Too Much Information?

Augmented reality promises to enhance our environment with informational overlays, merging the physical and the virtual. On the plus side, AR can provide information when and where we need it. On the downside, that "information" will most likely be advertising, or so suggests designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda, who, about a month ago, posted a video titled Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, a witty depiction of a world rife with too much information. The video went viral, maybe because it struck a nerve, or maybe just because it's so visually compelling. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick called it "both very cool and very frightening," while the invariably insightful Greg Smith on his blog Serial Consign noted, "After suffering through countless optimistic/uncritical AR vignettes it is great to see one with a sense of humour." While the video's vision of the future pushes way beyond the graphics-enhanced worlds we've seen before, it's also part of a genre of shorts that critiques our inundation in logos and promos by making them a key part of an overall aesthetic. It's hard not to find both pleasure and pain in these projects, the pleasure of visual excess and the pain of the knowledge of info-promo glut.