Airtagging

WARNING: This is the tech-heavy entry. I'll give a small summary when I'm done, so do not be discouraged if you miss something along the way. Once this is over with, it will all start moving pretty fast and my brother is going to ask me to kill someone, so please keep reading.


Ok, so you may find the concepts that were introduced in the previous entry a tad confusing, so I'll try to clarify a few points. First of all, Wendy and mecenas (no caps, intended) are people, they'll be recurring characters soon and you'll get to know them. As for dodamage.de and airtagging, they're the awesomest ways of handling info, pretty high-tech and underground culture. BTW, spellcheck seems to have a problem with the word "awesomest", but I like it, so it stays.
Fuck you, Shakespeare.
BTW, spellcheck seems to have a problem with the word "spellcheck".


I'm rambling, so back to focus.
See, this is something so underground that we do not want people meddling with the stuff, so as I said earlier, please treat this as a work of fiction. Airtagging is the act of leaving tags of info everywhere.
Tags, as you will surely know if you were born before the nineties but after the seventies, is something similar to graffiti. Leaving a mark somewhere, you'll tag the spot.
Now, this is where the cool hi-tech stuff comes in, have you heard about Augmented Reality?
Ok, please launch any FPS videogame you've got lying around, see how all around the main action you get a bunch of numbers? Like, the amount of ammo you have left, your hit points, all that stuff? Imagine seeing all that info in real life? I do.


So, dodamage.de. This was the awesomest webpage ever (Oh, c'mon, spellcheck, webpage? seriously?). Somewhere around 2004, it started as a photo-sharing social community. It's main motto at the time was: "Create the art you want to consume". I was heavily into urban decay photo back then, I used to go around and take pictures in rundown neighborhoods, demolition sites, burnt houses, stuff like that. This was well before the term "ruin porn" was even coined, so it was still cool to do it. We were a small but pretty active community and we soon started believing that everyone else on the site were our friends. So, when mecenas told us about this small project he was running, we all jumped in.
The main gadget we got from it were the HUD lenses, we got a small chip in our contacts that's constantly receiving info from sensors we have in our bodies, which are called blips. A blip is a hypoallergenic chip that can be injected under the skin, it's got wireless capability and they run by draining the smallest amount of energy from your blood flow. Ever saw those watches that work by charging from your pulse? This is basically the same idea.
So, me myself I've got three blips active. One is basically a GPS, the other is a muscle-reader and the third one was my own personal access to dodamage.de.


The end result of all of this is that while I'm walking through any area with mobile phone reception, I was connected to the site and my blips were retrieving info from the site. As you can imagine, it was no longer just a space to share photos, but it had became a place were we would add comments with a GPS location attached to it, so if we looked at the spot where the comment was added, we would see the comment floating in thin air, thanks to our lenses.
Airtagging, cool, eh?


The lenses had a few extras, I had an IM program with most of the dodamage.de contacts on it and a small integrated browser. As I said before, I also had a muscle reader, this was a small blip on the palm of my hand that was able to check the movements of my hand and share them with my lenses, so when to everyone around me I would simply be twitching my fingers, I was actually IMing someone or browsing Wikipedia.




SUMMARY: I am able to read comments that people leave on a website while walking around as if they were floating on thin air. I can also IM people from wherever I am. Kind of what you do with an iPhone or Blackberry, but without the corporate gadget.


Did I already warn you that I hate corporations, including those "we are good" corporations like Google or Apple?
Well, I do.