Applications for augmented reality are appearing everywhere: you can fight zombies, find the closest subway station, and measure a virtual flat-rate box on your kitchen counter before you head to the Post office. One of the slickest examples I’ve seen (not yet on the market) uses a robust facial recognition technology developed by Polar Rose to pull social information in real time just by looking at someone’s face. It’s called AugmentedID, and power networkers everywhere are drooling.

While many of us are caught up in the allure of augmented reality’s potential, few have played out the consequences of the rapid availability of this technology. Jamais Cascio decided to do just that in an article in this month’s The Atlantic, and conceived of a dystopian nightmare of real-life popups and social filtering (automatically removing people with differing political views from your field of vision, for instance).

We’re not that far off. He writes,

Although AR now relies on handheld devices, electronics makers like Sony are working on systems that you wear like sunglasses, making augmented vision more immersive. Here’s where the first familiar online phenomenon shows up: spam. Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages. AR systems will be used for spam too, whether via graffiti-like tags, ads that pop up when you look too long at a shop, or even abstract symbols stuck to a wall or worn on a shirt that, when viewed through an AR system, turn into 3-D animations. (emphasis added — I would remove “nearly”)

Sounds cool — as long as there are only a few innovators doing it, and the executions actually add value. But it’s not hard to imagine this media opportunity spiraling rapidly out of control, as every logo ever printed becomes a point of “engagement” overnight.

The interpersonal implications are even more interesting. Cascio picks politics as an ideological differentiator to illustrate the drawbacks to instantly knowing everything about any individual you meet.

After California’s Prop 8 ban on gay marriage passed, opponents of the measure dug up public records of donors supporting the ban, and linked that data to an online map. Suddenly, you could find out which of your neighbors (or the businesses you frequent) were so opposed to gay marriage that they donated to the cause. Now imagine that instead of a map, those records were combined with an AR system able to identify faces.

You don’t want to see anybody who has donated to the Palin 2012 campaign? Gone, their faces covered up by black circles. You want to know who exactly gave money to the 2014 ban on SUVs? Easy—they now have green arrows pointing at their heads.

You want to block out any indication of viewpoints other than your own? Done.

This will not be a world conducive to political moderation, nor one where differing perspectives get along comfortably. It won’t take a majority of people using these filters to poison public discourse; imagine this summer’s town-hall screamers on constant alert, wherever they go. Yet this world will be the unintended consequence of otherwise desirable developments—spam filters, facial recognition, augmented reality—that many of us will find useful.

Now, I don’t necessarily buy that political partisanship will lead the augmented reality revolution. But here’s a far more likely scenario: augmented reality dating. Intelius recently rolled out an iPhone app called “datecheck” (video walthrough here) that performs an instant background check on anyone, reporting on details from criminal records to personal interests to estimated net worth. Imagine if this information was available in real time, based simply on facial recognition (e.g. someone you hadn’t met yet). The economist in me calls this access to near-perfect information “efficiency.” The realist in me calls this situation “everyone dies alone.” My favorite economist (and favorite professor), Steven Landsburg, would be torn.

Comedian Demetri Martin has a bit about bumper stickers that’s always resonated with me. He looks at the bright side of these eyesores:

A lot of people don’t like bumper stickers. I don’t mind them. To me they’re a short-cut to saying: “Hey, let’s never be friends.”

What happens when we’re followed around by virtual bumper stickers — not of our own choosing — at all times? Will we find new areas of commonality, or new reasons to discriminate? I worry about the latter scenario. Based only on your profile information, Facebook already thinks you’re fat; what will augmented reality present that’s any different? Some have argued that “what unites us is greater than what divides us.” But I bet you could find at least one ideologically incompatible perspective with every friend you have — after all, if your social network consists of ideological clones, what the hell do you all find to talk about?

I haven’t decided how I feel about this. I’m excited by the technology, but alarmed by the implications.

What do you think about augmented reality — good or evil?

Google’s type-ahead search suggestions often provide interesting insight into what the world wants to know. Recently I was curious about the most commonly researched definitions on Google, and realized that what I discovered resembled a twisted snapshot of the year in review. I submit the following:

• love
• ethics
• culture
• socialism
• integrity
• irony
• leadership
• twitter
• agnostic
• pandemic

This may be about to change, with a surprising player in the media convergence environment: gaming consoles.

In the UK and Ireland, Xbox Live members will soon be able to watch premium content and live television from Sky TV straight from a Xbox 360 via a broadband connection. (Watching live television on your TV doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary, but stop and think about how much that premium-cable-plus-DVR package is costing you versus your $20/mo broadband connection.) Integration with Hulu may be soon to follow.

Why is the Xbox 360 the right platform for this convergence? For starters, they combine the hardware of multiple devices in one: the standard 120GB hard drive could replace the need for a separate TiVo/DVR, and deals with Netflix and other media partners make standalone devices such as Apple TV unnecessary.

But most significantly, the Xbox 360 already has a huge user base. More than 28 million units have been sold since the console’s launch. And even more significantly, more than 17 million of those users are Xbox Live subscribers, meaning that well over half of these consoles are already hooked up to a broadband connection. The potential of this platform as a consumer media solution was proven when over 1 million copies of the Netflix application for Xbox were downloaded and installed in the first three months of its release.

While newcomer Boxee represents a huge leap in web and TV convergence, boasting social networking and media services like Last.fm and Pandora in addition to streaming television programming, its adoption may be hampered by the fact that it is just one more device to sit under your TV. Recall that Betamax was a better quality video solution, but VHS took an early lead in market share and never looked back. With a three-year lead in retail availability, the it is doubtful that the 360 will see serious competition from Boxee. And the 360 is keeping up on social features as well, adding Facebook Connect and Twitter integration in the near future.

Of course, no one is buying an Xbox 360 purely for its media capabilities — yet. Keep in mind that for a time, the Playstation 3 was also the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market, making it a completely respectable home-theater purchase even for someone with no interest in ever playing a video game. It would not be a surprise to see Microsoft continue to evolve the Xbox 360 platform with additional partnerships and further software improvements geared towards transitioning the console into the role of an “all-you-need-is-one-box” consumer media hub.

(Image via Gizmodo)

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. — Winston Churchill

An annual marketing survey released by Alterian in February found that a startling majority of marketers fail to implement analytics to measure the success of their efforts. Only 47% of the 1500 marketers, agencies, marketing services providers and systems integrators polled asserted the use of analytics in their campaigns.

Most alarming, however, is the attribution of this statistic to the fact that marketers found analytics “difficult.”

Churchill had it right, but it seems some marketers have taken him too literally. “Occasionally” is not the operative word; it is of course intended for ironic effect. Measurement — regardless of how we may define success for a given initiative — is the only way we as marketers know if our strategy was sound. And it is one of the key inputs in defining and optimizing the strategy the next time around.

Enquiro Research recently reported that 93.1% of business technology purchasing decisions are researched online. Not surprisingly, the use of search (and predominantly Google) comprises a significant share of the online research performed.

More interestingly, however, is the fact these same business buyers are startlingly active on social platforms. Forrester recently published the results of a survey of the online behaviors of business technology buyers, which found that they more socially engaged online than the average adult consumer.

Almost all respondents maintained at least a passive level engagement with social media: 91% of buyers in the business-to-business sector reported reading blogs, consuming user-generated video, or listening to podcasts. But social participation among B2B buyers runs much deeper — nearly half (43%) reported actively creating content on social platforms themselves. This figure is nearly double the average among all US online adults.

Social media is staged to play an ever-increasing role in actual purchase influence among business buyers. Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff sums up the situation in a recent blog post: “What does this mean for you? If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.”

Regardless of the fact that Phil’s prediction seems to be wrong more often than it is right, I take issue with this entire methodology. First of all, who on earth is qualified to tabulate shadow “impressions” among groundhogs, even if he or she only needs to count one? And even if that were possible, what’s the value of a single impression, anyway? I for one would like to see some sort of deeper engagement with said shadow before I could even begin to formulate a reasonable prediction of the remaining weeks of winter ahead.

In these modern times, when even groundhogs are on Twitter, I strongly believe we must request — nay, demand — more meaningful metrics from our groundhog analysts.