General Seminar N°6 — Augment Reality, with Julian Bleecker & special guest participant Tim Maughan.
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Limited to 15 participants.
The topic of this General Seminar is Augmented Reality. The goal of the seminar is to begin to make some sense of AR more holistically — more than the instrumental technology and its associated hyperbole. We want to have a discussion about AR as it would be in the lived world. We want to approach the AR quandary by imagining and describing augmented worlds with a higher degree of acuity and with rich inquisitiveness as to what it will be like to live in a social world of reality augmentations.
AR — Augmented Reality — and its cousins XR, VR, MR, &c. offer the promise of obliterating the distinction between fiction and non-fiction; between what we experience otherwise, and what we can laminate onto that experience with some algorithms.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I’d argue that the world does not know what it all means, what it could be like to live there, and much of any “use case” — beyond the well-trodden and somewhat tiresome technology motivated implementations.
AR feels like a classic example of instrumental technology leading the comprehensive consideration of the lived social world in which AR has become a normal, ordinary, everyday component of life.
What is a world in which AR and AR experiences are ubiquitous to the point of boring? What is a world where AR is as common as AAA batteries and knock-off Nike sneakers?
What are the augments that are experienced?
Are we creating a world where virtual avatars, algorithms, and advertisements appear like the overlays like seen in John Carpenter’s They Live or Keiichi Matsuda’s Hyperreality? Or routine worlds where the hype of AR distills down to the most mundane sorts of things like controlling speaker volumes and coffee pots.What are the ways we will communicate with AR? Will AR support more authentic interactions if these interactions leverage sensed data from biosensors? What might “co-located AR” be if we take such to mean in-person AR in shared “augmentations”? What are possible unexpected and potentially undesired outcomes of reality augmentations?
This General Seminar means to address this question: what is it to live as a social being in an world of in which Reality is Augmented as routinely as we listen to a podcast, make a phone call, or walk the dog. Why augment reality, and what kind of augmentations would we want, expect, deserve — or will be served up?
In this General Seminar we will address this question through the use of Design Fiction. Participants will collaborate in small groups to imagine possible AR augmentations or associated products that represent AR in the near future in which augments are culturally ubiquitous.
To represent the Design Fiction, participants will construct a simple quickstart guide explaining their augment to a new owner, as if their augment exists in the world. (For an example of a Design Fiction done using the archetype of the quick-start guide, see the Near Future Laboratory Quickstart Guide for a Self-Driving Car.
Wednesday August 18th, 2021 at 11am PST. Hosted remotely via Zoom. Limited to 15 participants. $20/seat. Sign Up Here.
Some stimulus material:
[Strange Beasts] [Paintwork - Tim Maughan][Social AR: Reimagining and Interrogating the Role of Augmented Reality in Face to Face Social Interactions] [AR is the Future of Design][AR/VR - Facebook Research][Augmented Creativity][What’s Holding Augmented Reality Back?][Dance Apocalyptic: Tim Maughan’s “Infinite Detail” and Media After the Internet][VR blockchain startup founded by Second Life co-creator raises $35M for High Fidelity – TechCrunch][Augmented Reality – Transitioning out of the old-fashioned “Legacy Internet”: Interview with Bruce Sterling) [Nreal Teardown: Part 1, Clones and Birdbath Basics - KGOnTech][100 Original Voices in XR]