Internet & Social Media Law Blog
In case you don’t know, William Gibson is the prescient science fiction author who effectively coined the terms “the matrix” and “cyberspace” as we currently use them, way back in the early 1980s. He also predicted augmented reality applications. In his 2007 novel, Spook Country, a character has taken to creating “locative art” installations in the real world that can be viewed only through mobile devices that use the GPS grid to create a virtual overlay on top of the real world as recorded through the device. For example, the artist recreates the scene of River Phoenix’s death, complete with annotations, that can be seen when the viewing device is brought to the real-world location where Phoenix died and aimed at the spot where his body was found. A character in the book describes such locative art this way: “Spatially tagged hypermedia. The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these.” Today, we simply call that “augmented reality”—or AR for short.