Comments on: “Augmented Reality” Foretells a Dark Future

By: me@jameskurtz.com

me@jameskurtz.com — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:17:00 +0000

Madness. Reminds me of a graphic novel called The Surrogates by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele. Only in that story the avatars also existed in our physical realm.

By: Lulu

Lulu — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:18:00 +0000

You’re not lame!

By: Ransom Riggs

Ransom Riggs — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:46:00 +0000

@ Joel —

I’m mostly joking about the dark future thing. I’m all for energy efficiency. But thank you for saying I’m not as lame as David?

By: Joel

Joel — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:36:00 +0000

I applaud any efforts to popularize energy efficiency. Your slippery-slope fears of an incredibly distant future where the virtual world supercedes reality as the primary method of human interaction has about as much validity as the movie “The Matrix” does in prophesizing our future. Shame on you for your scaremongering.

This post is almost as lame as the “new Mac smell” post by David K. Israel a couple months ago. But not quite.

By: Fruppi

Fruppi — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:46:00 +0000

The bit about the grandchildren of WOW geeks using avatars to interact with their families isn’t totally insane…although interacting exclusively with avatars is kinda lame!

I’m not a WOW geek, but I am a LOTRO geek (same concept, except it’s Lord of the Rings, so it’s considerably more awesome) and I use LOTRO almost as much for its social facets as the gaming. We have friends in real life who live a long way away, and playing LOTRO with them is a great way to get to hang out without expending tons of gas. Still not quite as good as real life, but better than IMs or even talking on the phone.

By: Beth

Beth — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:21:00 +0000

We had a system similar to that in the 80’s from Radio Shack. All the lights and some appliances were plugged into control devices. There was then a box you could hook up to your TV and you could use it to control you whole house.

It would show you what was on or off and you had the ability to change it as well.

It had some good use like checking to see if the garage light was on or not and then turning it off without getting up. And you could set what ever you wanted on a timer. So your bed room light would come on and then a couple minutes later the bathroom light would go on and so forth so if you did it right and had a pretty set schedule you would never have to actualy turn a light on.

But other than that it was a complete waste of time and money.

By: Bec

Bec — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:06:00 +0000

I kinda see someone hacking into it and turning off and on all the lights in someone elses house to drive them nuts! lol

By: Dane

Dane — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Plus you’re using a resource-intensive mechanism (i.e. the servers on which this “world” exists) to manage electric consumption…