For hacking, Augmented Reality is practically here now. Just extend it 20-50 years into the future.
Everyone wears glasses or contacts that project an improved HUD over whatever happens to be in the wearer's field of vision. IPhone browser gestures are as long ago as punchcards and have been rendered obsolete first by eyeblink/eyeroll control and shortly thereafter some type of neural link or skin-reader so good it might as well be a direct mindwire.
So when I look out my window I don't merely see a tree, two cars and a mailman walking in front of the ivy-colored fence across the street. Oh no I get tags and overlays for all of the following:
- from the window manufacturer,
- the blind manufacturer,
- their competitors,
- The safety notice about keeping kids away from open 2nd floor windows, with realtime updates of neighborhood, city, state and worldwide incident counts.
- a efficiency schematic from the utility company using thermal overlays, micro-neighborhood meteoroligcal data and realtime market prices for electricity delivery letting me know the second-by-second money to comfort tradeoffs between running the AC with the window closed and opening it for a breeze instead
- a botantical overlay about the species of maple tree and ivy with links to articles about care, allergens, and types of insects and micro-bots they most frequently harbor.
- A public-key encryption function confirming that the mailman is a legitimate employee of the postal service with links to his route, schedule, office contact, and how many of my packages he has personally touched.
- Data about each of the cars, including make, model, serial number, mileage, ownership history, maintenance logs, how well their actual Miles Per Megawatt compare to the averages for similar make and model vehicles, etc.
And with this much data, hacking becomes the art of convincingly falsifying data that is higher priority to a human reader than to a security program. A hacker maxim might be"information control is mind control"
So a hacker might do something like spoofing an update for the window safety incident report at the hyper-local level, so that I will respond by rubbernecking to see which neighborkid just took a dive and whether the ambulance has been contacted yet.
Or maybe they would put a "subject to immediate armed repossession" tag on the ownership history of one of the cars, so that I will keep my head down and away from the window.
Of course how you simplify and abstract that sort of thing down to game mechanics is an issue, but the basic conceit should be that cyberspace is not separate from ordinary space, and that cyberspace tags are most often used to add potentially useful data to physical objects.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."