Been arguing about AR, archiving for posterity.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality will be the most important technological and social change since the widespread adoption of the internet. The internet has been around for decades, but it wasn’t until computing hardware was ubiquitous that the technology was able to serve as a platform for radical social, political, and economic change.

Similarly, AR technologies have been around for a while, but only now is the hardware ubiquitous. Everyone is carrying computers in their pocket, computers that are networked and equipped with cameras and GPS, and are about as powerful as the PCs that fueled the first few years of internet.

My personal hope is that the Hollywood-backed push for 3D multimedia will promote the widespread use of “smart glasses”, connected by Bluetooth to the smart phone in your pocket, with a HUD for fully-immersive, always-on AR. The technology is already there, or close enough for early adopters, it just all needs to get hooked up in the right way.

AR tattoos
Your face is a social business card
3D AR on the fly
From image to interactive 3D model in 5 minutes
Photosynth + AR
Arhrrrr
The future of advertising
Ali G
QR
Google Translate
Hand from above
Projection on Buildings
Pinball

The Ladder is a mixed-reality installation.
The room is plain apart from a window, cut high into the wall and a ladder. A tiny virtual character, that can only be seen through the computer screen, stands on a ladder and looks out of the window to the physical world. He keeps voicing concerns as to the nature of the world, tracing shapes with his hands and trying to describe the scene. The screen is on a rig so that you can pan it across the room but the boy stays at the top of the ladder.

The work exists at the faultlines opening between traditional notions of presence and place, blending spatial, generative and augmented elements, both virtual and real together into a work of contemporary art. The artists views the possibilites within augmented or mixed reality as a most important breakthrough in media art, allowing cinematic type installations to move from the 2D plane and inhabit the gallery. Through these strategies cinema can be recontextualised as an interactive and physical experience.

By John Gerrard, author of Watchful Portraits.