When you read the phrase “Augmented Reality,” your mind might turn to something like Pokémon GO or the popular running app, Zombies, Run! In both cases, the user experiences a game that, while based in a real-world environment, includes computer-generated perceptual information—most typically visuals and sounds, but including haptic modalities, too. A Pokémon, GO player might make their way down a very real hiking trail or across a downtown street while their phones display that very same location—the only difference being a virtual Growlithe waiting to be captured atop a tree stump or storm drain.
Augmented Reality is a term that’s been in the mainstream public consciousness for decades now; for example, AR in the form of what’s known as Heads Up Display (HUD), which allows airplane pilots to read information on a clear glass screen atop the windshield itself (rather than a separate display), has been standard in aviation for decades now. But only very recently, alongside the rise of smartphones and Artificial Intelligence, has the true potentiality of AR become a mainstream, everyday reality—allowing it to flourish most popularly in entertainment, fitness, and marketing and commerce. Pokémon GO and Zombies, Run! have been around since 2016 and 2012 respectively, and in that time a whole world of Augmented Reality experiences have popped up. Alongside the video games and fitness experiences, there’s the Warby Parker app that allows users to virtually try on glasses, an IKEA app that places virtual furniture into users’ homes, and Snapchat filters that turned a Footlocker advertisement into a 3D digital model of LeBron James. As more time passes, it becomes clearer that our material, physical reality is no longer separate from the digital one–what we once thought of as living within screens and machines is now, more than ever, all around us.
So where does the rest of AR’s untapped potential lay? For those of us in education, the possibilities seem, so far, plentiful and potent; although Augmented Reality is not without its fair share of ethical concerns—which I’ll circle back to in a bit—its potential to unlock otherwise inaccessible sensorial experiences should, too, be given due attention. Among the responses to the unprecedented nationwide Black Lives Matter protests during the Summer of 2020 were some high-profile anti-racist AR events at University campuses. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn and Slavery Project launched an immersive AR app that walks student-participants through the campus—and narrates the University’s early histories with slavery and scientific racism. The University of Arizona’s Center for Digital Humanities recently unveiled a project that would use Virtual and Augmented reality to put participants literally “in the shoes” of common experiences of racism and discrimination in the U.S. via settings like college seminars and workplace meetings.
But campuses are not the only place where such projects exist. Across the nation, there are countless histories waiting to be told, re-told, or repositioned, and AR has become an increasingly attractive vehicle for those narratives. There’s Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based public art and history studio that creates participatory exhibitions that facilitate pressing conversations around race, memory, archives, and data. In 2017, Monument Lab helped produce Built/Unbuilt Square in Philadelphia’s historic Rittenhouse Square. Participants were invited to use a pair of viewfinders to explore archival documents and renderings about the park atop the literal, present-moment Square. These documents reveal forgotten cultural and physical histories that would be totally inaccessible in this location without the viewfinder feature. And there’s the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston—commemorating the all-Black Infantry Regiment’s participation in the Civil War—which has an Augmented Reality component that allows users to view and explore a 3D rendering of the actual memorial from any place in the world.
This all has fascinating implications for the future of digital and privacy rights, as well as ethical questions surrounding sympathy and empathy. Many critics have rightfully pointed out that the more frequently our material world intersects with data and the digital, the more carefully we should be considering privacy and data protection. In order for a 3D model of the real world to work, AR technology often has to accumulate massive amounts of data , and it is sometimes unclear to users how and if their personal information is being stored. For example, a Snapchat or Instagram selfie filter must first create a hyper-detailed digital map of the user’s face, or an AR game or immersive AR experience might use “always-on” cameras or microphones to interpret when to reveal particular features or update mapping features; these new concerns pose novel scenarios that property and privacy laws have often not yet caught up to.
Additionally, in the case of educational and anti-racist AR, results are far from conclusive on whether or not such experiences actually help users build new knowledge and empathy. It is clear that Augmented Reality, like any tool that we might use for anti-racist pedagogy, is not a one-stop, magical empathy machine. This sort of unpacking and unlearning would very likely require a much larger overhaul of, well, the entire U.S. cultural legacy. But it is also true that Augmented Reality can importantly disrupt and re-imagine memorials, monuments, and other ways that racism is perpetuated visually throughout our nation’s public spaces. Such spaces have traditionally been used to promote narratives that privilege some groups, ideas, and points-of-view over others; the string of memorials removed during the Summer 2020 George Floyd protests are a testament to exactly this. AR has thus far proven a powerful tool in helping to re-imagining which stories should be privileged and prioritized in our shared parks, pathways, museums, libraries, and more. We’re excited to seek out guests for Information Ecosystems, this semester and beyond, who can shed even more light on the future of digital interventions within material, public spaces—it is surely a conversation that will not end any time soon.