Getting in Touch with Content Through Experience
We have two choices: to be the camera or to control it.
The simple replication of reality – as seen in many metaverse-related projects – is no longer a viable path, either culturally or technologically. The natural evolution of our relationship with digital content moves through mixed reality, a seamless integration between physical environments and virtual content. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role, enabling connections across the different layers that constitute the complex interactions among objects, data, spaces, and living beings – often of deeply heterogeneous nature.
Today, digital content is accessible through an increasingly wide range of sensory and emotional experiences. Consider, for example, projects like Loveseat by Double Eye Studio, which uses VR to stage intimate and personal relationships, or the immersive and participatory dance-theater performances by Blanca Li, or the live motion capture experiments by Gilles Jobin, blending the human body with digital space in real time.
The dominant trend and most advanced frontier of spatial computing is embodied in immersive devices – headsets, smart glasses, sensors – that are becoming true sensory prosthetics. Their integration with artificial intelligence enhances human perceptual and cognitive abilities, changing not only how we interact with data, but also how we perceive the world itself.
This isn’t merely about performative extremes like those of Stelarc or Orlan, who have turned their bodies into canvases for artistic experimentation, nor about iconic figures like Neil Harbisson, the first legally recognized “cyborg,” whose antenna allows him to “hear” colors, or Moon Ribas, with seismic sensors implanted in her feet. Instead, we are entering what philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls the Symbiocene: a new era of symbiosis and reconnection between humans and nature, mediated and enhanced by technology. In this sense, to “see” – through smart lenses or augmented systems – is not just an optical act, but a cultural and ecological gesture.
A significant example of this direction is the ongoing collaboration between Meta and Ray-Ban, aimed at developing smart glasses that can assist users in daily activities, enabling new forms of interaction, perception, and visual memory. Over the years, many wearable technologies have attempted to gain traction: some successfully, others with more difficulty. Devices like the Apple Vision Pro or Microsoft HoloLens have established themselves in specific niches – the former aimed at creative and experiential users, the latter becoming a key tool in industrial and professional fields. Sometimes, it is not the technology that is unready, but society that lacks the cultural tools to understand and embrace its potential.
Today, however, mixed reality is emerging as a tangible and growing reality, capable of offering us a concrete glimpse of the future – a future in which digital experience will no longer be separated from the body and space, but will move through them, enrich them, and perhaps, make them more human at last.