hard to envisage such a future being both possible and, because it meets the human demand for autonomy, profitable. For inspiration, Matsuda has given us another delightful piece that hints at how inherently user-empowered design can work to create a more positive and delightful mixed reality and spatial computing future entitled "Agents".   I wanted to highlight just a few seconds of this although the whole mini-series is delightful and is itself a distillation of his 2020 essay “GODS”.

Here our main character grows irritated with individual apps inhabiting her digital reality and tosses them aside, literally throwing them out of her space. I found this moment to be a wonderful little example of how we can create our own individual relationship with our digital lives when they’re freed from the screen – apps can be useful one moment but once we need more headspace and freedom from them, they’re just as easily thrown aside.

For mixed reality and spatial computing to be accepted by society, it and its creators must demonstrate that the technology exists for people not to them, that they are agents not subjects and that they have real and not manipulated or manufactured choice.

The thrid post capturing my (measured) excitement for the worlds of spatial computing and mixed reality. For complete transparency, I, along with some incredibly talented industry veterans, have started a new venture building foundational technology for this future of Spatial Computing & Mixed Reality.
Subscribe to read more…I always love a good debate on LinkedIn too!