Medical AR from Munich

Minority Report - ARchive?

analog AR

As touched upon in the previous post, people have been augmenting reality way before there was this fetish for computer vision.

Here is Where: a project that rediscovers (lackluster) physical locations through historical accounts. New York Times article that describes the project.

“It’s sort of a reverse scavenger hunt,” he said. “Trying to find things that aren’t there.”

Other things to look at could be shamanism or other rituals in which people initiate this accessing of information that is not there. (Often this refers to the physical perceptible reality.) More to come.

augmentology against AR-terminology

George Shalom of Augmentology rebels against the term Augmented Reality because of the way it is used. He denounces the word "augmented" because it's not new for humans to "augment" their reality with technology. A very simple example of this is writing:

"The innovation of written language was a concrete visualization of reality-augmenting metadata"

Shalom doesn't like the use of the word reality, because in implies the fact that there is one objective reality that is enlarged, allthough it only refers to mobile web technology applications that don't even have open standards. Shalom argues that what many people call AR should be termed more specifically towards mobile web technology.

In Part II of his essay, he tries to come up with an alternative for the revealing of metadata and calls it "aura recognition" (aurec for short), explicitly referring to Walter Benjamin's use of the term aura.

"In the best case scenario, aurec will help us make sense of the emotional significance of digital phenomenon in ways which are meaningful and helpful."

I'm not sure, but I think Shalom is trying to say that aurec is the better term for AR and that it enables us to access the aura of something trough the metadata, for example a specific context. Maybe someone can read Part II as well and edit this post or comment on it.

I think aurec relates to the idea about virtually contextualizing archive material in an immersive environment, that we talked about today.

Food for Thought

Both Tangible User Interface (TUI) and Augmented Reality (AR) designs seek to move computation beyond the desktop. The primary difference between the two lies in the approach.

TUI seeks to inject computation into the physical world while AR seeks to overlay computation onto the physical world. However, the two approaches are not orthogonal.

From Augmented Reality, Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces

Are we researching possibilities for AR for the archive or also Mixed Reality and Hybrid Space?

Going one step back, we discussed that a good starting point could be creating metaphors for the physical exploration archive(s), the ritual before digitalization, browsing and stumbling on new knowledge...before considering interfaces, technology, etc.