- Design and usability considerations are critical to ensure a reasonable commonality and longevity of content.
- Marketing and business plans aside, we have to assume that the emergence of truly compelling and valuable technologies are ultimately in line with the deep evolutionary needs of the human animal.
- Proper design for human usability is perhaps even more critical in the augmented interface than in a typical screen interface.
- …(T)he overwhelming amount of data and the need to filter it to some meaningful subset, particularly with respect to spam and advertising. A glance across the current crop of iPhone AR apps reveals many design interface challenges, with piles of annotations all occluding themselves and your view of the world.
- What types of augmented experiences can reinforce our connection to nature and our role as caretakers?
- What happens to the commons when there are 500 different augmented versions?
We’re living in a time where the most prosperous societies are immersed in digital visual culture. While this immersion has given birth to new ways of seeing the world, it has also been largely transformed into what theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord would refer to as the ‘fascination for the spectacle’ that is constantly being fuelled by a commodified view of the world.
Visual seductions reinforce the public’s ‘pleasure in spectatorship’. The dominance of the visual dimension makes us more likely to see — and look — at the appearance of things, not at their underlying relationships.
If this is one significant context wherein developments in AR take root, I wonder how it will then affect our social and signifying practices. With which eyes will we view our environment, how will we assign meaning and how will we define our experiences of the world? Will augmented reality also augment our understanding of worldviews? Will it enrich meanings in our lives?
If the world becomes our interface, and yet the reality it represents is actually illusory, then what is augmented reality actually resonating, mediating and recreating?
Allow me to wax poetic: unaided and un-augmented by augmented (and virtual) reality technologies and digital technology in general, will we still be able to look deeper in the heart of a flower, tremble at the abyss of poverty, and glimpse the history of a raindrop?
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