"Reality is augmented when it feels different, not when it looks different. And when the senses of time and obligation, and rewards are altered, maybe the aspiration of 3-d optical augmented reality begins to feel a little bit like pornography. Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye—that is rendered for the eye, which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with," said Kevin Slavin (co-founder of Area/Code) recently at Mobile Monday Amsterdam. It's a thought-provoking talk, and one bound to be referenced in years to come as augmented reality transitions from cyborg theory buzzword to an unavoidable component of the digital experience.
Slavin quotes film studies professor Elena Gorfinkel (cited in Salen and Zimmerman’s book Rules of Play): " The confusion in this conversation has emerged because representational strategies are conflated with the effect of immersion. Immersion itself is not tied to a replication or mimesis of reality. For example one can get immersed in Tetris. Therefore, immersion into game play seems at least as important as immersion into a games’s representational space." He considers augmented reality as an uncanny valley "not for the human face, but for the actual world around us."
And here's a great response to the talk from Rhizome contributor Greg J. Smith on his blog Serial Consign:
[T]he initial buzz was slightly misleading as it suggested that the presentation was an outright dismissal of AR. I don't really think this was the case...My reading of the talk is that Slavin is extremely curious about augmenting reality—as praxis—and suggesting we (startups, developers and consumers) need to be considerably more thoughtful in our application/exploration of the emerging medium and consider how it might activate other senses – AR should not distill down to "an overlay for all seasons". I think the key takeaway point is in Slavin's suggestion that "reality is augmented when it feels different, not looks different" – which basically echoes Marcel Duchamp's (almost) century-old contempt for the 'retinal bias' of the art market. If AR development (thus far) is lacking imagination, perhaps the problem is that we're very much tethering the medium to our antiquated VR pipe dreams and the web browser metaphor.
I absolutely agree that the "VR pipe dreams and the web browser metaphor" are holding the medium back. But in terms of the larger discussion about AR it is really hard to talk about what it feels like to live in an AR world until we have some decent video contacts…and until it gets past the point where we the consumers can get something better than a dinky baseball card that is more trouble than it is worth.
"Like, umm, just like." Employing blank sarcasm and cursing freely doesn't solve the basic problems that Augmented Reality is now operant for 20 million consumers weekly in the form of blended 3-D via glasses. In one year data to these glasses will be singular, allowing head movement to uncover hidden objects and recap to those arriving late to the Imax. This is an unconvincing, poorly delineated response to the future of all media, and clearly Slavin is not current on the technology under development in many levels of media. Without a proper reading of theorists like Gelertner of technicians like R.L. Gregory, the speaker is coordinating data merely to suit his arguments. He displays anger that a machine would display text on a overlay for itself, but he neglects to comprehend the phrases themselves are merely a stand-in for a concept of choice the machine has. Terminator's overlays are much more experimental than Slavin leads us to believe, and like an academic (instead of the operator he claims he is) he questions the tool not its meaning. The Terminator screen is showing us primarily that the Machine has a choice, not that the machine must read English. How do we know this? The audience laughs not when the screen appears, but when it chooses the most basic response and gruffly speaks it. His nitpicking prevents comprehending the future of machines and augmented reality. This was not just sloppy, but worthless.
I would say, as one who uses public versions of this medium in an art working mode, that it is precisely the primitive state of AR, that makes it as DuChamp would have wished, non-retinal. It is potent because it must rely on conceptual suggestion. It is at the 8-bit or gif stage. I agree with Slavin about the memisis problem, but in a strange way he conflates this desire at the same time as he dises it.
People intrested in this topic might like some of the papers by Dr. Alan Blackwell. Here is a short piece that got me thinking: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/experiencingcriticaltheory/Blackwell-DarkSide.pdf
Well, what about when 3-d augmented reality feels A LOT like porn, or perhaps IS porn, as in the case of our new piece virus.circus.laboratory in the Speculative show opening thursday at LACE?
Here's a video that's part of our augmented reality installation:
http://vimeo.com/22215703
Seems like people are giving AR a little too much credit. Its cool and all, but I doubt it will be the next Internet, at least not any time soon. Having worked with mobile AR and having built advanced custom apps, I think there are too many limitations to get past the obviousness of the screen overlay and the novelty of the initial experience.
However, it is a powerful tool for communicating certain ideas and concepts through visual language in a portable, mobile way. Obviously advertising agencies are psyched about it and there will be many more dinky baseball cards, but hopefully we can also see a fruitful art practice emerge that will compliment the newly flourishing net.art scene.