The coming age of computer graphics and the evolution of language

Abstract

Sometime in the coming years -- whether through ubiquitous projection, AR glasses, smart contact lenses, retinal implants or some technology as yet unknown -- we will live in an eccescopic world, where everything we see around us will be augmented by computer graphics, including our own appearance. In a sense, we are just now starting to enter the Age of Computer Graphics. As children are born into this brave new world, what will their experience be? Face to face communication, both in-person and over great distances, will become visually enhanced, and any tangible object can become an interface to digital information [1]. Hand gestures will be able to produce visual artifacts. After these things come to pass, how will future generations of children evolve natural language itself [2]? How might they think and speak differently about the world around them? What will life in such a world be like for those who are native born to it? We will present some possibilities, and some suggestions for empirical ways to explore those possibilities now -- without needing to wait for those smart contact lenses