The next four entries in my series on AR will assess it’s potential socio-cultural impact, which has now started to begin.
We have now reached a depth of analysis that has taken in the historical, economic and technologic paths leading to Mobile AR, but there are greater depths to plunge. From this vantage point, the question arises: how will the user experience this new medium? This section assesses the implications of Mobile AR from a critical and media theoretical perspective, and offers the other half of my close analysis.
There are very few published articles on the subject of AR, let alone Mobile AR, and fewer still that offer a media theory perspective on user-interactions in augmented environments. There are a clutch of articles that refer to such an area, but like my own analysis, these academics have resorted to applying old frameworks to a new medium, with McLuhan, Baudrillard and Benjamin seeming the most applicable theorists. My own thoughts on Mobile AR resonate with these thinkers yet no such analysis has involved all three epistemologies, so I must tread carefully…