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developers and consumers into willing their dreams into being. This video is what I
call an “Alpha Revision” proposition that secured crowd-sourced funding and was
showing prototypes in the form of the
Meta1
glasses at the Augmented World Expo
in 2013. To their credit, Meta also enhanced their credibility by hiring pioneering
cyborg Steve Mann at their Chief Scientist.
The competitor, Atheer Labs, also has a compelling design fiction based around
their
glasses, much in the vein of Meta. The glasses both show dynamic augments
of the environment, streaming entertainment, and fluid communication, stressing
creativity, entertainment, and productivity. Atheer is about a year behind in their
crowdsourcing (Miot
2013
), and boasts a less expensive product than Meta's pro-
posed Second Generation Meta Pro glasses ($667/developer edition, $3,650 for the
Meta Pro (Meta
2014
) as of this writing, with both “shipping July 2014”). Although
our discussion is about the modalities of augmentation and the relationship of
augmented media and users, it's also of interest to note the “six months out”
mentality and the gap between pre-order and stated delivery, as well as the proof of
concept videos versus the initial design fictions. Admittedly the differences narrow
as time goes on, but the reality of Google Glass became far different than the one
depicted in
One Day with Google Glass.
Design fictions, such as the PADD from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
becoming the iPad seem to make everyday the
notion of science fiction and make it less compelling, as stated by Bruce Sterling
in the WELL State of the World Report for 2014 (Lebkowsky and Sterling
2014
).
5.3.6
Locative/GPS-Based
The last gesture/modality in AR, and the most complex, is that of Locative/GPS.
This is due to the dynamic relationship between the user, the media linked to points
of interest in the landscape, and the objective background upon which the media
is overlaid. Many variables are in play as the relationship between user, media and
landscape as with the Environmental modality, and dynamic content creates a fluid
matrix of representations, creating a sort of semiotic pinball machine. Fortunately
for our analysis, and perhaps disappointingly for the work itself, most locative AR
work consists of overlaid imagery or video on static POIs (Points of Interest). This
author understands, as with all our gestural modalities that there are commercial
applications, like the fiducial application used in the Esquire Magazine issue that
have surpassed many of the artworks in our discussion in leverage of the potential
of the medium. In addition, locative AR art constitute the majority of the medium,
so only a brief number of works will be discussed here, and apologies to the mass
of work in this gestural realm that is elided. For purposes of interest, I would
like to discuss installations that address certain topics - politics and geographical
annotation. Each throws content in useful or illegal/unexpected places, and creates
a double signification of the location through overlay and context.
Political work is one of the smaller genres in AR, although interventions like
We AR MoMA
(Sterling
2010
) have used AR to create salons des refuses inside
