AR Testing


Test 1 on 2-D printed material. Traffic sound mp3 file and a German map.
Software works well with small .mp3 file size and the graphic nature of this image.


Test 2 on 3-D object. Environment Agency Twitter feed and a water cooler.
I was quite surprised that the software recognised the watercooler as the shapes are not hugely distinctive. The process of acquiring the information via WiFi necessary to render the Twitter feed took quite a long time.

Test 3 on 3-D organic object. Plant care website and my cheese plant.
The software really didn’t like the Cheese plant. The curved organic forms really seems to fox the algorithm, but it did eventually recognise the form and load a website.

As a user of Augmented Reality software I did feel affected when I aligned reality correctly with the device and the software recognized the features of the scene to deliver the sound, video or image. Karppi (2011) in describing this moment, or as he calls it — event, uses three layers as a method of analysis; the first layer is relations between the real environment and the application, the second is the interface or browser screen and the third is the user and the software. In the first layer the application puts the invisible chaotic environment full of data in order via the processes of “seeing, articulating and calculating”. In the second layer, the interface mediates us an environment – we move our bodies to to reveal not a static image but a “mobile temporal section of the world”. In the third layer, Karppi (2011) draws on Parisi and Terranova to suggest that we should try to understand these ‘events’ outside questions of representation and reality. Instead we are to think of these events as affective media, with the capacity to “embody the experience of seeing without deceiving the spectator or falling into the category of unreal simulations”.

I’d like to follow this post up and expand on this as I think some of the ways that Karppi is describing affective images chimes with a little of what I’ve read of Flusser’s (2011) account of technical images but this is all I’ve got for now!!

Karppi, T. (2011) Reality Bites: Subjects of Augmented Reality Applications. In Unfolding Media Studies, eds. Puro, J. and Sihvonen, J. Turku: University of Turku: 89-102 Karppi(2011) Reality Bites- Subjects of Augmented Reality Applications.pdf