Augmented what?

The art exhibition Seeking Silicon Valley is being presented simultaneously by the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA and at the Zero1 Biennial in San Jose, CA from September 10-21 by the international artists’ collective Manifest.AR.  With the aid of an app called Layar on your smartphone, alternate versions of the space in front of you will become visible.  This is known as augmented reality.

Wait…what?

I’ve been having some trouble with this concept myself, so here I am going to do my best to break down what exactly augmented reality is and its myriad applications outside the art world.  With augmented reality (that’s AR to you), an actual image of a place is enhanced with additional sensory information, altering your perception of the environment.  Our show adds graphic elements, but these can also be sound, video, etc.  One of the earliest and most basic examples of this technology is probably already familiar to you.  Think about watching a football game on TV: you know that yellow first down line that appears on the screen?  You guessed it, that’s AR.  It’s taking an image of an actual space in real time and superimposing an element–the yellow line–which doesn’t exist.

There are many smartphone apps which have capitalized on the AR technology.  In the Yelp app, there is an option called Monocle where you point your camera at a restaurant in front of you and there will appear ratings and reviews from Yelp’s site.  With another app, Wikitude, you can bring up the Wikipedia article on hundreds of thousands of points of interest around the world simply by opening the app and aiming your camera towards the place you want to learn more about.  The phone uses its internal GPS and compass to determine where you are and in what direction you’re facing.  That’s how it knows what you’re looking at.  Advances in image recognition software are continuing to make applications such as these more accurate.

The U.S. military has found use for AR in its head-mounted displays which can superimpose blueprints or satellite images onto a landscape.  Video game companies are taking advantage of it to make which are more interactive and often incorporate 3D elements.

Interested in learning more?  Our curator, Rick Rinehart, is giving a talk on September 18 at 6pm in the Gallery Theatre.  In the meantime, I encourage everyone to visit the Samek and experience AR for yourself (don’t worry, we have technology experts on hand to guide you through downloading and using the app).