May 28, 2014, Augmented World Expo, Santa Clara, CA—A series of speakers talked about implementing or adding AR to art projects. The people had to overcome both technical and artistic challenges to achieve their desired responses.
BC Biermann and Ean Mering from City Visions are artists who do large outdoors projects around the world. Their works include integrating AR into billboards by using adding attributes into the basic ad message, and large murals that can change into 3-D expressions on a tablet or smart phone. In all of their installations, they collected general data and aggregated those data for analysis.
The AR functions did change the view interactions, but highlighted the challenges of adding AR to an installation in the public. The installation needed to inform the viewers that this was an interactive exhibit with other parts only available via a smart mobile device. The viewer had to have the proper AR reader to use the interactive parts of the exhibit, and a WiFi hot spot had to be nearby to allow tablet users to participate.
Patrick Lichty from the University of Wisconsin and Crossing Worlds noted that one of the first uses of AR was for the Japanese virtual pop singer Miku Hatsune. This anime crossed many boundaries as a point of interest in pop culture, even though she was a cartoon. Other works have moved in other directions, but the mixture of art and AR continues to grow.
An AR deployment at the Museum of Modern Art changed the displays for AR-enabled viewers and allowed the role of the artist to change to be more involved in the exhibit. As traditional artists move towards AR, it raises the question of increased meaning for the artist as well as the viewer. Photography is becoming like the Jacquard loom, it is the digital loom for video, print, and other forms of content and allows the creator to display other points of interest. The world becomes an installation space and requires recognition of the layers of mean. The issue is what to do for collectors, archiving the collections, and valuation of ephemeral content.
Nicolas Henchoz from EPFL-ECAL discussed the area of AR becoming the next media. The issue is between technology invention and innovation versus story and performance. The tools allow for greater design exploration, but there are no underlying rules and norms in AR. Society has to accept new relations between objects and animation.
The resulting stories will be based on AR and monetization through principles that link physics and virtual objects that give the perception of materiality. The direct link with physical objects will have layers between the people and the object in an AR world. Eventually, people will use the visual characteristics just as they do with physical objects.
Interactions will have to combine the layers to eliminate the remote control syndrome. AR will have to become more user centric to keep people engaged, taking into account the prior assumptions and enhance imagination through partial stories. The space around you will become part of the experience, especially in museums where the light, and other environmental variables are under control to invoke multiple senses. This supernatural approach makes perceptions greater than the basic story and becomes the first world of sensation. History has shown that design and technology are not new, and layers of perception all exist at the same time to provide a cumulative function.
Giovanni Landi from Darts Engineering looked at the challenges of AR for cultural heritage. One work in progress is an art work called "The Holy Trinity" and resides in Florence Italy. The painting is the subject of much research in art history and architecture. This object is the first piece to use geometrically correct linear perspective, so they created an AR application to explain the 2-D to 3-D transforms and the underlying mathematics. The AR app shows perspective information as an overlay on the 3-D images.
Another project is a Spanish chapel. The view of the chapel and fresco detail the construction of the arches, so the AR and print materials provide explanations of the frescos and show where the various sections in the fresco are in relation to the actual arches. They will be converting the images to HD and will add 3-D animations in the future. The current panoramic views show multi-spectral images to show the various layers and types of construction. The images allow the viewer to deconstruct the layers.
The technologies are available for higher resolution, and a full laser scan would provide greater accuracy, but the high resolution would generate very large data sets that are costly to display and preserve. The data visualization is used for research and the data can be repurposed for public use. The concern is that people will use the AR for other than positioning functions, and will look at the screen and not the actual building and frescos.