The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation as an Art Form - Augmented Reality Art - page 99

Fig. 5.2 Reactable, Jorda et al. ( 2005 )

This viral example of a pop-cultural fiducial AR application is the fusion of the
free program Miku Miku Dance and AR Toolkit. To understand the confluence of
elements to lead to the profusion of videos of “anime” character Hatsune Miku
dancing on fiducial marker cards, a little cultural unpacking is in order.
AR Toolkit is the product of Hirokazu Kato of the Nara Institute of Science and
Technology in Japan, created in 1999. However, it took 2 years for it to be released
by the University of Washington's HIT Lab, with over 150,000 downloads from
SourceForge.net, according to that site's statistical tracking (Kato and Billinghurst
1999 ). It is a series of libraries allowing programmers to orient media to a fiducial
marker relative to its appearance through a webcam or other optical input device.
By the mid 2000s eligible media included animated 3D content as seen in Fig. 5.3 ,
which leads to the Japanese virtual pop idol, Hatsune Miku.
In many ways, Hatsune Miku is the realization of William Gibson's autonomous
virtual pop Idol Rei Toei from his Bridge Trilogy (Williams 2012 )inthat“she”
was released as a character representing a text-to-song program called Vocaloid
(Vocaloid.com 2014 ) by company Crypton, released in 2008. Based on text-to-
speech technology developed by Yamaha, Hatsune Miku is the first of a series of
Vocaloids to utilize granular synthesis of sampled vocalists (Miku being modeled
from the voice of Saki Fujita). What would follow is a series of music videos,
especially after the release of Miku Miku Dance , a character animation program
starring Vocaloid characters, also released in 2008. This would reach its apex
in Fig. 5.4 large-scale music concert using imagery developed by UK company
Musion, which would also reflect Digital Domain's Virtual Tupac spectacle at
Coachella 2012 (Verrier 2012 ).