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Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Noth­ing of him that doth fade,
But doth suf­fer a sea-change
Into some­thing rich and strange.
— from Ariel’s Song, The Tem­pest by William Shakespeare

I loved the almost anal-retentive dis­play of data through a heads-up dis­play about the scenery and other details in the open­ing scenes of the movie ‘Stranger than Fic­tion’:

Now, imag­ine that kind of data dis­play about every­thing; The chem­i­cals in the soil around you, the wave­lengths of light as they strike your skin, the build­ing mate­ri­als of the struc­tures you walk by; all are a sea of data that is not so much invis­i­ble as it is inac­ces­si­ble. Now imag­ine, if you had a heads-up dis­play on your glasses (or on con­tact lenses, as is sug­gested in Ver­nor Vinge’s Novel Rainbow’s End). If you are ‘wear­ing’ as Vinge calls it, you now have the pos­si­bil­ity of super­im­pos­ing all sorts of data on top of the real­ity you see around you. In fact, if you pre­fer, you can replace that real­ity with one as rich and strange as you like.

Rather than a real place, what if this were done with, say, a Fairy Tale. Tomas Nils­son, a design stu­dent at Sweden’s Linköping Uni­ver­sity, decided to do just this with the Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood story, which started out as a class project:

As com­put­ing and access to data becomes more ubiq­ui­tous, I think this will start to change our view of real­ity. It’s a sub­tle thing, but the fact that many peo­ple now carry some sort of device (either a smart phone or a portable GPS device), so they are never truly lost. That’s a big change of their real­ity, right from the start.

The other evening, my iPhone had some prob­lems, so I headed home to try and fix it (I did, the soft­ware needed to be rein­stalled). The ride on the bus felt very strange with­out being able to lis­ten to pod­casts or music. I couldn’t check the time. I couldn’t call any­one, or check my email. It wasn’t until then did I real­ize how much I rely on this lit­tle brick of metal and glass.