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Augmenting Reality: The Markers, Memories, and Meanings Behind Today’s AR

Cover of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 22, Number 4
Cover of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 22, Number 4
“Augmenting Reality: The Markers, Memories, and Meanings Behind Today’s AR”
By William Urricchio
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Volume 22, Number 4

Humans have long ‘marked’ the world, cities included, augmenting their surroundings with traces of their experience. They have learned to read the signs inscribed on the world’s surface, whether in search of prey or precedent. And they have sorted out how to give those marks coherence, whether as narrative or insight. Publically deployed, discovery-based, or even personal, augmentation’s inherently dialogic character requires reality for its work. This essay considers today’s AR technologies in terms of these more deeply embedded practices of augmentation, particularly as they play out as interfaces in urban places. It explores underlying continuities between earlier augmentation practices and our own, suggests strategies that can usefully inform our deployment of AR technologies, and points to semiotic reciprocities that can help AR move from the gadget du jour to an ally in a profoundly human conversation.

Read the full piece at the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

About William Uricchio

William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of "Americanization" in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and was Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

His publications include Reframing Culture; We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities; Media Cultures; Many More Lives of the Batman; and hundreds of essays and book chapters, including a visual "white paper" on the documentary impulse (momentsofinnovation.mit.edu). He is currently completing a book on the deep history and possible futures of documentary; and another on games and playing with history and historiography after post-structuralism.