Terminology Brainstorming

[Wayne Ligon]

I've been trying to think of a good terminology for augmented reality, and it occurred to me that this might be the perfect place to brainstorm some similar things - someone submits a phrase, word, concept or such and we try to brainstorm a new term for it.

For my own work, one significant thing is augmented reality - a computer generated overlay of what you see. I already had this concept, but I've been 'poisoned' by Alistair Reynolds' work, where he posits a global system that gets referred to as 'the aug' or 'the augment'. So, I need a better term for this than 'the aug'.

I thought about 'jack', for 'jack up'.

'Sym' for both a word-play on 'simulation' and the more accurate 'symbiotic device', but that also triggers my 'y-substitution in made-up terms' allergy.

What sort of terms are you struggling with?

 

[Robinski he/him]

12 hours ago, Wayne Ligon said:

but that also triggers my 'y-substitution in made-up terms' allergy

Lol!

In CAD, it's all about information being in 'layers', so that groups of objects can be switched on and off independently. The Layer is not very buzzy though. Doesn't really sound exciting or particularly intriguing.

You could go acronym, like TAL or AL (the Augmented Layer), but AL sounds like AI - maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not. Augmented Reality would be AR, of course - another option. The Augmented Reality = TAR.

You could go a bit Niven-y and name it after someone. The Dyson Layer (I don't mean use the same name, of course!!). The Kepler Layer. The Sanderson Layer.

You could go completely made-up name, but the problem I have with that is how do you avoid making it sound like a car make / model from (say) Korea?

Is it a gaming thing? You could call it Level 1, Level 2 - or Layer One; Layer Two; Layer Three, if there are different grades of information. That's fairly boring too though.

Something based around 'world' would tend to make it sound like a parallel universe, which it's not.

Hmm, nothing's really catching my imagination, but maybe some of this rambling will trigger a thought for you.

[king007 he/him]

Hello, I would suggest "Hyper View," or anything with the word "hyper" in it. Maybe even "hybrid vision."

I hope this helps

[Eagle of the Forest Path he/him]

How about something with the prefix meta- ? Meta-view, meta-sight, the meta-layer (in deference to @Robinski), ...

edit: or "the synth", as in "synthetic reality"

Edited July 21, 2016 by Eagle of the Forest Path

[Robinski he/him]

1 hour ago, Eagle of the Forest Path said:

the meta-layer

Er, I think both Meta-view and Meta-sight are better @Eagle of the Forest Path !!

(p.s. Hey - I learned to '@' - thanks Eagle )

Edited July 21, 2016 by Robinski

[krystalynn03 she/her]

Sometimes looking up the etymology and synonyms of a term can shake a new idea loose!

[Wayne Ligon]

6 hours ago, krystalynn03 said:

Sometimes looking up the etymology and synonyms of a term can shake a new idea loose!

Yeah, that's where I got 'jack' - which now that I think of it is going to make some people think of a phone jack or something similar to 'jacking in' in older cyberpunk books.

[Wayne Ligon]

Another idea I had was DAO, for Deep Augmented Overlay. This resonates well with 'tao', and the 'like he was seeing another world' out-of-focus look people will get when they concentrate on a large overlay.

[neongrey]

I'd be less inclined to that-- sometimes you get initialisms coming into common usage (laser, radar, snafu, etc) but by and large people tend to abbreviate, especially when it comes to slang. And a common slang usage probably would not be coming from the formal/technical term. It may sound tempting because you can verb it easily and I can certainly see it as being, say, the word that gets pushed by marketing interests, but-- well, people don't like to run with that. Consider, say, how people reacted to the initial reveal of the name for the xbox one. marketing's thought was that people would 'just call it 'the one''. People mashed the words together and were calling it the xbone in under a day; they then more or less settled into calling it the xbox, same as previous iterations.

Since something like this would inherently be a commercial service, I'd start with what it's technically called, go from there to what it's marketed as (this might not necessarily be super different, see: 'the Internet'), and start lopping off syllables or mashing words together and go from there until something seems snappy.