Reality+
When I saw Elan Lee speak at the Transmedia LA event downtown, he said the sad truth that most Augmented Reality programs, as they are currently implemented, are at best herky-jerky and at worst just plain suck. The question of whether AR is over before it even began (like the VCR before it) is a raging one, but this blog post indexes a few ways that Augmented Reality is living up to the hype - or trying to.
Like Greg and I, many of the gamers whose work we look up to is about getting people to interface with their surroundings in a new way. Our own personal technique is to hide clues in special places that we think are of particular interest; this has a compounding effect, for they are both surprised (pleasantly, we hope) to find the clue we concealed, and also surprised by this particular work of public art / shop / hidden nook or cranny in the city that they might have walked by a million times before without recognizing. That’s certainly something that happens to me when I play games in urban areas, even if they are no more augmented than a standard 2-D scavenger hunt.
I would argue that watching a clip of a movie in the real-life location where it was filmed hardly constitutes augmenting reality or playing a game. I also hope this trend doesn’t catch on or the streets of LA will be even more clogged than they are now with tourists and people paying attention to their phones instead of where they are going. However, I think the playful opportunities for AR apps like this one are ample: it just takes someone with the right playful attitude to figure out how best to use them.
