Augmented Reality has been the buzz lately, and as iPhone SDK 3.1 started to support Augmented Reality Games, Developers like myself become quite excited at the prospect of the future. We can envision a future when everyone is looking at the rest of the world through their iPhone. Many things can be done in an augmented future, imagine connecting to Wikipedia just by looking through the screen at an object and finding all the information about it. This future could be only just a few years away, but it has already been depicted perfectly in an Anime directed by Mitsuo Iso and premiered on NHK Educational on May 12, 2007 — Dennō Coil, not unlike how Neuromancer by William Gibson had envisioned cyberspace and Internet back in 1980.
Dennō Coil’s setting takes place in the near future of 2026, where augmented reality has just entered mainstream.In the fictional city of Daikoku, where a city-wide virtual infrastructure has emerged. The story revolves around a group of children who uses AR glasses to explore and unravel the secrets behind the half real and half internet city, with a variety of tools like hacking, virtual pets, metatags.
The rules and science in Denno Coil is arguably the least interesting part of the show, but still a delight to explore. In order to spatially synchronize virtual space and real space, users of internet-connected dennō eyeglasses need to constantly upload the status of physical space to the virtual infrastructure. Virtual objects such as pets cannot be recalled or reset; when a pet runs away, it must be chased and caught in 3D space. Virtual objects and pets are also susceptible to a form of death by data corruption or deletion. For a virtual object or pet to be deleted from cyberspace, it can be attacked by a virtual weapon, A special type of rogue virtual organism known as illegals populate the damaged and obsolete spaces, and the protagonists sometimes hunt special forms of illegals in the hope of collecting valuable metabugs.
The world of Denno Coil is filled with urban legends of ghostly tales about children losing their soul to the other side, a ghostly realm hidden inside the augmented reality. Shadowy figures known as the Nulls (a form of illegals) come from the other side just to take the children away (very much like traditional Japanese horror stories). The protagonists continually gain a clearer picture of the true nature of the glasses and cyberspace throughout the series. It is eventually revealed that the glasses form a two-way brain-computer interface known as Imago, first used in experimental medical treatments. However there are substantial health risks in prolonged use of the interface, and the interface itself presents the possibility of a coma or brain death through the “dennō coil” phenomenon. At the same time, an experiment gone awry gave birth to Michiko, a digital life form that assumed control of Coil Domain — referred to in rumors as the entity that ruled the other side and stole the souls of children.
Those who enjoys Science Fiction and want to see the potential of augmented reality in the future world must take a look at Denno Coil. There won’t be any demons stealing souls from the AR world in the near future, but don’t be surprised that our lives will soon be tightly integrated with augmented reality and we will be playing games like these in no time:
Source: Wikipedia
