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SINCE EARLY MAN (CIRCA 1990) FIRST STARTED WEARING VR GOGGLES, THE GOAL HAS BEEN SIMPLE: ESCAPE REALITY. WITH MICROSOFT'S RADICAL NEW WEARABLE COMPUTER, REALITY HAS NEVER BEFORE BEEN SO GLORIOUSLY REAL.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW 3D graphics was on my dad's computer when I was a boy. Dad was a programmer for the phone company, back before they called programmers "coders" and before being a coder was cool. He didn't make apps; he wrote routines for a brute of a mainframe that lived somewhere in the bowels of Pacific Bell. He stayed up all hours of the night telecommuting before it was a perk of every job. Sometimes, my younger brother and I would wander in to see what he was up to, and if we were lucky, he'd set us on his lap and boot up a game, Wolfenstein 3D, a first-person shooter. You were a GI trying to escape a Nazi castle. I never thought of the graphics as looking real, but they were undeniably effective. The three of us would sit in the darkened office, soldiers running down corridors, anxious and scared at the possibility the next turn might lead to Gestapo lying in wait. In the tensest moments, Dad would physically lean his body, my brother and me with it, to try to peer around corners.
Did the rudimentary machine we were playing on intuit my father's movements and respond? Did we become part of the game, in anything more real than our imaginations? Dad was good, but not that good. Besides, it was the Dark Ages -- the mid-90s -- what do you want?
The protagonist of this story is a machine. A wearable, holographic computer that leaves your virtual, surpasses your augmented, and just gives you the reality. You might call it a second-sight machine, giving you the cognitive powers of the machine you were born with, but freed from the tyranny of physics. It is a set of magic lenses through which humans see, with unprecedented clarity, their relationship to the world.
The applications for this machine are limitless, from planning tricky surgeries to designing other intricate machines with your partner who is in Tierra del Fuego but right there with you at the same time to...