I was coming out of my favourite public sauna with some friends tonight, when we thought we witnessed from a distance someone getting beaten up by a group before they moved on. Other people were closer and seemed to be observing, it was near to a busy street, and we wondered if someone had called the authorities. We didn’t want to take a chance, I’m well aware of the insidious bystander effect. We called, only to be told that an ambulance was on their way, and the police were in pursuit, and everything was as close to being taken care of as it gets. No need to worry.
It struck me that this sort of data - where and when an emergency or crime has been reported, and if the report is being responded to, should be publicly available in real time, and makes excellent fodder for map or AR based visualization. If people, motivated by curiosity could check whether a situation has been reported, and then once they find it hasn’t perhaps feel like it were now their responsibility to do so, maybe the bystander effect could be reduced. It also doesn’t hurt that using a video-see-through AR app to initiate the report could also capture location and possibly perpetrators with less ambiguity than a verbal description to a dispatcher. Finally we don’t waste any dispatcher time with well-intentioned but ultimately redundant reports: a more efficient, more informative, more empowering solution.
This goes back to the AR with utility post (the title is an homage of sorts to the post by Adam Greenfield that sparked those thoughts). I feel that bringing AR to bear on these kinds of serious real-world problems would give the field some credibility that feels lacking right now. There isn’t really a business case here, this is just one of those things that should be done because it’s the beneficial thing to do. Perhaps we need to find fans in civil service.
