I saw this commercial on TV over the weekend and thought that it captured an aspect of Augmented Reality applications that I find troubling. The ad’s protagonist exists in an empty city, only noticing other ‘players’ of the game he is involved in. “Never Stop Playing”, is the tag line–but seeing the ad, and watching this celebration of total isolation from the sociality and relationships that are a part of urban life, I can’t help wishing that people would stop playing immediately and spend more time being aware of their everyday contexts. Am I wrong to be skeptical? While I know that there will be a huge market for games like these, I would love to see the development AR applications that somehow connect people to their everyday spaces, their social and political contexts, or just their neighbors, instead of isolating them even more. For that reason I like the Occupy Wall Street AR app that we discussed earlier in the term, but does a project like this even get close to connecting people to the actual space that they are in? Hopefully we can discuss this a bit in class.
Categories
- Assignments (23)
- Case Studies (15)
- Class presentation (5)
- Commentary (19)
- Ephemera (8)
- Exhibits (16)
- MOV (10)
- News (18)
- Social Media (3)
- Uncategorized (1)
Recent Comments
- kate on ‘Fleeing From Darkness’ Prototype of Interactive Neon Sign Web App is Live
- tyler on Bioluminescence exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History
- claude on YouTube as ‘Social Media’
- jeremy on A SECOND SIGN OF THE TIMES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS MOSER…
- jeremy on Social Media Space and Museum Practices
Tags
augmented reality
avatar
bainbridge
barnett newman
constructivist learning
contact zones
cultural heritage
digital heritage
digital technologies
experience
Fred Herzog
immanuel kant
interviews
jeremy owen turner
knowledge paradigms
marc pachter
medium affordances
MOMA
MOV
museum collections
museum discourse
Museum of Vancouver
museums
museum voice
nanotechnology
neon
neon signs
Neon Vancouver
news
OpenMOV
performance
peter walsh
photography
point of interest
repatriation
replication
Second Life
sentimentality
surrey art gallery
text
Thanks
Virtual worlds
voice of fire
Week 2
william sims bainbridge
I promise to discuss this in class tomorrow 🙂
I am working in my powerpoint presentation now that will summarize and contextualize the discussion.
Hey I’m having trouble getting to your main post on the site . . . how do I get through the password??
Don’t mean to send obsessive (since this is my research platform), but AR for me works best on large scale, street size platforms. Otherwise, AR on PDAs is too much like we are walking around with walkmans (or ipods) with earphones and only exist in our own little world. More tomorrow…
I think that AR will only be effective once holograms are perfected. Then we won’t even need a screen, we can just have Rimmer from Red Dwarf walking around as though he IS an actual person. Then we will be connecting to our everyday surroundings more, but in a problematized way because we will be overly suspicious of what is and is not a hologram. 🙂
On a more realistic note – I do think that having a small screen to steal our attention away has its benefits (when feeling anti-social in the wrong part of town). But there are some unique design questions in how we can use AR outside, in our environment, as a way to re-experience the world. For instance, maybe a projection that is designed to only be seen when it is raining in Vancouver (like a rainbow?).
Hello all,
I just finished my powerpoint presentation so I am a bit burned out.
As for the ideal screens for viewing AR, why wait for holograms when contact lenses enter the marketplace in 2 years?
http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=2491