Creatively augmenting the urban experience

As the world’s technologically empowered super cities continue to evolve in a heady mix of expanding urban density and big data, Augmented Reality (AR) is the latest digitally enabled media form to appear on the public radar. The concept of AR has been around for a number of years but despite this, many people are only recently beginning to experience the potential of digital AR. This first encounter often comes through the downloading and interacting with AR applications on a mobile phone or tablet computer. Working with prepared visual markers these apps are often used to augment printed material such as advertising posters, books or magazine content, even museum exhibits with digital media content. But the capacity of AR to overlay information and rich-media on a screen-based representation of physical space can also be used to augment our experience of the urban environment. Through a combination of location-based and image processing technologies AR apps are often used to give directions, signpost and advertise local services and commercial outlets or provide information about who is doing what and where in the vicinity. However, the possibilities revealed by locating AR technologies in our urban experience are also beginning to interest and excite a number of creative practitioners, who are starting to explore the potentials of AR through artistic works in a new form of creative media. The ability to map digital media content including audio, animations, graphics, photography and computer generated 3d models into a representation of real-space, in real-time, on a dynamic and responsive canvas offers much potential in this respect. Shannon Novak is an artist who sits at the vanguard of augmented reality as an art form and is one of a small number of people exploring the creative potentials of AR in the urban environment.