Years and years ago (late 80’s, early 90’s) I read a short story in Analog where pretty much everybody wore, IIRC, “Rose Colored Glasses.” This wacky, terribly sci-fi concept was a computerized pair of spectacles that slightly altered the world you saw, by making everything better. Stains, cracks in the wall, roadkill, dead lawns would all be digitally painted over, resulting in a prettier, “cleaner” and “better” world. Of course, this leads to collapse; if you can’t see the flaws, you can’t fix the flaws. I’ll have to go digging through the old back issues, I suppose.
So, with that out of the way, some months back Microsoft announced that they are working on a system called “HoloLens,” which, if they can get it to work as advertised, will be an incredibly powerful augmented reality system that can add stuff to your visual world… or perhaps paper over real stuff. It looks like it could be monumentally useful for a vast range of applications. One not shown: you’re out on a blind date. Your date is a bit of a disappointment in the looks department. But with the touch of a non-existent button… now they look amazing! And so do you!
And of course… the hackers and the spammers. How long before someone figures out a way to delete themselves from the system? Say… insert a subroutine that recognizes someone wearing a hoodie with a particular pattern of shapes and colors, and then paints that person out. This would make such a person partially invisible to people wearing the system (they’d be visible until the system recognized the code-pattern).
The system would be fabulously useful for drivers and pilots… a heads-up display that lets you look *through* the walls of your vehicle (I described something similar in my exceedingly short story fragment “Launch“) and automatically alerts you to anything you need to be alerted to. But then the hackers will get involved and pilots will calmly fly their planes into mountains they didn’t see and cars will plow into farmers markets without the drivers having to actually be old people.