This new game shows what the world might look like after the death of the smartphone

Smartphones aren't going anywhere anytime soon. It'll be another decade (or more) before your digital life is projected into the world around you, viewed through seemingly magical augmented-reality glasses.

You know the kind: The Google Glasses of the world, worn like sunglasses, which appear to "project" stuff like email or directions directly into reality when they're actually just overlaying your vision with digital information.

For many folks in Silicon Valley, augmented reality is an inevitable evolution of the current smartphone-obsessed world we live in. That begs the question: What will that world look like? A new Xbox One and PC game called "Tacoma" offers a vision into that worryingly-believable future.

Let's take a look.

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In "Tacoma," set in 2088, you're an employee sent to explore an abandoned space station (named "Tacoma"). You can watch employee AR logs to unravel the game's story. In reality, that means you can watch their their lives play out through ghostly silhouettes and voice recordings.

In the future where "Tacoma" is set, employees of the Venturis corporation are working on a space station. A condition of their employment is having their entire lives recorded through augmented reality. As a result, your exploration of the now-abandoned space station is filled with ghostly replays of their lives.

In a nod to another potential AR feature of the not-so-distant future, each employee's job is designated by the symbol on their back. Above, the station medic plays a game of pool.

If these skeletal frames look familiar, maybe you've seen motion-sensing cameras in action before. Microsoft's Kinect, for example, views humans through a similar perspective.

The skeletal frames recorded by the space station's monitoring system enable the player to see a surprising amount of human interaction. 

In this instance, you can see a surprising amount of detail even with just superficial skeletal tracking. One man makes an argument to a group of people while they react in a variety of different ways.

Also of note: ID tags pop up over people, like in a virtual world. There are a variety of less-than-savory connotations to this concept — perhaps those ID tags also show annual income, or other status measurements — but in the world of "Tacoma," it's solely used as a personnel badge.

Imagine this concept playing out in real life, though:

You go to meet your friend at Central Park, but it's huge. Where are they?! You call your friend, and their face pops up a foot away from your own on a projected screen. "Where are you?" you ask. "Right here," your friend says — and instantly, a real-world indicator shows their location. Your AR glasses guide you to the friend, seamlessly, while walking — projecting directions into the world around you. No stopping to check your phone or look on Google Maps or whatever else. It's this promise that makes AR so appealing, and the logical successor to smartphones.