James Fung
Biography
James Fung is a Canadian engineer and researcher in wearable computing, computer-mediated reality and computer vision. He took his doctorate at the University of Toronto under Steve Mann, in the group that developed the EyeTap, and worked on GPU-accelerated computer vision — his OpenVIDIA project was an early demonstration that graphics hardware could be used for general vision processing.[1]
Mediated Reality
Fung's research sits inside the mediated reality programme, which is distinct from augmented reality in a way that matters. Augmented reality adds synthetic material to the visual field. Mediated reality allows the visual field to be modified in any direction — augmented, diminished, filtered, or altered — because the EyeTap architecture routes what the eye would have seen through a computer before presenting it.
That capacity for deliberate diminishment is the part with the sharpest implications. A system that can add a label to a building can also remove an advertisement, blur a face, or subtract a person from view. Fung and Mann's work on planar patch detection made it technically feasible to identify surfaces in a live scene and substitute their contents in real time.
Fung has also worked on cyborglogging (glogging) — continuous first-person recording and transmission — and on sousveillance, Mann's term for watching from below: the inversion in which the surveilled record the surveillers. Their joint work included public demonstrations of the asymmetry, in which people wearing recording devices in stores that themselves recorded customers were asked to stop.
Key Ideas
- Diminished reality. Removal as a first-class operation on perception, and the ethical questions that follow: an interface that can subtract has editorial power over what its wearer experiences as real.
- Sousveillance. The counter-position to panoptic surveillance, and the observation that institutions permitting cameras generally object strongly to being recorded by individuals.
- Humanistic intelligence. The framing shared with Mann: intelligence arising from the human being in the feedback loop of a wearable system, rather than from the machine or the person separately.
- GPU computer vision. Practical work making real-time mediated vision computationally possible on commodity hardware.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Fung's work identifies a question the augmented-reality industry has largely avoided. If a device sits between the eye and the world, the question is not what it adds but who decides what it removes — and whether the wearer, the manufacturer or an advertiser holds that authority. Diminished reality makes the editorial power of a wearable explicit, and it is a far more consequential capability than overlay.
