Foisted upon them with no say in its development, the students instead looked to forms of digital interaction that brought them closer to one another and to the world around them. So it was a bit of a surprise when the one piece of technology they didn’t revolt against was a pair of interactive glasses—an XR headset that quietly leveraged AI for real-time insights. 

Why was this surprising? Our students’ mental model of AI technologies was isolation-inducing. The glasses, ironically, were perceived as requiring less of their direct attention, thereby providing more time, space, and capacity to boost genuine human interaction. We observed that the students’ interest in the glasses was driven by a desire to feel more immersed in their surroundings, including their neighborhoods and the city at large. They wanted to make invisible connections visible.
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So what did we do?

The AR glasses, or Snap Spectacles, are hardware that's meant to be worn outside. When you wear them, you’re mostly seeing the real world around you. So I asked: How might I create a contextual overlay for places around Cambridge, allowing a user to walk around the city and see things they might not have noticed otherwise?

I built a Snap Spectacles lens using knowledge drawn from Atlas Obscura, the off-the-beaten-path travel guide that surfaces curious places around the world. While walking around the city, the Lens displays various geographical waypoints that you can follow to their origins or learn more about the history of places that appear on the overlay. You might walk by an oddly-shaped home and wonder why it looks the way it does. The Lens overlays tell you it’s the “O’Reilly Spite House,” a house so small and narrow it appears to be the product of an architectural feud. Or maybe you walk past the Harvard Museum of Natural History and see what looks like flowers lying on a table. The Lens overlay tells you that these are, in fact, Blaschka Glass Flowers, impossibly delicate and detailed, made in the 1800s.

These are not moments meant to take you away from the world around you, but to help you experience a more vibrant reality by drawing your attention to its wondrous hidden aspects. This, of course, raises a different set of questions. What happens when we share the same physical spaces, but different virtual ones? How are we using technology to grant people independence to experience the world on their own terms? (For example, the Be My Eyes/OpenAI collaboration is an early use of multimodal LLMs. The project utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4 to assist blind and low-vision individuals by interpreting and describing visual data in real time.) And how does making these connections change your relationship to your community, to your history, and to the people around you?

These questions can only be answered by directly experiencing their effect through tangible experiments. What the students’ enthusiasm for glasses over chatbots revealed is that there is still room for the real promise of connectivity embedded in new technology. Terms often couched in language that otherwise feels too overwhelming and anxiety-inducing can be engaged with in a way that feels practical—delightful, even.

So I built a prototype. After living here for decades, I learned things about my neighborhood I overlooked every single day. We are enmeshed in a cross-generational web of stories, histories, and lives that we only barely scratch the surface of. Accessing that archive, I felt my world expand. It was clear that my neighbors and my city are far more interesting than I had previously thought. Far from stealing me away from my life, it allowed me to delve deeper into the context and connections that enrich the sensation of living.