“This video shows Wikitude Drive, an Augmented Reality navigation system.
Wikitude Drive (Android) US Beta Test Phase starts Thursday, May 20, 10:00am PST.
After 2000 downloads we remove the app again from the Android Market.
Drive safe!! Use a car holder!!”
“Augmented reality (AR) is a new technology in which various virtual elements are incorporated into the user’s perception of the real world. The most significant aspect of AR is that the virtual elements add relevant and helpful information to the real scene. AR shares some important characteristics with virtual reality as applied in clinical psychology. However, AR offers additional features that might be crucial for treating certain problems. An AR system designed to treat insect phobia has been used for treating phobia of small animals, and positive preliminary data about the global efficacy of the system have been obtained. However, it is necessary to determine the capacity of similar AR systems and their elements that are designed to evoke anxiety in participants; this is achieved by testing the correspondence between the inclusion of feared stimuli and the induction of anxiety. The objective of the present work is to validate whether the stimuli included in the AR-Insect Phobia system are capable of inducing anxiety in six participants diagnosed with cockroach phobia. Results support the adequacy of each element of the system in inducing anxiety in all participants…”
Presented in the production track of the 1st European AR Business Conference arbcon.eu on 23 April, 2010 at the Ludwig Erhard Haus in Berlin, Germany.
Includes:
Photography by Panos Tsagaris with Kimberley Norcott
Collage by Iuri Kothe
Further Reading:
A Holographic View of Reality, David S. Walonick, Ph.D.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
An Overview of Auditory Displays and Sonification, Dr. Thomas Hermann
Audio Feedback and Calm Computing, Richard Monson-Haefel
Rousseau and Echolocation, Geoff Manaugh
NeMe: Locative Media and Spatial Narratives, Martin Rieser
Developed from a series of articles originally published here on augmentology and a contribution to the Space Collective.
Video produced by KS12 ks12.net
Part 3: The Crystal Ball
Film Still, The Wizard of Oz.
<continued from Part 2: Infinite Summer Afternoons>
During the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy visits Professor Marvel and has him read her fortune from his crystal ball. He asks her to close her eyes and takes the opportunity to “read” the belongings in her basket. From these artifacts, Professor Marvel pieces together a story based on his intuition of the meaning of the objects and the context of Dorothy’s visit. Professor Marvel is reading Dorothy’s aura by diving into her metadata and delivers his observations in dramatic and persuasive tones.
Now imagine if Dorothy visited Professor Marvel in the 21st century. His crystal ball is a web-ready mobile device capable of scanning Dorothy’s possessions, clothes, face – maybe even her DNA. This cloud of data is cross-referenced and interlinked with Dorothy’s online profiles and he’s able to quickly conjure up an extremely detailed impression of Dorothy’s past, present and future. At the very least, he’d spot Auntie Em in Dorothy’s Flickr account and come to similar conclusions about Dorothy’s family situation as he does in the film.
As aurec technology improves it will know more and more about us; it will become better at predicting what we do and how we prefer to do it. It will enable us to customize our interactions with everything that surrounds us while also allowing us to share these preferences with others. Search is the essential experience of the web (witness Google). The web asks us “what are you looking for?” every time we use it. To understand the potential of aurec we need to be sensitized to the fact that it will reduce the importance of the question/answer relationship posed by the web and open up an environment of ambient data.
It is my hope that shared aurec experiences will have positive effects on our relationships with other people, allowing us new degrees of emotional intimacy and mutual understanding. Aurec has the potential to change our relations with natural and urban environments by revealing otherwise hidden information on a bespoke basis. This could lead to increased corporate and governmental transparency/accountability as the norm shifts to a sharing paradigm as opposed to hiding data. The more we shift our attention away from gimmicky iphone apps and focus on the broader ontological implications of aura recognition, the more aurec will have the best chances of actualization.
Special thanks to NotThisBody for brilliant insights and reflections while writing this article.