New Terrain in Interaction Design - Computers as Theatre - page 189

Digital cameras started to make an appearance in the early 1990s (I remember
the Sony Mavica I used at PARC; it recorded on fl oppy discs). But they still required
using a PC to share images.
Several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capabilities were
demoed as research projects in the early 1990s by Kodak, Olympus, and Canon. But
everything changed in 1997 when Philippe Kahn and his wife had a baby. He impul-
sively wired together a digital camera and his digital cell phone and recorded the
birth—and wirelessly transmitted the pictures to more than 2,000 family members,
friends, and business acquaintances across the globe. Following this, he worked with
Sharp to build a cell phone with an integrated camera that worked with an email
system Kahn developed.
The following explosion of popularity of photo sharing in the fi rst decade of
the 21st century was immense. It depended on repurposing infrastructure devel-
oped for other purposes: the digital cellular network (built for voice and messaging),
email and the general Internet, and the World Wide Web. It continues today with the
collapse of traditional fi lm (Kodak in bankruptcy), the disappearance of pocket digital
cameras from drugstores (your phone is as good as or better than a camera), and
the rise of online social sharing of images and video . . .
. . . and the collapse of several governments as citizens record and share actions
in the polis.
—Rob Tow
when we see it as “the war in Syria.” Fill in your own timeline, and you
will see the correlations.
Augmented Reality
The Oxford English Dictionary (2013) defi nes augmented reality as “a technol-
ogy that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the
real world, thus providing a composite view.” The idea has been around in
various forms for a long time. Mort Heilig had a notion of it when he de-
signed Sensorama , even though his installation (1962) had no computational
parts. There has been abiding interest and research in military applications
for at least twenty years. Myron Krueger's Videoplace project (1975-1984; see
Krueger 1990) presaged AR in some interesting ways. Krueger developed the