Why so many stories are just boring? Is it because the subject is meaningless or the storyteller untalented? Or is it because the storyteller doesn’t have the medium in which they can do it? The large number of new technologies emerging year to year give us exciting possibilities to express ourselves and tell the stories that form in our heads. And people all around the world are picking up these tools and pushing them to the limit, creating new forms of what we used to think was finished. The possibilities are endless, says an ominous voice, but as endless as they are, the chance of finding the precise thing in this vast ocean is limited to a very precise Google search (or dumb luck) (or knowing exactly who might know about it). Thus, as we continue developing new and exciting tools, we also need to dedicate ourselves to creating a way to find them, to find these stories, to connect them to the people that want and need to see them, to truly democratize media.

Diving in infinite information

In a way, Google has taken a lot from us (even if it can potentially give us almost everything else). Our brain works differently now, as we now focus on how to get information rather than storing that information ourselves. But it also limits our creativity when it comes to searching through and scraping the internet. As discussed in class, having a linear representation of a multidimensional space is not really accurate, nor it is efficient in terms of freedom of thought. How to find something when we don’t even know how to ask these questions? We don’t know how to do a multidimensional search, because we don’t have it yet. It will be a field full of small failures until we find the one method. Word vectors are a pretty good starting point, but we need to figure out a way of addressing this information without collapsing it into a scalar.

So, how to do this? I would like to explore the possibility of using non-traditional methods to conduct non-traditional searches. Playing a bit with the possibilities of immersing ourselves in virtual spaces, the search results could be overlain all around us. The information we are looking for can be presented in spheres or sectors with transparency according to the proximity to the source. These results could also overlap forming actual Venn spheres to showcase their multidimensional similarity.

One cloud to rule them all

Another aspect that struck my attention as a good idea that won’t really work, is the creation of an AR cloud. As of now, VR has a clear advantage over AR, because it is -mostly- agnostic (cross platform) and can be accessed by mobile devices on Web Applications. AR is strictly platform bound, with AR Core and AR Kit being specific for Android and iOS respectively. Naturally, the jump for AR to web content is extremely captivating, but it has to be done correctly.

6D.ai is trying to build an AR cloud, but for me they’re taking the wrong approach. Google came to be a multimillion company because it could access all the information across the internet. This cloud would require all the content to be on the same place, like if Google required all the sites to be under their platform. It is a great way to connect everything, but if it succeeds, it will prompt multiple clones of it, creating at least two or three competing services which will end up branching the whole content.