Chris Arkenberg gives an extensive overview of some of the major issues emerging “..in the rush to colonize the augmented reality.” Here are a few excerpts from his post ‘Breaking Open the Cloud: Heads in an Augmented World’:
Design and usability considerations are critical to ensure a reasonable commonality and longevity of content.
Marketing and business plans aside, we have to assume that the emergence of truly compelling and valuable technologies are ultimately in line with the deep evolutionary needs of the human animal.
Proper design for human usability is perhaps even more critical in the augmented interface than in a typical screen interface.
…(T)he overwhelming amount of data and the need to filter it to some meaningful subset, particularly with respect to spam and advertising. A glance across the current crop of iPhone AR apps reveals many design interface challenges, with piles of annotations all occluding themselves and your view of the world.
What types of augmented experiences can reinforce our connection to nature and our role as caretakers?
What happens to the commons when there are 500 different augmented versions?
We’re living in a time where the most prosperous societies are immersed in digital visual culture. While this immersion has given birth to new ways of seeing the world, it has also been largely transformed into what theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord would refer to as the ‘fascination for the spectacle’ that is constantly being fuelled by a commodified view of the world.
Visual seductions reinforce the public’s ‘pleasure in spectatorship’. The dominance of the visual dimension makes us more likely to see — and look — at the appearance of things, not at their underlying relationships.
If this is one significant context wherein developments in AR take root, I wonder how it will then affect our social and signifying practices. With which eyes will we view our environment, how will we assign meaning and how will we define our experiences of the world? Will augmented reality also augment our understanding of worldviews? Will it enrich meanings in our lives?
If the world becomes our interface, and yet the reality it represents is actually illusory, then what is augmented reality actually resonating, mediating and recreating?
Allow me to wax poetic: unaided and un-augmented by augmented (and virtual) reality technologies and digital technology in general, will we still be able to look deeper in the heart of a flower, tremble at the abyss of poverty, and glimpse the history of a raindrop?
I’m glad that the current crop of conversations on augmented reality not only focus on business or marketing concerns, but also on users and their experience of the augmented world, the content and accessibility of the augmented worlds being created, and the rationale for such layers of augmentation. More important that the question of what can be created with augmented reality technologies, is why should it should be developed at all.
danah boyd’s talk at web2expo overflows w/ insights! I don’t care what others said about her presentation. Ok, I wasn’t there, but even if she wasn’t at her best, and if she just read her presentation, I think if you really paid some attention, you’d still appreciate it very much.
I guess it’s kinda relevant to ‘Stimulation’, one of the four core issues she highlighted. What we focus our attention on isn’t necessarily the best information or content. Sure, presentation skills are important in conveying the message, but I do think we are all too impatient and focus too much on speed and packaging rather than content. Insight has to be eye-candy, too for most people to start payng attention. This might be the internet era, but the age-old issue still persists: we judge too quickly based on what we immediately perceive without trying to look deeper or LISTEN first.
1. Democratisation – democratising certain types of access isn’t equivalent to democratising attention. It doesn’t mean that you can get your voice heard that everyone will listen. Attention is brokered by many factors other than accessibility. 2. Stimulation – attention isn’t always given to the ‘best’ content but to the most ‘emotional’. eg. gossip, violence, sex. Over-stimulation can lead to a numbing or desensitation of society, and thus disconnection, which of course goes against the principles and values of networks. 3. Homophily – we connect to those most like us, but with this connection comes an innate exclusion of those least like us. On one hand we’re building tribes, but also we’re excluding other world views. This can potentially stunt the growth and expansion of our doxa. 4. Power - networked structures of consumption are also configured by power. In a distribution-focused mdoel, access is power. But in a network, access alone isn’t power. Command of attention/traffic, influence gives rise to power of info-brokers, not just to the content creators.
Eve Online is huge. And I don’t only mean the universe it has spawned, but the waves it created that now reverberate loudly through the spaces of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Eve is a player-driven, persistent world that culminates in an unscripted and emergent experience. Dominion focuses on the end-play: the conquest of territories – the carving of your own space in this vast universe, which requires all the struggle, conflict, alliance and strategy you can muster. War, conquest and continued dominion.
Mike Berry, my former colleague, and the other cool folks at An English Breakfast Radio 99.4FM gave our campaign some air time today. Mike interviewed me about the benefit concert and is helping spread the word on the fund raising. They posted about the interview on their site where you can get the link to the interview itself.
Pinay sa Holland (Filipinas in Holland) invites you to support our benefit concert and fund-raising campaign for the storm victims in the Philippines. Entitled ‘Bangon, Pinoy! Rise above the storm’, it’s a concert to celebrate the unsinkable Filipino spirit, which has prevailed amidst the fury and havoc of typhoons that recently passed and contiue to threaten the country.
What do we want to achieve?
We are a non-profit organisation duly registered with the KvK (Kamer van Koophandel). Our goal is to raise funds for the massive relief and rehabilitation efforts for the poorest and most vulnerable victims of flooding and landslides in the Philippines caused by the tropical storm Ondoy (Ketsana) and super-typhoon Pepeng (Parma). We want to focus on direct support for children, women, elderly and the differently-abled.
Who are the beneficiaries?
We want to help in two ways. We want to aid in immediate national relief operations provided by the Philippine National Red Cross, and concurrently support community-based disaster management and rehabilitation initiatives provided by the Citizens’ Disaster Response Center (CDRC).
The E-culture publication by Virtueel Platform is available in PDF format. This post contains the Mapping E-culture book.
The articles are presented in the same order as they were published in the E-culture book (2009). They have been converted to PDF and each article has a separate page containing the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license. When reposting, this license has to be added to blogposts or other online publication.
All three publications (Mapping E-culture, Navigating E-culture en Walled Garden) are available for download via the URL
Online Communities Strategist and Goddess of the Social Media workshop, Laurel Papworth, shares the first episode in her series on Experiential Economy , which she defines as “the shift from commodities and service to selling experiences.” In this podcast she talks about how large social networks below earn revenue from real world events: Awards Nuffnang, Friendster Pinoy Event, MySpace Australia Secret Shows
Check out her matrix on monetizing social networks:
social media monetization models by laura papworth
Amazing and powerful rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ by musicians around the world. So moving, so hopeful! Learn more their site: http://playingforchange.com/
Open or Closed: What's the Best Path for Mobile Augmented Reality? via @Rhymohttp://bit.ly/cI8zNb Open: goes beyond 'working product issue' 5 days ago
weird friday dreams: my dad & i survive colossal asteroid impact; smaller asteroids fall, i sidestep each one, go back home, eat cupcakes 5 days ago
weird friday dreams: nuclear bomb about to explode; i urge my mom & bro to hurry up, but we're not done packing the tiramisu and cupcakes... 5 days ago
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