This is from Microsoft and is remarkable but caused me to imagine some scarily ominous ideas.
This opens up so many possibilities to the meshing of the online and offline experience. I call it meshlining, the blurring of the realities. Can you imagine a child being woken up every morning by their favourite Avatar friend? Wouldn't it become their most trusted friend maybe even with a memory too? A memory of all our past. A memory that could be instantly recalled and played back as video. It would be a descendent of seesmic, ustream or justin.tv knitted with a virtual world but showing our development from a very young age.
Imagine as that child grows up it would hark back to it's Avatar friend, but then again that friend might age with them, always be there for them, the virtual piece of their lives. On call at a moment's notice, from any screen, whether mobile or static. Be there as a virtual psychotherapist? The virtual search engine friend that's always (supposedly) right, with that one verbal answer, demographic and contextual bullseye as opposed to the choice of millions of webpages? It would always have an answer, the right answer or would it be used as a form of control? Steering you in a particular brand or product's direction, It's meshlining word of mouth, it's the perfect contextual avatar advertising!
Then there's steering you in a particular path in life? Could your parents control you, feel safe in the knowledge of what their child was thinking and doing? Be alerted when key words were discussed or searched. Keeping their child's thoughts and actions on the straight and narrow. You could be constantly being mentally assessed from the analytics from your vitual 'meshfriend' then you, or your parents could nudged you towards a particular profession or form of training from it or I mean him or her and I guess primarily through games, making education a fun and informative time. What kind of generation would our society produce? Would the youth rebel and subvert it or would we have a generation of the supertrained and supertalented who wouldn't have to remember anything at all?
Could even our mental health be monitored by the meshlining company? This leads on to you having to have a different virtual colleague at your workplace to work in concert with you in the digital workspace or would your original meshfriend play this role in your life too? Be your mirror image? So our employers could also monitor our productivity, our mood, our state of health too. We've seen this meshfriend already appear in films but this webvideo is a telling clue of a fast approaching, mindblowing (mesh)reality. What do you think and what ideas have I missed? via wonderland
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