Response Week 13

I googled “iPhone apps augmented reality” to research my first question and this is the first site that came up in the search: http://bit.ly/3ga6Vm. I think one of the more interesting apps is called Cyclopedia. By moving your iPhone around, the app automatically finds information from Wikipedia and displays it on your screen. I’m not quite sure how they managed to program this but it’s really cool. I’m a space geek so I really am also into the Star Chart application. Just point your iPhone towards a particular direction in the sky and the app will pull up a constellation map. There is even one that closely relates to the YouTube video we watched in class with the two-dimensional paper and skittles. AR Basketball lets you play basketball on your iPhone by simply using a piece of printer paper.

There is a lot of information out there about gaming addiction but not as it specifically relates to augmented reality. I’m not sure what to make of this but I do think that augmented reality may be seen as less harmful than virtual reality. Virtual reality seems to represent a departure from the “real world” and an immersion into something that is perceived as a false version of life by outsiders. Augmented reality keeps the player grounded in this “real world” as we define it, but enhances that reality. It may also be too soon to tell because augmented reality is a newer trend. It will be interesting in the coming years to see what research has to say about social norms and trends when comparing the two closely related topics. I wonder which one engages the user more fully. I think if you are looking at virtual reality from the perspective of believing that it is an escape from the real world, that it has the potential to be far more addictive than augmented reality. You are not escaping an existing reality when you use augmented technologies, but instead enhancing it. Augmented reality is additive in that way, and virtual reality is subtractive.

Well let’s be honest, this third question is quite existential. Reality for me is probably different than reality for someone else, although there are plenty of times in which we all agree to a particular collective reality; a consensus on how the world should be. There are far more frequent occurrences of disagreements though, and it seems foolish for someone to deny the existence of other perspectives even though it happens all the time. I don’t actually feel comfortable defining the word. Reality is subjective, which is why class discussions on augmented and especially virtual reality become very muddled and split.