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capability to project the silhouette of an interactor into a world of computa-
tionally interactive objects and environments. For the interactor, it was like
looking in a magical mirror. Krueger called this approach “artifi cial reality”
and set it apart from what would later be called “virtual reality.” Krueger's
work was actually an inverse of AR in that the person's image was projected
over (and interactively “into”) a computationally generated scene.
Folks have been working on AR for a long time. Ivan Sutherland's
early work in 1968 is often cited as the beginning of AR, although Suther-
land's work eventually led to the development of VR. The term was coined
by Tom Caudell and Divid Mizell (1992) to describe systems that involve
an overlay of computer-generated material on real-world scenes. Impor-
tant work has also been done by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino at the
University of Toronto (1994) in which they produced a matrix defi ning AR
on a continuum they called “mixed reality.” From 1997, several groups ex-
plored AR as a wearable computer system that was often bulky, but did the
job (see, for example, Feiner et al. 1997, Thomas et al. 1998). Between 2004
and 2008, dedicated handheld systems were developed by several labs. The
fi rst AR example on a mobile phone was probably Anders Henrysson's
AR-
Tennis
game in 2005. AR applications for mobile phones began to be re-
leased commercially around 2007.
While I was working as chair and professor for an amazing group of
students at Art Center College of Design, I came across two students in
particular who did thesis work related to augmented reality that I must
mention here for their prescience and imagination, and also to describe the
kind of visionary work that informed the development of AR. Scott Nazar-
ian (MFA class of 2004) is one of the big shots in AR. After he graduated, I
had the good fortune to work with him at Sun Labs and again at California
College of the Arts, where he taught a course in Futurism in the Grad De-
sign Program. He has been at Frog Design since 2009, currently working as
a creative director.
One day, I walked into the studio to see an installation project Nazarian
had built to emulate what AR might look like. He built a curved semi-round
of scrim that people could walk around inside of. As the participant turned,
light fell on the objects set outside the scrim, and projections appeared on
the inside (so you could see both at once). The installation instructed the
participant how to make a peanut butter sandwich (see Figure 6.1).
4
4. Possibly not a well-known fact: The main benefi t of teaching is learning from your students.
