AR Tourism
by admin on Oct.28, 2009, under Fiction, Hardware, theory
I was almost tempted to make this another edge-case AR Fiction weekend post. Augmented Reality Tourism makes up a significant subplot in Bruce Sterling’s recent The Caryatids. So I was not entirely surprised to find this video on his blog this morning.
Bruce points out a lot of the important points in his entry about this, for instance, HEY this is monetizable unlike the entire rest of the internet. But one thing I want to point out about this is how much it all seems like entertainment and not education. There’s something decidedly not academic about AR, and that’s not just because barely anybody in the academy is looking into it. If there’s traditional academic rigor in AR it’s certainly stuff like this, and yet it doesn’t feel like the academy. It feels like Disney Land. And I somehow doubt that’s just the result of growing pains. When we see something that looks like academic AR I don’t think it’s going to look the way we imagine AR or the way we imagine academic networks. I think it’s going to end up looking a lot more like the invisible college. Honestly, even I’m not sure if I mean the abstract concept or the historical institution.
