Augmented reality (AR) is an interacting experience of
a real-life environment in which real-world items are enriched by virtual
perceptual data, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including
auditory, olfactory, visual, haptic, and somatosensory. AR is a strategy that
meets three simple goals: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time
communication, and accurate 3D capture of virtual and actual items (Bhosale et
al., 2021). The article ‘Understanding AR Activism….’ was a good read, offering a lot of insights
by connecting AR - an area I had little knowledge about and activism as one term.
Firstly, the amount of reception AR has gained in the
recent times and the fact that it also used for something like activism is
commendable. The term ‘activist tech’ is interesting as it indicates how
technology can be used to bring a change and make people aware of the problems
in the society. Both AR creators and activists are brought together sharing a
similar vision of making people change their perspectives and AR does this by physically
changing the surroundings that people view by augmenting them. Instead of explaining
it to the public it helps them to experience it making them understand the situation
in a more realistic way.
Secondly, focusing on the participants and
questions of the interviews, it was very brief, helping the reader understand
the creative perspectives, the thought process and the output of an event by hearing it from the creators themselves. The use
of simple vocabulary rather than using complicated terms is notable because
anyone with no prior knowledge about AR can read and understand this article easily. The
term ‘benefit activism’ is the use of AR to tell expressive and emotional
stories through immersive experience to make the audience empathize with our
story. I feel this a need of the hour because with so much war and chaos going on
across the world among the nations most of the people have become insensitive
and choose to ignore the issues when they have the power to change and stand
against it.
In the era of print media, newspapers, journals, and
books were extensively used by activists then to express their thoughts and
anger with an aim to instigate social, economic, or political change. Then when
television was introduced, it was also used as a tool to spread awareness as
audio- visual medium like television and films could reach to wider audience than
books. After that the internet and social media platforms were more effective. Now
AI, AR, VR are all used to spread activism that applies to all human senses mering
the real and unreal into one entity. All these technological advancements have
both boon and bane, they can help an individual explore their creative side as well
as take it away from them. But if used in the right manner for a right cause
like the examples and creators mentioned in the article it can most definitely
be beneficial and bring about the change that is needed in the world.
GROUP WORK
In our class during 8th week, we learnt how
to use AR tools in creating our campaigns which was fun and insightful. As a
group we tried different tools in the app and had a trial run with the tutors.
Apart from that, we met outside class to update each other on the progress we have made on the artefacts and finalised the rules, event and scenario for our LARP activity.
SNIPPETS FROM OUR CLASS ACTIVITY
REFERENCES
Silva, R. M. L., Cruz, E. P., Rosner, D.
K., Kelly, D., Monroy-Hernández, A., & Liu, F. (2022c). Understanding AR
Activism: An Interview Study with Creators of Augmented Reality Experiences for
Social Change. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517605
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