Welcome to this space. I'm not sure how you got here, but come on in. I will share my musings, research, and context on whatever I am working on in here. Sometimes it will be about art and sometimes it will not be about art. I'll try to define it by the post title, but not everything I do has a strict category. I guess that's why it is called "Interdisciplinary Art." Please be forewarned that I have a slight sense of humor. I'll try to keep an "academic" tone as this is my "academic" blog, however, a dry joke or two might slip in. Just roll your eyes and keep reading.
It's summer and school is out. That gives me much time for research and I'll post a bit of that here.
Today, let's talk about Augmented Reality.
As I see it, Augmented Reality (A.R.) is when reality is enhanced, but not replaced, with the virtual.
Here's where I get to include playing Pokemon Go as research. Yes, I am serious.
My interest in A.R. started last year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Google Tango was a hot new thing then. It was cool, you could follow the 3d model of a pet around in real time and interact with it. Digital Art, 3d modeling, and 3d animation are a few of the many art forms that I'm interested in and it seemed (just like game development) like a great way to blend interdisciplinary art. The developers also mentioned how they were using it to develop a tool to help people that are blind see obstacles. It would work kind of like a sonar with vibrations and temperature feedback.
It's still a hot new thing, but no longer on fire. Meaning, in the short time since they released it a number of the bugs have been worked out. I experimented again with it in December at Autodesk University and once more at GDC 2016. At over $500 for a development package (very cheap compared to similar products) I still wasn't quite ready to jump in it. The question became, what can I make for free and/or low-cost especially as that is what my students would want to work with? I try to look for course materials that are accessible to all incomes as students pay enough as it is and I can still relate as my own student debt is also entirely ridiculous. Anyway, there is a budding market around AR creation tools that allow for AR without coding. The most well known (at the moment of this blog post) are Layar and Blippar. These were two separate companies, but then Blippar bought the other. Now, they're the Google of AR.
The nice part of Layar is that it is free to use, with an upgrade in tools possible at a relatively low cost. The nice part of Blippar? If you ask nicely and fill out a form, then it allows educators a free full subscription as well as gives you the ability to assign work through it. Each educator can create a student account using their emails and oversee student work. Students can also work collaboratively on a campaign. Campaigns are the project that you are making an AR out of. For example, let's say you have a map. When you scan the map you want to be able to touch locations of it and (through viewing it on your phone) see information and pictures about each location. Or, you want a pokemon to appear at the location that's ready to fight you. Same deal.
If you want to try this, then download BlippAR to your phone. Next, scan the below image. Try tapping on the "markers" on the 3d model that appears as well as any text you might see. Should it not immediately work, try entering the code 26401 under the setting of the app. It should be public by now, but this tech is new and inherently buggy.
Well, almost like Pokemon Go. BlippAR uses markers, an image/photo that trigger the AR, while Pokemon Go is using location-based AR. Location-based AR is much less reliable than marker based AR, although Google Tango is making it much better.
I experimented a bit with Blippar on a few small projects, but my first big project was at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at Victoria University this June. It's not as beautiful and bug free as I'd like, but when you make something in two days you don't typically expect perfection. Since then, I've been contemplating ways to do more. I submitted a proposal to the TedxErie artist commission in hopes of doing one for Erie, have been drafting a t-shirt based on faculty research, and will look at using our maps around campus (Penn State University, The Behrend College) for an AR.
Then there was Pokemon Go. Not many people knew AR existed prior to this game and Virtual Reality (Oculus Rift and some others) was dominating the field. Now, suddenly, AR has been thrust into the mainstream. If you are really interested in the technology behind the game as well as its history, then I highly recommend "Augmented Reality Art" by Vladimir Geroimenko. The price tag is steep, but should you be a Penn State student, staff, or faculty then you can read it for free online through our library. For example, did you know AR took over the Museum of Modern Art (without permission at first) a few years back? Or, that AR has been leading an activist front ever since Occupy Wall Street? I didn't. My guess is most of you didn't either.
AR seems to be consuming a lot around us right now and is heading more mainstream by the moment. Before PokemonGo, CocaCola and McDonalds were using BlippAR to augment their wrappers with games and other fun things. Children's books for the past few years also started to incorporate this. The best example I've found so far was from National Geographic. They've been on the AR ship for several years now. In the book, after reading about the animals, you could scan them and interact with them. My children and I thought this was great! Go into a supermarket and see if you can find some products using this technology. Odds are, if you never looked for it before, then you would never realize it was there. To me, that's the most interesting part of augmented reality and it leads to many questions about virtual space and property rights. I might just paint my town (Erie, PA) in this invisible ink and see who finds it.
That's it for this week. If this interests you, then awesome. Take a look at the links provided. If not, then come back next week for what I've been learning about "art and coding." I'll try to have a new post every Thursday until the Summer is over. Then, I'll shoot for biweekly.
Best,
Heather
P.S. If you have suggestions on an appropriate comparison for the digital age to "the pen is mightier than the sword" then I'd love to hear it. If you tried some AR or have anything to add than shoot me a message as well. I'd love to hear about your experiences with this medium.
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