Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
I'm intrigued and slightly disturbed by our first glimpses of what augmented reality might look like. In a comment in an earlier post I posed the question of what happens to theories of place-based practice when virtual space overlaps or annotates a physical space. The video above - which Karen Wohlwend showed at the UKLA conference suggests how this might play out. The Junaio app for the iphone provides a foretaste of AR, but I'm not particularly attracted to the idea of staring at the world through a smartphone. Nevertheless the idea of being able to access deeper levels of information about real world places is attractive, but as the video suggests it could provide all sorts of information that we might wish to filter out. Maybe here's yet another reason for returning to the critical?
‘Proponents of ‘ubiquitous computing’ look to the day when digital media become architectural: no longer furnishings or infrastructure, but an absolutely integral part of the building. When the digital display becomes a sort of window, looking and dwelling will be transformed. But not as completely as when digital media learn to forego the display and the analogy of the window and the interface is able to go anywhere, responding no longer only to mouse or keystrokes anchored to the screen but to gestures, movements, and sounds, dedicated, roving or ambient, compounded or uncompounded with visions and information. Electronic media offer, in principle if not yet in practice, and infinite connectibility of spaces.’ (Massumi, 1998: 22)
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