Marco Tempest: A magical tale (with augmented reality)

Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today

is something in the way of an experiment.

Today's its debut.

It's a demonstration of augmented reality.

And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded.

They are live

and reacting to me in real time.

I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic.

So fingers crossed.

And keep your eyes on the big screen.

Augmented reality

is the melding of the real world

with computer-generated imagery.

It seems the perfect medium

to investigate magic

and ask, why, in a technological age,

we continue to have

this magical sense of wonder.

Magic is deception,

but it is a deception we enjoy.

To enjoy being deceived,

an audience must first

suspend its disbelief.

It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

who first suggested this receptive state of mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing

to produce for these shadows of the imagination

a willing suspension of disbelief

that, for a moment,

constitutes poetic faith.

MT: This faith in the fictional is essential

for any kind of theatrical experience.

Without it,

a script is just words.

Augmented reality

is just the latest technology.

And sleight of hand

is just an artful demonstration

of dexterity.

We are all very good at suspending our disbelief.

We do it every day,

while reading novels,

watching television

or going to the movies.

We willingly enter fictional worlds

where we cheer our heroes

and cry for friends we never had.

Without this ability

there is no magic.

It was Jean Robert-Houdin,

France's greatest illusionist,

who first recognized the role of the magician

as a storyteller.

He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio.

Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler.

He is an actor playing the part of a magician.

MT: Which means magic is theater

and every trick

is a story.

The tricks of magic

follow the archetypes of narrative fiction.

There are tales of creation and loss,

death and resurrection,

and obstacles that must be overcome.

Now many of them are intensely dramatic.

Magicians play with fire and steel,

defy the fury of the buzzsaw,

dare to catch a bullet

or attempt a deadly escape.

But audiences don't come to see the magician die,

they come to see him live.

Because the best stories

always have a happy ending.

The tricks of magic have one special element.

They are stories with a twist.

Now Edward de Bono argued

that our brains are pattern matching machines.

He said that magicians deliberately exploit

the way their audiences think.

Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly

on the momentum error.

The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations

that are perfectly reasonable,

but do not, in fact, match

what is being done in front of them.

MT: In that respect,

magic tricks are like jokes.

Jokes lead us down a path

to an expected destination.

But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips

into something entirely unexpected,

we laugh.

The same thing happens

when people watch magic tricks.

The finale

defies logic,

gives new insight into the problem,

and audiences express their amazement

with laughter.

It's fun to be fooled.

One of the key qualities of all stories

is that they're made to be shared.

We feel compelled to tell them.

When I do a trick at a party --

(Laughter)

that person will immediately pull their friend over

and ask me to do it again.

They want to share the experience.

That makes my job more difficult,

because, if I want to surprise them,

I need to tell a story that starts the same,

but ends differently --

a trick with a twist

on a twist.

It keeps me busy.

Now experts believe

that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained.

We think in narrative structures.

We connect events and emotions

and instinctively transform them

into a sequence that can be easily understood.

It's a uniquely human achievement.

We all want to share our stories,

whether it is the trick we saw at the party,

the bad day at the office

or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation.

Today, thanks to technology,

we can share those stories as never before,

by email, Facebook,

blogs, tweets,

on TED.com.

The tools of social networking,

these are the digital campfires

around which the audience gathers

to hear our story.

We turn facts into similes and metaphors,

and even fantasies.

We polish the rough edges of our lives

so that they feel whole.

Our stories make us the people we are

and, sometimes, the people we want to be.

They give us our identity

and a sense of community.

And if the story is a good one,

it might even make us smile.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)