Controller Masks with Sensorimotor Implants - Text 5
As things stand today, most large companies are engaged in a kind of virtual and augmented reality race. They are developing devices, but also platforms – creation or dissemination platforms, but also sharing and collaboration platforms – such as Google’s ARCore, Apple’s ARKit and Microsoft’s Mesh. The horizon of all these developments is the convergence of virtual reality and augmented reality in a mixed reality and in XR or extended reality. Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta – Meta as in metaverse – is an exemplary manifestation of these companies’ socio-political, aesthetic and commercial program: to bring into dialogue physical space and virtual environments, the city and the Web, in order to transform the entire world into a kind of mega social media network which will be at one and the same time an agora, a game space, a surveillance space and a marketplace – on the inaugural model of Habbo Hotel (Sulake, 2001) and Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003), or, more recently, of VRChat (Steam, 2014). But mixed – on-line and off, a veritable social XR.
Throughout this period, some university or industrial technology and bio-technology laboratories have already been working on a new generation of individual devices which, beyond contact between the technological interface and the natural interface, go so far as to incorporate the technological interface: on the skin or with contact lenses for augmented or virtual reality, like eMacula (Innovega, in development and introduced in 2019) and Mojo Lens (Mojo Vision, in development and introduced in 2020); beyond the skin, with organic crystalline implants, like the CentraSight telescope (Centrasight, 2010), the Google “intraocular device” (Google, 2014) and the mechanical Bionic Lens (Ocumetics Technology, 2015); beyond organs, with retinal implants like Argus (Artificial Retina Project and Second Sight, approved in 2011); and even beyond the nerves, with neural implants, like those being developed by Arthur Lowery and Yang Dan which make it possible to see without eyes.
