An earlier article on augmented reality referenced the work undertaken at MIT on a contact lens that could incorporate displays of information. Tim O' Reilly and Jennifer Pahka have linked the rise of Web 2.0 to the forthcoming displays of augmented reality and charted another route.
Like all pundits they try out a neologism for size, given how it can fund a few events companies, if it is catchy enough. Their phrase is Web Squared, pithily described as “Web meets World”, as the social networking platforms increase by an order of magnitude and are joined by applications that use the vast amounts of data now held or pouring out of all electronic devices. The sea-change, in their eyes, is the shift from a voluntary model driven by human action (joining, voting, tagging, commenting) to applications where the data is seamlessly joined and applied for the benefit of the user, based upon their habitual practices. It is the beginnings of the avatar, the magician's apprentice and is dependent upon the history of the user. These applications acts as the senses in the collation of data, and the next step is when they are joined together by an overarching intelligence, a servant.
Today’s smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms.
The scale, nature and speed of the data change what we mean by collective intelligence. Consider the obvious use case: internet-connected GPS applications that have built-in feedback loops, reporting your speed and using it to estimate your arrival time based on its knowledge of traffic ahead of you.
One must recall that this is a form of augmented reality arising now out of realtime applications on mobile devices and cloud computing. A leap forward will be attained by better hardware and a joining of our dots. At the moment, this is a maze and we need a social GPS to steer us.