When We Started to See The World Through Augmented Eyeballs

By 2035, vision had been upgraded—and reality became optional.

In this episode, we explore the moment humanity stopped looking at the world and started editing it. AR implants moved from medical miracles to mass-market enhancements, blurring the line between perception and preference. A morning walk could include glowing art in alleyways, floating calorie counts above fast food, or—more troublingly—none of the unpleasant realities someone didn’t want to see.

The transformation began with good intentions. In the late 2020s, AR eye implants helped the blind regain sight and guided the cognitively impaired through daily life. But once inside the body, the tech didn’t stay clinical for long. Custom visual overlays took off—filters that tweaked mood, erased discomfort, or turned a hotel room into a Martian dome. Reality became a menu of aesthetic options.

People didn't just see differently. They lived differently.

Need directions? Follow the glowing arrows in your field of vision. Forgot someone’s name? Implants whispered it back. And for a premium, you could filter out graffiti, litter, even the people who made you uncomfortable. Entire neighborhoods were quietly redesigned—not by urban planners, but by private preferences.

This wasn’t science fiction. This was checkout lines and birthday parties and subway rides, refracted through software.

The implications ran deep. Governments embedded public service announcements into overlays. Political ads hijacked sightlines. Religious groups debated whether digital halos helped or corrupted faith. Romantic partners fought over filter settings. A new kind of intimacy emerged: seeing the world, raw and unfiltered, together.

But not everyone opted in.

A growing resistance formed—artists, thinkers, privacy advocates—championing “natural vision” as a creative right. They saw something sacred in imperfection. Their movement wasn’t anti-tech, but anti-curation. To them, reality wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t tidy.

Meanwhile, those with implants started to feel disoriented when they unplugged. Could they trust what they were seeing anymore? Or were their brains still projecting synthetic overlays they’d forgotten to disable?

The psychological fallout took a toll. Incidents of voluntary disconnection turned tragic. Some users, desperate to see something real again, harmed themselves just to be sure it was still there.

This episode asks what’s left of truth when our eyes are programmable. What happens when we can opt out of hardship, and even out of empathy? When AR first promised emotional depth—like walking in a refugee’s shoes or standing inside a tragedy—it felt powerful. But over time, most chose not to walk through pain. They chose to swipe past it.

And in doing so, we learned something about ourselves.

👉 Read more and share your thoughts at 84futures.com

Author: Dax Hamman is the CEO at FOMO.ai, and an expert in AI Search & Marketing.