Harawayian Network Protocols

Informational Infrastructure: A Basic Software Engineer's Primer

Fourth Edition

Chapter 26: Augmented Reality in Action

The Harawayian Augmented Reality network can be considered to be several panes, designed for graceful degradation of services dependent on available bandwidth. Most colonial networks use a variation of the original graceful-degradation given bandwidth system, officially known as IEEE 802.20x-2095. This system, rather than slowing down loading, selectively loads content depending on available bandwidth, networking with other nearby systems to ensure an equitable bandwidth distribution. Like all such systems, Haraway's system is built on six tiers: Symbolic, Textual, Graphical, Auditory, Immersive, and Holographic. The network itself is built on 802.11x-2090 standards, with proprietary upgrades given Haraway's isolationist tendencies, involving distributed bandwidth, local devices having their own transmitters and receivers to forward data across larger distances, creating an "ad-hoc" network if necessary.

The original basis of Harawayian AR was this ad-hoc network, but later as cities grew, more centralized wireless infrastructure was used to provide higher bandwidth availability, allowing for the Immersive and Holographic levels of bandwidth load to be achieved. However, the inefficiencies and compromises from being early adopters of universal augmented reality have created a host of structural-level inefficiencies in design and multiple redundant backups that hamper its expansion. Controversial proposals to fix this massive issue include attempting to build a second level of AR infrastructure and then shut down the original network, which is almost universally opposed by rural interests.

Tier One: Symbolic
At the lowest available level of bandwidth, symbolic AR is used when bandwidth can be measured in the single bytes per device. All Harawayian AR display systems are mandated to have a standardized symbol library of 65,356 standard symbols, which are updated approximately once every ten years by Haraway's Electronic Standards Review Board. This level of AR is used to highlight important points of interest (in addition to your standard high-visibility signs) such as emergency exits, emergency switches, hazards (bio, chemical, radiation), load-bearing structural elements, shelters, and other various fixtures, and is generally only relevant to emergency workers. Most symbolic AR data is provided by low powered RFID that is forwarded to the network at large, and is generally exclusively transmitted by ad-hoc networking.

Tier Two: Textual
Textual bandwidth allows for text (of various fonts, colors, and sizes) to be displayed on objects. At this point, bandwidth is still fairly low, as angle processing is built into all Harawayian visual AR terminals. This unfortunately does mean that unlike AR in the Core, which is generally much more "top-down", Harawayian AR contacts require an additional (and fairly large, cigarette-box sized) computer for this processing which may be externally worn, printed on clothing, or implanted. As an alternative, AR messages can be toggled by the sender to "float", but these limited options have made the Harawayan AR system difficult to use for programmers familiar with other AR environs (some conspiracy theorists believe this is intentional by the Harawayan government, to minimize foreign influence, but these accusations are beyond the scope of this book). Textual data is the most common form of AR data, coming in the form of nametags, text-based advertisements, and so forth.

Tier Three: Graphical
Graphical AR is typically not very convincing, but still bandwidth-cheap. Like textual AR, Haraway uses receiver-side viewing angle processing to minimize the data stream requirements rather than sender-side, which disallows more creative positioning for basic AR. Instead, a user sees the graphic centered on the transmitter location. Graphics can be anything from realistic-seeming wallpapers to simple neon graffiti, but overcoming the restrictions by creative image sizing has become something of a forte of Harawayan graphical designers. Ironically much of Haraway's textual AR data is actually graphical, because of the problems with Haraway's electronic infrastructure design.

Tier Four: Auditory
The highest level of AR commonly available in the outback, auditory-level AR is almost necessary in Haraway, as most announcements are provided over that service. Like most colony AR, the sound data is stored in an inefficient but easily compressed format, to allow for "bandwidth brownouts". It is not entirely uncommon for announcements or slideshow advertisements in the Harawayian outback to suddenly lose audio quality over the course of a transmission due to too many people listening in.

Tier Five: Immersive
Immersive AR allows for the easy broadcast of animated graphics, allowing for easy real-time animated video broadcast. Due to enhanced cognition speeds of several Harawayan clades, the need for 72 fps video (rather than the 30 generally used in most AR networks) greatly impinges on the available bandwidth for "immersive" (coined not because it's actually convincing, but because of the IEEE standards on AR quality) augmented reality, and as such this service is generally only available in the rich homes inside outback towns or the cities. Bandwidth effects and airwave saturation make the cost of immersive AR prohibitive outside of cities.

Tier Six: Holographic
Most AR systems do not use AR of this quality, because decoding and overlaying 3D image data on real objects in real-time is extremely difficult, especially in a polity with widespread transgenics who have high-end movement or cognition speeds, as it is necessary to update the positioning several times faster to be "acceptable" for the mainstream. However, Haraway has taken a significant liking to holographic AR, up to and including holographic clothing. However, it is this layer which has the most problems with bugs (poorly programmed AR "clothes" which have gaps in angle coverage have become an embarassment to more than one celebrity), hacking (the sheer depth of holographic angle-overlay code means it is unlikely every exploit will ever be found), malicious editation (macros hidden in holographic AR data have been a scare several times in the last 30 years of Harawayan history), and a host of other problems. Despite this, citizens of Haraway are often fiercely proud of their accomplishment. The technical difficulties of holographic AR (and how the few nations which use HAR attempt to mitigate them) are found later, in Chapter 30: Reality-Grade Immersive Environments.

Leecher Systems
Haraway's government knows of, and heavily restricts, "leecher systems" that use artificially high bandwidth priorities, as they take up critical bandwidth in emergency situations, and unnecessarily cripple the functionality of all other systems. However, it is not difficult to make a leecher system, and they have been used in more than a few acts of political activism. The primary issue Haraway has with leechers is its bottom-up bandwidth distribution-each device broadcasts its priority, and data transfer is allocated according to that priority. Although useful for graceful degradation, the original 802.20x protocol was not intended for augmented reality setup (but rather temporary colonial network infrastructure) and this issue is one of its holes.