Most people who keep abreast of technology are aware of augmented reality. That's technologies that look like this:

This stuff is really cool. I mean, it's incredibly useful to be able to get directions in this fashion, and it's also incredibly neat to imagine the possibilities. Someday, will I walk out of a movie about alien invasion, hold up my phone, and through its viewscreen see the real world overlaid with aliens invading? Probably. I wouldn't be surprised!

Augmented reality, though, is about much more than just holding up a phone and looking "through" its screen. Producers of ARGs - alternate reality games - have long understood what augmented reality really is. It's what happens when you look around you and see your everyday world transformed. When you're playing an ARG, your understanding of the world shifts. No longer are you simply standing at the bus stop, getting tacos from a lunch truck, or admiring a famous landmark; now you are looking for clues that may be hidden anywhere, reading secret meanings into the passersby, searching public advertisements to see if any of them were placed by a particular company. The world around you has become the site of a story - and it's done so without any technological intervention.

In the computer industry, people use the term platform agnostic. If a piece of software is platform agnostic, it can run on any kind of computer - a Mac, a PC, a Linux box.

I like to use the term "platform agnostic" too, but when I use it, I mean something a little different. The root of "agnostic" is Greek, αγνώσις. It literally means "without knowledge." So, someone who's religiously agnostic asserts that they don't know if God exists.