Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

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The project described emerged from an effort to digitize workplace environments for remote access during the early days of the pandemic. While augmented reality (AR) is usually used to add virtual objects to physical spaces, digitized places can also be virtually relocated and experienced in different physical spaces using smartphones. Navigating virtual spaces while looking “through” a phone screen can be surprisingly immersive, despite the real environment filling peripheral vision. Layering a virtual relocated space with a very different physical space creates a context-dependent liminal space experienced somewhere between the two realities. Examples discussed include workplace research environments brought home, students bringing their home to school to use as a design space, and reconstructions of silent film urban architecture, assembled from multiple films, relocated, and shared with historians. As smartphone photogrammetry, depth-from-video AI, and drone-based data collection continue to become more accessible in the current drive to create digital twins, larger scale databases of spaces should become more accessible as well. This will begin to allow virtual locations to be borrowed, modified, remixed, and shared, much as 2D imagery is now. Mixing layered contexts (e.g., virtual/physical, temporal, (un)familiar, real/cinematic, work/third place/home) creates a rich abstract possibility space to navigate as well. If AR continues to be increasingly adopted, our experiences of space and place could begin to shift. As with all emerging technology, deployment is unlikely to be uniformly distributed. The infrastructure choices we make now are likely to have significant societal impacts.