My goggles would visually transform homeless people

Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What's more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it'll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

And don't go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It's a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut's vanished and you've got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.

Some people will say there's something sinister and wrong about all of this. They'll claim it's better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they've never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they're right, we'll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.

In other words, over the coming years we're all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there's no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I'll scarcely notice.
Charlie Brooker,Guardian