Contemporary lives are described by the relentless interaction with images, which are projected to us by different kinds of displays, whether they fit our hands, or reach the scale of a building. Nevertheless human being ontological knowledge and understanding surroundings pass through the world of images, as described by many philosophers of the present and the past in conjunction with Plato’s Theory of Forms. Images indeed are bold vehicles for experiencing and dwelling the real because they allow our identity to take a particular “shape” by reifying the surrounding.

Such particular mechanism is also adopted for dwelling 2.0 digital reality, to the extent that we equally assign the same physical properties, like those perceived by touch and smell – besides sight – to objects from the real and the digital. Nevertheless such binary and mutual conditions, as perceived by our sense, make us dwell the digital as undisclosed, relentless and as a producer of (the illusion of) truth (our truth, of course), which is accessed by the apparent depth that any digital image possesses in the 2.0 world. Indeed the illusion of depth gives the digital physical matter and creates the condition of relegating the real to a particular image generated by the digital. Such inversion occurs because we sense our virtual reality by means of those desires (or illusions) that give it its form; nevertheless desires are triggers that feed one’s ontological need of truth, which is purveyed by the illusion of digital image’s depth. Because of such a loop digital reality appears at our eyes more real that the Real, as it is made of the same matter but shaped according to our own identity. Do we still need the real? In the hybrid-real, halfway between the digital and the real, we dwell by means of the illusion of depth that opens up questions about the shape of one’s identity, which normally takes form by contrast with the Real rather than association, as described by Slavoj Žižek in many of his books. Hence this paper would like to address the formation of individual identity via the latent flatness of images and to discuss the modified perception of space in the coming age of wearable technology, where the digital and Real merge at our eyes, but not for our sense. Where is the real in the age of latent flatness?