Augmented Reality Innovative Perspectives Across Art Industry and Academia

Introduction

"To engage with digital content, in this paradigm, does not crave detachment from one's surroundings; indeed, enhancing ane's perceptual and cognitive experience of the spatiotemporal here and at present is precisely the ideal that orients AR."

Parlor Press, 2017

Augmented Reality: Innovative Perspectives Beyond Art, Industry, and Academia offers an in-depth examination of the cultural emergence of augmented reality (AR) applied science. The authors in the collection outline the rhetorical implications of AR for a variety of disciplines and industries, from writing studies and visual rhetoric to digital marketing and historical interpretation. One of Morey and Tinnell's (2017, p. 9) main arguments throughout Augmented Reality is that AR technologies "support new writing and design spaces". Thus, they offer the reader not just information virtually AR but a demonstration of how AR might be incorporated into impress scholarship. Using the free mobile AR application Aurasma, readers can scan augmented pages throughout the book to access additional multimedia "overlays" such as film clips and interviews. For the most part, the AR overlays operate as digital supplements to the book's printed material, and the principal content of the collection tin can exist accessed without downloading the Aurasma app.

The collection is separated into iii sections: articles, interviews, and artworks. "Part 1: Scholarly Manufactures" brings together scholars from fields such as limerick, rhetorical theory, comics studies, and media studies. "Role 2: Interviews" signals this collection's unique approach to AR in recognizing that critical investigations of new media crave a range of voices, including non-bookish experts from the engineering science manufacture. Thus, this section provides half-dozen compelling interviews with leading experts in the fields of informatics, digital humanities, and mobile AR development. The final department, "Office 3: Artwork," builds upon the theoretical (Part i) and technical (Office 2) foci of the previous sections by exhibiting augmented reality artworks from digital artists from across the world. This department proves to exist the well-nigh innovative in terms of design in that farther information about the artworks tin can be accessed within the pages of the book itself simply past scanning the pages with the Aurasma app.

Manufactures

The authors in part 1 encompass a range of topics and areas of concern that are beingness (or will be) impacted by the evolution of AR technologies, such as spatial exhibit design, comic book studies, digital memory, rhetorical theory, and much more. Although the scholarly contributors in part 1 take a variety of approaches to AR, they seem to agree that AR'south central affordance every bit a writing engineering science is its power to collaborate in meaningful ways with the user'south physical environs, whether these surround are a general location or a specific object or text. Moreover, they by and large seem to agree that "augmented reality" is not reducible to whatever particular concept or technological assemblage merely rather a broader socio-cultural phenomenon emerging through a network of ideas, technologies, and representations.

Augmented Space

Many of the contributors approach AR in terms of how it changes the user'south ability to perceive and interact with physical locations. In the opening chapter of part one, Brett Oppegaard offers readers a methodology for designing location-aware AR experiences. Drawing upon his piece of work designing AR experiences for the National Parks, Oppegaard describes how AR technologies, if they are going to go a mainstream engineering, must not only pursue technical alignment (i.e. the verisimilitude betwixt digital and physical components of the application) just also rhetorical alignment. Oppegaard's major contribution to theorizing AR as a design practice comes in his categorization of rhetorical alignment into three tiers: location, spatial, and contextual. Tier 1 alignment (location) focuses on the degree to which the digital information aligns with the rhetoric of the space itself. Tier two alignment (spatial) refers to the power of the AR application to connect the user to physical spaces and objects exterior of the user'due south immediate, witting concerns. Lastly, Tier 3 alignment (contextual) refers to how the AR experience delivers context-specific and/or personalized data to the user. Oppegaard moves the conversation forward in terms of AR criticism past offer a more precise framework that other scholars, artists, and designers can describe upon in developing and evaluating location-enlightened AR experiences. In chapter 9, "SAZoo-AR, Ethea, and Figurer Vision," Steve Holmes provides a detailed assay of an interactive augmented reality game created for use within the San Antonio Zoo. The awarding allows users to scan augmented targets throughout the park to admission 3D animations and informational quizzes related to nearby exhibits. Holmes rightly critiques the zoo's utopian claims that AR engineering science in and of itself offers a dramatically improved learning experience. Holmes' affiliate offers a good corrective to digital evangelists who preach of AR as a "revolutionary" applied science in itself without shut consideration of the content (concrete and digital) of specific applications. Through his analysis of the SAZoo-AR app, Holmes demonstrates that rhetorical analyses of AR experiences must account for how these apps are realized through emergent interactions between actual users, awarding content, and environmental constraints.

Similarly, chapters five, "Life through the Screen: Location-Based Information and the Personalization of Space," and x, "When Geolocation meets Visualization," outline the potential furnishings and affordances offered by mobile AR technologies that are capable of linking digital texts to specific physical locations. In chapter 5, Jordan Frith discusses the potential effects of AR interfaces on how we excogitate of (and interact with) public spaces. Frith points out that the continued development of AR as an everyday interface for public interaction may contribute to a farther perpetuation of the "filter chimera" that currently plagues online discourses. Frith cautions that the "homophily" (i.e. the tendency of people in like socio-cultural strata to cluster together) of public life could be accelerated if these personalization algorithms overtake our experiences of physical public spaces. In chapter 10, Jason Farman describes how geolocative AR applications are redefining taken-for-granted concepts similar "space" by demonstrating how infinite is not a matter to exist abstracted but rather something we embody, practice, and produce. In function, Farman claims AR participates in a further collapsing of the imitation dichotomy between the real and the virtual by exposing the caste to which the "reality" of a identify is composed of a diverse array of potential rhetorical actants and interpretations. Farman describes how maps are existence redefined in a mobile media era in which users participate in both the creation and employ of digital maps for a variety of purposes (e.g. finding a restaurant, marking themselves "rubber" during a crisis, etc.). Those interested in more in-depth studies of the human relationship betwixt mobile media and spatial rhetorics should besides consult Farman's edited drove The Mobile Story: Narrative Do with Locative Technologies too as Jordan Frith's recent book Smartphones as Locative Media.

Augmented Culture

Other contributors in part 1 interrogate AR equally a pop-culture phenomenon. In Chapter 3:,"Potential Panels: Toward a Theory of Augmented Comics," Jason Helms provides a succinct summary of the current state of AR within comics. For the almost part, Helms is disappointed in the current land of AR comics, noting that most mainstream applications (due east.g. "Marvel AR") employ AR more as a marketing gimmick than as a platform for enhancing the reading feel. Every bit an alternative, Helms (2017, p. 61-two) offers several potential examples for how AR might be integrated into print comics, the most promising of which is Helms thought of mail service-publication augmentations that could be created by comics scholars and/or readers as a way to bring online conversations about the comic onto specific pages and panels. In Chapter four: "'Sergey Brin is Batman:' Google Glass and the Rhetoric of Adoption in Pop Culture," Isabel Pedersen and Douglas Trueman extend this department's cultural analysis of AR into a case-report of media representations of Google Glass, focusing specifically on its entanglement with the ethos of Google'due south co-founder, Sergey Brin. For Pedersen and Trueman (2017, p. 68), Google Drinking glass is more than "a marketing phenomenon heralding a technological epitome;" information technology is a "rhetorical instigator" for an entirely new era of human computer interaction. Following a meme that surfaced in October 2011, they point out that the rhetoric of Drinking glass is tied upward with the mythos of Sergey Brin equally a "Batman" effigy (i.e. a brooding business human working tirelessly and secretively to salvage the world). They annotation that Brin is more Batman than Tony Stark: he is non a quirky genius inventor but rather a savvy playboy who directs the evolution of applied science for a broader social expert. Overall, Pedersen and Trueman provide a compelling, well-researched assay of the emergence of Glass as a cultural icon of AR, demonstrating that media representations of a new technology are influential to how a guild comes to perceive it. Lastly, Joseph P. Weakland's affiliate "'Augpunk': Imagining Alternative Futures for Augmented Reality through Science Fiction," provides an overview of AR representations within scientific discipline fiction (SF) literature and moving-picture show. Specifically, Weakland (2017, p. 105, 109) rightly points to the SF origins of AR as a engineering science for "rewriting public space" and "forming communities through locative art". Through a close analysis of Tim Maughan's Paintwork series, Weakland describes how AR can function equally a kind of digital graffiti by providing cultural and political dissidents a means of appropriating public texts and spaces as a platform for counter-public discourses. As such, Weakland'south chapter establishes a useful framework for theorizing the interventionist AR artworks in Part 3 of the collection.

Augmented Rhetorics

Chapters 7 and viii provide a compelling theoretical test of AR every bit a philosophical and rhetorical phenomenon. In Chapter vii, "Gathering Memories with Augmented Reality," Jason Kalin discusses the relationship between AR and rhetorical memory. Kalin (2017, p. 121)writes that "retention and technologies of memory help disclose new exigencies in and of reality, thus creating the possibility of new worlds to inhabit". For Kalin, AR technologies alter the function of memory past drawing the user's attention toward the "ever-shifting exigencies" of her immediate environs. Moreover, Kalin (2017, p. 121) points out that AR technology allows for an approach to retentiveness less as a thing to be retained and recalled and more of as a identify to exist inhabited. Kalin draws upon two central metaphors inside rhetorical theory for thinking virtually augmented retention: network and ambience. Kalin points to how mobile AR applications like Layar work equally augmented memory by taking existing digital texts (eastward.g. tweets) and attaching them to physical spaces. Kalin's article takes a meandering, personal arroyo to digital retentivity by following serendipitous encounters via locative media apps like WikipediaWorld and HistoryPin. One of Kalin'south central claims is that memory becomes ambient as it is dispersed into material spaces of everyday life, thereby destabilizing the field of study-object dichotomy of reductive theories of rhetorical memory. AR renders retentiveness equally temporary and fleeting; the tweets and instagram pics that Kalin accesses along the streets of Chicago are non stable items existing in a storehouse to be recalled later. Rather, they volition dissolve as other digital texts take their place according to the shifting kairos of specific places. In chapter 8, "The Dream Deferred: Augmented Reality as Rhetorical Realism," Scot Barnett explores how augmented reality allows us to re-envision the relationship betwixt reality and language. Similar to language, argues Barnett, rhetorics surrounding AR and ubicomp metaphrase the computer as a barrier to our interactions with reality. Thus, AR, similar rhetoric, becomes a barrier to reality "in itself" while also (paradoxically) functioning as the very machinery through which we come to perceive and know "reality." Barnett (2017, p. 152) points out that, much like attempts at rhetorically unadorned "universal languages," AR thus becomes defined every bit a medium that attempts to erase its presence through the very human activity of arbitration: "For the Tagwhat user, language is no mere intentional or representational human activity (information technology is not only epistemological, in other words); it is, instead, what is speaking at a given time and place, what stems from world and is the composite of pregnant and matter". Barnett claims that AR reveals to us how language operates exterior of primarily homo concerns as it is generated alongside and through nonhuman objects and environments.

The capacity in this section nowadays a well-rounded exploration of the theories, methodologies, and rhetorics associated with AR technology at this electric current cultural moment. As John Tinnell (2015, p. 133) has pointed out in a recent article for Computers & Limerick, writing almost new and emerging technologies tin can be akin to "playing the stockmarket" in the sense that technological innovation and cultural uptake often move at a faster pace than scholarly enquiry. However, the contributors in Part i do a prissy job of cartoon out broader rhetorical implications of their analyses of gimmicky AR.

Interviews

"AR could exist every bit much of a game changer as the printing printing was 600 years ago." — Christine Perey

Part 2 of Augmented Reality presents readers with six interviews from experts in educational activity, new media theory, digital design, and business technologies. Each interview offers an insider glimpse of the history and future of AR. Overall, the experts interviewed in this department seem to agree that AR is still in its infancy. Specifically, many of them note that AR'due south potential ubiquity is non only tied to technical advancements (due east.grand. better optical displays) but also the creation of more compelling AR experience.

In the kickoff interview, Sean Morey talks with with Sidney I. Dobrin, chair of the Department of English at the Academy of Florida and Managing director of the Trace Innovation Initiative. Dobrin describes some of the limiting factors of AR adoption inside the textbook manufacture, noting that many large publishers are wary of investing boosted resources in developing new technologies similar mobile AR applications. Dobrin rightly points out that AR forces us to reconceive of the pedagogical role of the textbook as a platform for content delivery. For Dobrin (2017, p. 208), the textbook operates alongside other educational materials like websites and location-based AR apps as "simply one node of a more circuitous ecology of learning interfaces". Overall, Dobrin emphasizes that AR is nigh interesting not as another tool to be wielded in a top-downwardly style from administrators, publishers, and teachers, just rather an emergent platform for reconceiving the very theories, methods, and practices of composition instruction.

In interview two, Blair MacIntyre, professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech, talks with John Tinnell about the past, present, and futurity of AR. MacIntyre has been researching AR since the early on 1990s, and he describes how the emergence of the smartphone was a double-edged sword for AR developers. On ane hand, the ubiquity of the smartphone gave developers a massive set of potential users. On the other mitt, MacIntyre admits that the smartphone is not the ideal interface for experiencing AR because of its limited computing power and relatively weak feature-tracking capacities. In his word of the technical challenges of designing location-based AR experiences, MacIntyre points out that the kind of organizations interested in creating location-based AR (e.thou. historic sites, museums, etc.) are typically nonprofits, meaning they probably don't have the time and/or resources to develop robust stand-alone AR apps. As Tinnell (2017, p. 219) points out, these kind of DIY-AR creators "demand a platform" suited to their needs. Every bit a way of addressing this trouble, MacIntyre discusses how he and his colleagues at the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech have developed Argon, a web-based mobile AR browser. Argon allows non-expert AR creators to admission and create AR content without downloading actress applications to their device. MacIntyre'south interview provides valuable insight into how computer scientists and humanists can work together to generate innovative AR technologies and experiences.

Interviews 3 and iv focus more on AR as a business organization technology. Tinnell talks with Christine Perey, a technology evangelist and business consultant, besides every bit Jay Wright, president and managing director of Vuforia. Perey (2017, p. 230) discusses AR in terms of inevitability, proverb she doesn't e'er "question if AR is going to exist ubiquitous". Perey describes how her conceptualization of AR refers to all facets of digital feel that engage with the material world, including ubiquitous computing and "smart objects." As AR continues to become integrated into our everyday lives, argues Perey, we will cease to conceive of the physical and digital as separate domains of experience and interaction. Echoing many of the claims fabricated past the contributors to chapter one, Perey ends her interview by noting that AR designers must pay more attention to user-experience inside specific AR experiences in creating new applications and interfaces. Jay Wright'south interview focuses more than on AR from a technical perspective. Wright describes how Vuforia is distinct from AR web browsers similar Layar and Aurasma in that it operates "behind-the-scenes," which allows AR developers to leverage the Vuforia platform to create stand-alone AR applications. Vision-based AR platforms similar Vuforia apply visual triggers in the user's immediate surroundings—posters, stickers, building facades, etc.— to display and orient digital content in physical infinite. As Wright (2017, p. 241) states, Vuforia'southward ultimate goal with reckoner vision is to requite computers the ability to see the world similar a human. Indeed, Vuforia is not alone in such pursuits. Through its Projection Tango, Google is also looking to create AR applications capable of more than accurately aligning digital content inside large physical spaces, from living rooms to factory floors. Wright (2017, p. 241) makes an encouraging statement for those interested in AR from an academic perspective when he says that "universities remain one of the best sources of innovation and new technology". Whether or not the humanities are included here remains to be seen. However, Wright's emphasis on content development and user experience seems to indicate that the AR industry will increasingly require effective designers, writers, and communicators.

In interview five, John Tinnell talks with Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, co-founder of the widely adopted AR platform Layar. Lens-Fitzgerald discusses how the AR industry is trying to avoid the pitfalls of early web development, such as overhyping and bad pattern. Much similar the other contributors to this collection, he emphasizes the importance of observing user-behaviors in order to understand how the contingencies of specific environments and spaces might bear upon the AR feel. Lens-Fitzgerald notes that Layar is dedicated to pursuing AR as a democratic space by allowing students, educators, artists, and nonprofits to apply its platform for costless. Notwithstanding, his optimism should come up with a notation of circumspection. Many vision-based AR platforms, such equally Layar and Aurasma, piece of work by associating digital overlays with concrete triggers similar posters or company logos. If a company decides that they want to "own" the augmentable space on top of their logo, this can sometimes prevent other AR creators from designing additional overlays for it through the aforementioned platform. In 2010, digital artist Marking Skwarek created an AR "logo hack" of the BP logo in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. According to Brian Wassom (2015, p. 125), one of the few legal scholars studying AR, things like logo hacks are probable to be construed as costless speech and thus may remain legally adequate. Withal, it is important that nosotros go on to explore this result as the interfaces through which we admission and create AR content become more consolidated and tightly controlled.

In the final interview of role 2, Tinnell interviews BC Bierman, an academic, creative person, and AR technology programmer. Bierman led the "AR | AD Takeover" project in New York City, which replaced public advertisements in Times Square with counter-augmentations designed by artists and activists. Bierman (2017, p. 257) says that he is less interested in AR specifically and more than interested in a diverse array of technologies and media that "permit artists to participate in public space in ways they never could before". Bierman notes that it's important for artists to experiment with new media in order to demonstrate non-commercial applications of emerging technologies similar AR. Overall, Bierman sounds a refrain that echoes throughout the collection: AR content creators must strive to design AR experiences that connect the user in meaningful ways to their concrete surround.

Artwork

Part 3 of Augmented Reality curates the work of six augmented reality creators. The projects in this section nowadays a range of compelling apply cases for how AR tin can exist utilized to create compelling digital experiences in physical spaces. Moreover, these creators demonstrate how AR can be used as a platform for interrogating a broad variety of public issues, from climate modify to government corruption . Each artwork is presented with images and a short textual description. Readers can as well scan certain images in this department to admission additional video content detailing the project'south aims and/or the creation procedure of the artist. As a way of synthesizing this section, I volition be discussing some of the artworks as I run into them plumbing fixtures inside three general categories: social, interventionist, and historical/educational. However, this taxonomy is not definitive, and many of the artworks mentioned here and throughout office 3 vest to multiple categories and/or might require different categories altogether.

Social

Artists throughout part three demonstrate the viability of AR as social media and platform for public discourse. For his project "EGG AR: Things We Take Lost," John Craig Freeman interviewed people in the city of Liverpool, asking them however question: what have you lost? Freeman then placed digital representations of these responses inside the exact GPS coordinates where the interview occurred, creating a digital public network visualizing Liverpool's commonage response to what it means to "lose" something. Although conceptual in nature, Freeman's project isolates one potential model for AR as a public writing engineering science: allowing citizens to visualize a various array of responses to a public question, issue, or concern. Similarly, Conor McGarrigle's "Vineland" application overlays geotagged vine videos throughout urban spaces. "Vineland" encourages developers to consider how AR applications tin leverage the popularity of existing social networking sites.

Interventionist

Interventionist AR artworks are designed to be critiques of the physical locations in which they are experienced. Interventionist AR experiences often reveal obscured historical realities and/or expose hegemonic forces at play inside physical locations. For instance, Tamiko Thiel's "Clouding Dark-green" overlays digital smog over the headquarters of major tech companies as a fashion of visualizing the carbon footprints of cloud computing technologies. Conor McGarrigle's "NAMAland" leverages AR to provide information nearly the property portfolio of The National Assets Direction Agency'south (NAMA), a controversial Irish gaelic Government agency that acquired risky belongings loans from Irish gaelic banks. "NAMAland" generates a map of the agency's secretive holding holdings depending on the user's physical location and overlays a digital "Monopoly man" on pinnacle of each of the NAMA properties. The kairos of NAMAland makes it an effective AR intervention: it partnered with and sustained an already going public discourse about the Irish economy and the public's disenchantment with NAMA's suspicious withholding of public data.

Artist John Craig Freeman is perhaps the most explicitly engaged in AR as an interventionist practice. With his project "Tiananmen SquARed," for instance, Freeman used AR to commemorate the student revolution of 1989, an effect that might otherwise remain silenced within the physical space of Tiananmen Foursquare. In improver, Freeman'south project "Border Memorial" operates equally a digital memorial for the thousands of Mexican immigrants who have died attempting to cantankerous the U.South.-Mexico Border. Marker Skwarek, who works alongside with Freeman and Thiel in the Manifest.AR artist collective, has too designed several interventionist AR applications. His 2011 project "#arOCCUPYWALLSTREET" places digital images and signs of Occupy protesters in locations where they accept been physically barred from entering. For a more than comprehensive overview of interventionist AR projects, come across Vladimir Geroimenko's collection Augmented Reality Fine art: From an Emerging Applied science to a Novel Creative Medium.

Historical & Educational

AR artists are starting time to experiment with AR as a class of public writing by creating applications that provide additional information and/or counter-histories about public spaces and texts. For example, BC Bierman's "Bowery Wall" project allows users to scan restored Keith Haring murals in New York City and view them equally they would take appeared in the 1980s. Bierman created a similar application for Miami'south Wynwood outdoor graffiti infinite that reveals an exploded view of the neighborhood's 2D murals. Tamiko Thiel's "Carnation Rain" commemorates the "bloodless revolution" that took place in Portugal in 1974. When the user activates the app inside Carmo Square, she can run into digital carnations falling all around, a reference to the peaceful nature of the Carnation Revolution. Theil's projection offers an example of how historical events can be commemorated through AR'due south power to evangelize compelling visual imagery in public spaces. Finally, Connor McGarrigle'south "Walking Stories" application presents a compelling instance of how AR can exist used to disseminate alternative histories for local communities. "Walking Stories" provides a counter-history of Dundrum village in South County Dublin. The awarding guides users on an alternative history of Dundrum, exposing the hidden effects of rapid commercial development.

By incorporating augmented reality triggers into the pages of their drove, Morey and Tinnell provide a generative model for other scholars interested in incorporating an AR component into their print scholarship. Hereafter iterations might extend this thought into collaborations with artists and developers inside the blueprint of the book itself so that the AR artworks tin be direct experienced on the pages rather than through online videos or print images.

Decision

With the release of the widely pop mobile augmented reality game Pokémon Get in summer 2016, the exigence for this collection is readily credible: the general public is finally warming up to the idea of AR. As such, this collection offers a much-needed primer on the technologies, concepts, methods, and rhetorics of this exciting new technology. In a publishing market place saturated with books about AR from a technical perspective, Morey and Tinnell's collection fills an invaluable gap in its focus on the cultural and digital rhetorics of AR. In detail, this drove is well-suited for graduate and/or upper-level undergraduate courses on digital rhetoric, media studies, and/or multimodal composing in that information technology offers an array of valuable methodologies, definitions, and analyses that are sure to exist of valuable to a range of disciplines. Overall, Augmented Reality offers readers a compelling glimpse into how AR is reshaping our taken-for-granted conceptions of space, mobile media, and public writing.

References

Farman, Jason. (2014).The mobile story: Narrative practices with locative technologies. New York: Routledge.

Frith, Jordan. (2015).Smartphones every bit locative media. Cambridge: Polity

Geroimenko, Vladimir. (E.d). (2014).Augmented reality art: From an emerging applied science to a novel creative medium. New York: Springer.

Morey, Sean and John Tinnell. (2017). Augmented reality: Innovative Perspectives beyond art, industry, and academia. Anderson, S Carolina: Parlor Press.

Tinnell, John. (2015). "Grammatization: Bernard Stiegler's theory of writing and engineering science." Computers and Composition, 37,132–46.

Wassom, Brian. (2015). Augmented reality law, privacy, and ethics: Law, social club, and emerging ar technologies. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Source: http://cconlinejournal.org/greene/