The Mirrorworld Is Coming

If you've been paying any attention to trends in technology, you'll know that augmented reality is big and getting bigger. So far, the best example is probably Pokemon Go, where imaginary creatures are overlaid on your phone's view of the world around you. Google has announced that Maps will support overlaid directional information sometime soon.

What's keeping the technology back right now is the difficulty and cost of producing a display that can overlay information on our view of reality. Google Glass was one of the first viable products, but outside of some niche markets like airplane maintenance, it hasn't taken off. But what will be possible in five or ten years? That's the subject of this article from Wired: AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld.

EVERY DECEMBER, ADAM Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld.

The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.

Kevin Kelly isn't the first author to use the term "mirrorworld"; it's been used in fantasy novels for some time. But in this article, he's redefined it. If you read one article on technology this year, make it this one.