Reality is what we agree on. My shirt is blue because light waves bounces off of it at around 650 THz, and we agree that that color is blue. My perception of this color may not be the same as your perception of the color, because we have no way of knowing if our brains color code these light ranges differently, and anything I point to that’s approximately the same frequency will look like the same color to you. With that considered, if we can’t even be sure about colors, what can we be sure of? Well, while we may have our minor differences in how we perceive our individual subjective realities, we put anyone who deviates too far from the norm in a nice safe space where they can’t disagree with us anymore. Until now, I suppose.
Virtual Reality, GPS, portable computers (or phones as you may call them), and Augmented Reality together have the ability to change our perceived realities. The notion of Virtual Reality and being able to roam in “cyber space” like some separate world is no stranger to popular fiction, and arguably isn’t far off from modern tech. What with products like Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, developers are already playing with creating entirely new virtual 3-dimensional spaces to explore and interact with.
Games like Pokemon Go however overlap these virtual spaces with real ones. With the use of a camera, you can even see the cute little guys appear in your living room. For now, these digital sprites float around unanchored to the backdrop of reality, but don’t expect that to be the case for ever, and while Google Glasses were a flop, smart watches have shown that wearable smart tech isn’t going anywhere. These days, everyone carries a personal computer in their pocket, linked up to a global network, and it seems like you can’t get away from digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. The “digital world” isn’t something that’s separate from the “real world,” they’re overlapping and beginning to bleed together, so who knows what could possibly come about in the future as these and other technologies continue to evolve?
Also I lied, my shirt is gray. Blue just sounded like a better example color.