Manovich’s predictions on augmented space are impressively prescient. Even more than ten years ago, he was able to anticipate how deeply digital information would permeate modern life. However, I think there are two key developments that he did not expect or account for: privacy and convenience.

Manovich writes a lot about how, in the future, any space might become an augmented space. This augmented space could involve a flow of information from the physical space to the digital or from the digital to the physical space, or both. However, despite having had the technology to make a such a space possible for years now, we do not them in practice. The main reason for the lack of augmented spaces, I believe, is peoples’ privacy concerns. To a certain extent, we do have such personalized, augmented spaces today in the form of online advertisements. If our favorite websites are considered spaces, then they are often augmented with ads targeted to us specifically. We interact with different pages online, and these ads change to match our actions. We interact with the digital space, and it adapts in a loop like Manovich’s augmented physical space. People often find this unsettling though. Seeing advertisements based on your thoughts and activities is strange - it implies a monitoring that people find unnerving. Manovich’s augmented spaces also involve such surveillance to be effective. Now, a physical space augmented in ways that aren’t advertisements by people who aren’t ad agencies might be less off-putting than targeted ads online, but they will always involve a computer monitoring your every move. I think this aversion to being monitored is a big reason we don’t see more augmented spaces today. Cameras are cheap today and computer vision has gotten quite good, so we could implement augmented spaces, but ultimately people don’t want to be observed by machines.

Manovich also failed to realize how convenient modern phones are. The advantage of a phone application is that the interface is almost standard - everyone learns how to operate the menus, settings, and functionalities of their specific phone after a while. Switching interfaces - either on a phone or computer - is surprisingly irritating. I can imagine that walking around augmented spaces, each of which might have their own rules of interaction and methods of deliverying information, could be confusing and frustrating. On the other hand, it is very easy to call up or receive information on one’s phone because we all know exactly how to use them. An effective augmented space would have to have a standard design. Since phones are so ubiquitous and useful, though, there is little incentive to spend the time and resources necessary to create an augmented space when our phones are already so effective and familiar.