Maria Engberg

MRX: an interdisciplinary framework for mixed reality experience design and criticism

Abstract We explore design strategies for mixed reality (MR) in relation to Milgrams definition, which has been central to its development in the past 20 years. We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of this definition in order to capture the experiential dimensions of MR and offer a humanistic framework for a growing class of experiences that we label MRx. We list three characteristics of MRx applications (esthetic, performative and social) and provide a context for the three subsequent articles in this special issue.

Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture

The ubiquitous nature of mobile and pervasive computing has begun to reshape and complicate our notions of space, time, and identity. In this collection, over thirty internationally recognized contributors reflect on ubiquitous computings implications for the ways in which we interact with our environments, experience time, and develop identities individually and socially. Interviews with working media artists lend further perspectives on these cultural transformations. Drawing on cultural theory, new media art studies, human-computer interaction theory, and software studies, this cutting-edge book critically unpacks the complex ubiquity-effects confronting us every day. The companion website can be found here: http://ubiquity.dk

Cultural expression in augmented and mixed reality

Most readers of Convergence will have some familiarity with the developing digital media forms that go under the name of augmented reality and mixed reality (MAR or separately, AR and MR). The widespread availability of smart phones in the last 10 years has redefined AR and MR that had previously been confined to the laboratory. Smart phones and tablets have become the platform for a variety of applications in which digital text, images, video, and audio are overlaid on the screen and appear to be present in the space around the user. In addition, the smart phone or tablet can typically determine the user’s location in the world and orientation in his/her immediate environment. Along with the commercial uses for location-sensitive advertising, new forms of cultural expression (e.g. for art, design, and social media) are beginning to appear. Appropriately for this journal, these new forms can best be studied by a convergence of disciplines, including media studies, art history, literary theory, philosophy (particularly phenomenology), interaction design, sociology, anthropology, communication studies, human–computer interaction, and computer science. Many of these disciplines are represented in the contributions in this special issue that focuses on the ways in which AR and MR participate in cultural expression in today’s heterogeneous media economy. Do AR and MR constitute a new medium? What are the specific qualities of the new medium that give rise to new forms of cultural expression? Are AR and MR two different media with different characteristic qualities and affordances? Over the past two decades, computer scientists have analyzed AR and MR as media forms from their own technical and operational perspectives (e.g. Milgram and Kashino, 1994). These questions are addressed from artistic and theoretical perspectives by the contributions to this special issue. The ‘medium’ question still underlies much of our discourse about the various digital technologies and their uses today, and the notion of medium has been naturalized today to such an extent that we may overlook its history in the 20th century. It is worth recalling that history in order to understand how the notion may limit our ability to appreciate the position that new forms such as AR and MR occupy in our media culture.

The Evolution of the Argon Web Framework Through Its Use Creating Cultural Heritage and Community–Based Augmented Reality Applications

The Argon project was started to explore the creation of Augmented Reality applications with web technology. We have found this approach to be particularly useful for community-based applications. The Argon web browser has gone through two versions, informed by the work of our students and collaborators on these kinds of applications. In this paper, we highlight a number of the applications we and others have created, what we learned from them, and how our experiences creating these applications informed the design of Argon2 and the requirements for the next version, Argon3.

MRx and the aesthetics of locative writing

Abstract From a media studies perspective MRx is a form of writing, and specifically a form of inscription, a writing in space or on places. A key quality that distinguishes MRx from MR is an attention to the aesthetics of the experience. To examine the aesthetic dimension of writing is to ask: what it “feels like” to read and write according to an accepted set of practices. MR applications are tactile and proprioceptive, and MRx experiences further explore and make us aware of this multi-sensory engagement. MRx experiences are in this sense polyaesthetic, and as such they exhibit the qualities: seriality, weakened narrative and altered trace. The polyaesthetics of MRx experiences is explored in a series of example of digital art and public display, such as Blast Theorys Rider Spoke and the projection on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to mark the finish of the 2013 Tour de France.

MRx design and criticism: the confluence of media studies, performance and social interaction

Abstract In this article, we bring together the lenses of media studies, performance studies and social interaction offered in the other essays in this special issue and discuss their collective contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of MRx. We illustrate this capacity by a brief critical review of a recent MRx environment: Mégaphone. We suggest how the lenses can also contribute to a design vocabulary for future MRx experiences.

Performing Apps Touch and Gesture as Aesthetic Experience

This paper is concerned with aesthetic explorations of tactility and sensuality that contemporary multitouch gesture technologies offer. I explore the provocative performative space that is created ...

Tutorial 2: Integrating and using panoramas and photographic images in AR experiences

Some AR browsers and other mobile phone apps (e.g. Argon, Photosynth, 360 Cities, Tourwrist) allow the user to create, display or interact with panoramas and other forms of historical and contemporary imagery. These technologies open up exciting possibilities for cultural heritage, entertainment and other uses in location-based experiences. Full panoramas or historical photographs merged into the visual field can provide the user with a perspective on a place as it looked in the past or might look in a possible future. We propose to offer the participants in this tutorial an introduction to the technical issues involved in creating and integrating such imagery into an AR/MR application. We will also provide relevant historical background regarding panoramas and consider issues of aesthetics and user experience design.