philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

You Can Ban a Person, But What About Their Hologram?

Due to outstanding warrants for his arrest, Cozart can’t even return to Chicago, and so unable to perform in the area, he took the innovative approach of performing from California, but as a hologram beamed into the Indiana music festival. But even that was too much for police, and the performance was immediately stopped.

Insubordinate holograms have been used in a far more political fashion as well. Two years ago, the Spanish government passed what has become known as the “gag law”—rules aimed at restricting protesters from convening outside government buildings. Demonstrators hoping to voice their dissent for the legislation staged the world’s first hologram protest as a way to circumnavigate the rules. To pull off the stunt, the protesters hired a production company to film marchers walking along a street at another location and then projected that footage as a hologram on top of a translucent fabric which was constructed outside the buildings.

Location-based augmented reality experiences create issues since they cause real people to move around real places in new and unpredictable ways. More than a few Pokemon Go flash mobs disrupted cities around the world during last summer’s frenzy.

Niantic, the company behind the game, had to remove in-game locations from the Holocaust Museum and Hiroshima memorial, showcasing just how important it is to create divisions between parts of reality and these new digital worlds.

The United States Congress is already beginning to ask interesting questions in the name of finding ways to protect consumers from the perils of augmented reality, including whether hackers might one day be able to edit our reality in weird and nefarious ways. Legislators will also need to explore the ways in which telepresence holograms and location-based experiences can be permitted to navigate the world.

See the full story here: https://singularityhub.com/2017/03/17/you-can-ban-a-person-but-what-about-their-hologram/