A Reality of Presence States

Re-reading Vernor Vinge’s 2006 novel, Rainbow’s End, plunged me back into an insistent but unclear reverie concerning the What? & Why? & Where? of the convergence between mirror and virtual worlds. In the book’s first scene, four of the book’s protagonists, 3 government agents of the Indo-European commission and ‘Mr. Rabbit,’ a potential contractor, are meeting in a very real Barcelona. Of the scene’s 4 actors, 1 is actually present on the terrace of a busy Barcelona café, while the other 3 are represented by avatars. Mr. Rabbit is a brown haired hare in a top-hat, last seen provocatively hopping away through busy midday tourists, as the other 3 sat around discussing the meeting:

The three agents sat for a moment in apparently companionable silence, Gunberk bet over his virtual wine, Vaz sipping at his real Rioja and admiring the stilted puppets that were setting up for the afternoon parade. The three blended well with the normal touristy hurly-burley of the Familia district–except that most tourists paying for café seating on C. de Sardenya would have had more than a one-third physical presence.           

The scene is grounded by the fact that it unfolds in a real, identifiable location –made possible by augmented reality hardware and software, the communication protocol between the 4 participants, and enhanced by a persistant background of tourists and landmarks which infuse it with the temporal and spatial presence that gives it an air of inevitable credulity. The idea of quantifying the verity of an experience according to the diversity and distribution of the physical presence of its participants is interesting. Would virtual worlds be taken more seriously, in business, educational or artistic circles if, for example, some of its participants could be grounded in real space, allowing the others to congregate virtually?  Could it evolve into a social or business norm, that a certain percentage of participants of a technically mediated meetup be ensconced in a real, social context? Could this be the natural extension of the social model of the public square as a mediator of augmented reality and a broker of trust? A diversity of presence states could help establish the ethics of living with the onset of real virtuality. [from Diesel’s ‘Liquid Space‘ fashion show [video]]