Here's a bet: Can you revive an old laptop computer thrown in the garbage, not by repairing its internal components but by using augmented reality, thus transforming this inert, rain-soaked object into something functional again – something that looks "alive" for any casual observer from the outside?
Sounds esoteric, right? Alvaro Cassinelli and Alexis Zerroug at the University of Tokyo have created a multi-modal, spatial augmented reality, a system that instantaneously changes household objects into communication devices - "invoked computing" - and it enabled them to transform a discarded pizza box into a laptop computer and a banana into a telephone, which won the grand prize at Laval Virtual, an international conference and exhibition on virtual reality and converging technologies.
So a computer can be "dead" but still work thanks to the intervention of external, invisible powers. Life would be instilled from the outside; the corpse of the computer would be "possessed", animated like a puppet by a ubiquitous "ambient intelligence". And nobody will notice the difference.
Alvaro Cassinelli: you really can use a banana as a telephone by Sam Price, The Guardian
