Italy’s commercial television network MediaSet recently started experimenting with a new type of teleshopping. Casa Mediashopping is a soap opera in which every item entering the camera’s viewfinder can be bought.

To some it might seem as product placement pushed to an extreme or television format-mashups new style. Not nearly as interactive yet as Fight Club’s IKEA catalogue , the potential for further innovation is clear, especially in today’s remix culture.

As a matter of fact, a touch of Joost metadata layers might do the interactive trick easily. After all, in today’s increasingly peer-to-peer world one can easily imagine people adding links on layers of travelling mattes, allowing others to click through to the products for shopping or any other type of interaction or transaction. Imagine watching a movie or for that matter an interview or documentary shot in the house of one your favourite artists, interior decorators, architects etc. You recognize the designer lamp in the corner, make a link, get a percentage for every item sold, when people watching the video after you click through.

Fast-forward again and put on your shopping glasses … ‘click’ (or any more subtle, more poetic equivalent thereof) as you walk down the street and see vehicles, clothes, objects, experiences you fancy. Consume, communicate, interact with its owner, producer, reseller, … do as you like, but do it immediately. And yes, interaction goes both ways, anticipatory technologies (see also here) will (try to) seduce you. Seduction becomes even more dangerous … new businesses arise as people devise ‘augmented protection layers‘, umbrellas against ‘information rain‘, ‘personal advertising snow‘ and ‘identity attack hail‘ … etc. etc.

As technology advances rapidly, business adopts and adapts it at increasingly higher paces, society becomes familiarized and infused with it, augmented reality may soon become everyone’s reality and not only in maintenance, navigation, entertainment, consumption etc. The physical and the virtual world continue to merge in a manifold of networked ways, way beyond the information layer into sensory reality, forming mixed realities (cf. any mix of augmented reality, augmented virtuality and/or virtual reality) of all kinds.

Software applications such as GIS and Photoshop familiarized us with a layered view of reality. New technologies now ‘immediatize’ this notion, opening up a brave new layered world with plenty of new fun and fears, opportunities and threats, …

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 17:16 and is filed under business, future, technology, trends, visions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.