In 1989, American forces bombarded Panamanian drug lord Manuel Noriega with deafening rock music when he took refuge in the Catholic Church's embassy in Panama. In 1994 Serge Monast, the Canadian journalist and conspiracy theorist published the book Project Blue Beam (NASA), in which he alleged that NASA was planning to use orbiting 3D holographic projectors to simulate the coming of the Anti-Christ. In 2015 the American startup company Magic Leap (formed in 2010) released a promotional video demonstrating their ability to digitally project 3D images directly into the world i.e. to 'augment' reality without the need for any interface other than spectators' eyes. The company announced a research and development partnership with Lucasfilm the following year and also received investment funding from Google.
Let us imagine that the troops besieging Noriega had used Augmented Reality technology of the type Magic Leap propose, in a similar fashion Monast alleged NASA had planned . It may sound like science fiction (Monast may have plagiarised a 1991 episode of Star Trek: TNG), and admittedly Magic Leap's failure to release any actual product so far may reveal them to have been a 'vaporware' company all along, but, given that sonic weapons already exist and have been used by law enforcement for crowd control, perhaps we should be preparing ourselves for the deployment of visual ordnance.
The title of this paper is a reference to the phenomenally popular Pokémon Go Augmented Reality game. Launched in 2015 by Niantic, the game's players use the GPS application on their handheld devices to track and ‘capture’ creatures from the Pokémon video game franchise which are lurking in real world space. Despite the absorption in the game experienced by many users – which, according to media reports, has resulted in accidents and even fatalities amongst those overly immersed in the hunt – playing Pokémon Go is still 1). a voluntary choice and 2). reliant upon an interface. Removing these two factors has the potential to make the experience of augmented reality not so much immersive as incursive in its capacity to instill discomfort and even terror in unwitting spectators, as is the case with the 'stress-inducing' low frequency sound weapons alleged by certain conspiracy theorists to already be in use and which may have been the casuse of a mysterious outbreak of illness at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba last year.
It is easy to conceive of technology like that promised by Magic Leap being used to generate disturbing visual manifestations. Indeed, similar apparitions already occur in theme parks, and deceased musicians Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson have all recently 'performed' posthumously onstage in holographic form (with Presley's hologram also making an expereince in Blade Runner 2049 [2017]). But, again, spectators are primed to expect such encounters, however unsettling they may be. One could argue that the public today is too sophisticated and media-savvy to fall for such visual trickery but a combination of AR technology and the kind of sonic weapons mentioned above could make for an experience which is overwhelmingly, even traumatically, real. Such an experience would constitute an invasion of reality similar to that presented in Angela Carter’s novel of ontological warfare, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, first published under the title The War of Dreams (1973).
In this paper, drawing on a range of theorists, including Wolfgang Iser, Steven Shaviro and Jodi Dean, I explore the possible ramifications and consequences of AR technology being 'weaponised' to impose incursive experiences on an unsuspecting populace.
