The Extensive Practices Of Augmented Reality Today

With this week’s news of Apple’s plans to launching a standalone gaming headset capable of AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality), back in the fore of tech and media discussions are the expansive uses of these technologies across and outside the gaming universe. Certainly those in the arts, medicine, psychology and tourism know of the benefits of these new technologies, but the expansion of VR, AR and XR (Extended Reality) is moving at a faster pace today than ever before. 

The insurance industry is using AR/VR to analyze insurance claims and undertake remote damage assessments whereby insurance and many other fields of business are quickly expanding the uses of new technology within their everyday practices. Doctors are using VR with pediatric patients instead of general anesthesia at the Starlight Children's Foundation’s healthcare facilities. In Malaysia AR/VR is being used in job training in the engineering work sphere and AR is being widely used in manufacturing and real estate. But how might these tools come to shift our cultural productions today?

Yale University is also one of twenty universities which are participating in the HP/Educause Campus of the Future project investigating the use of AR and VR technology in higher education. Yale’s Blended Reality team has endeavored to “capture” digitally the Peabody museum dioramas which will essentially become digital replicas of plastic arts. Yale’s projects also include the use of motion capture and AR to generate dance choreography in addition to the replication of visual artworks.

Additionally, the University Libraries at the University has recently hosted a VR|AR Meet-Up featuring the Reno Street Art Project and Walking With Reality, two projects that have fully taken on the challenge to merge the arts an new technology. And Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA) is also using VR to preserve street art collections which will be destroyed by the year’s end. It is clear that VR, AR and XR are promising new arenas in the art world and their inclusion in the cultural landscape of art is hardly experimental today.

This week at The Digital Hub’s Immersive Tech Week event in Dublin we are having resoundingly clear answers to this question. Digital artist Stephen Coyle spoke in relation to his own art practices and AR stating: “TiNK AR started as a project for my final year in college. Augmented Reality interested me because I liked the idea of creating an experience which could blend the virtual world with the physical world.” And Digital Hub Artist-in-Residence, Kate Nolan, also expanded upon her research into artists who use VR and her own work in this field. 

Carrie Able is a New York-based visual artist, musician, and XR Artist (virtual and augmented reality). Set to stage an AR music performance at Jump into the Light next week with December shows of her AR-enabled oil on linen paintings and VR sculpture at Pulse and Art Basel Miami Beach, Able has made her name as a pioneer in XR Art as a multidisciplinary artist who breaks genres within the field of art. Pioneering new techniques, Able is at the forefront of VR and AR art expanding the uses of this new technology to include all facets of her work in VR sculpture, oil painting, music, and coding, bringing these elements to the fore of the art world.

Even hybrid spaces of science and art are being explored by the likes of Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya who is bringing microscopic communities into the field of the visual where viewers can use their mobile phones and tablets to experience the colorful representations of microbes surrounding them through the use AR. Phingbodhipakkiya’s work shows that the limits of art are limitless even when applied to the sciences.

Atlanta-based XR company, Life Vision VR, also brings young readers to literature through VR technology through its app, Desdemona's Dreams, whereby young readers are offered a panorama of a 360-degree vanguard into the world of “flying butterflies, dancing ballerinas and a stunning Oz-like madman.” Where storytelling has expanded from the book to Kindle format in recent years, VR technology offers readers a new venue into reading and storytelling.

Today’s more scientific and business uses of new technology is certainly important in the development of funding which often buttresses the use of new tech in cultural fields, but we cannot underestimate the importance of these new formats of technology which are vital to the preservation of our collective cultural heritage and integral to the creation of new art forms.