Let Your Fingers Do the Walking: How Technology Can Change Us for the Better ( breakout presentation )

Abstract

Background Technology changes everything. Former “streetwalkers” now book their engagements on Craigslist and Tinder. “Going to the shopping mall” is giving way to ordering with few keystrokes on Amazon. Even the time-honored tradition of “walking the halls” to browse a library is now impossible at the University of Calgary, with most books hermetically sealed in a far-away High Density Library. The prognosis for walking doesn’t look so good, especially in the light of WHO statistics showing that globally, 81% of adolescents aged 11-17 years were insufficiently physically active in 2010. It doesn’t have to be that way. The inane Pokemon Go craze, which came and went in 2016 (Slice Intelligence reports that the game’s paying player base dropped 79% from July to August of that year) teaches us a valuable lesson. Technology can get people off their couches, but only if it appeals to their highest values. Program Description I’ve advised developers on Augmented Reality (AR) projects from making architectural and historic features visible on smartphones to adding haptic feedback to medical devices, and have also covered this field as a technology writer, attending and speaking at the 2016 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. I’ve written a book (Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy, Greystone Books, 2014) and note that the developers of Pokemon Go met most, but not all, of the criteria I laid out for avoiding “technocreepiness”. However, even I was surprised by the meteoric rise of that dopey smartphone game, though I successfully predicted its demise into relative obscurity. Implications This presentation provides an analysis of how and why Pokemon Go captured the hearts, minds, and feet of people around the world, and what we can learn from it. Other AR projects, like Google Glass and the Tesco Discovery app, are acknowledged failures. So, what makes the difference between success and failure in the Augmented Reality world? If I knew, I’d be selling the information to the highest bidder. But I do have some pretty solid ideas about how augmented reality can make people want to walk more, and not just to catch Pikachu or Squritle.