Improving the embodiment relations by means of phenomenological analysis on the “reality” of ARs
Nicola Liberati · 2012
The aim of this paper is to focus attention on how it is possible to better the embodiment of the AR technologies. Commonly our attention falls on the term “augmented”, concentrating only on how to technically create this augmentation, while the aspects concerning its reality in the world are completely left out. Thanks to the Husserlian analysis on the image consciousness, we manage to distinguish fiction from reality by basing this on the modality of the perceiving action of the subject. This analysis helps us to identify the AR as a real world, in the sense that the subject does not suspend his positional act during the perception of an object in the AR, i.e. the subject interacts with the object as an existing object in the real world. To improve the “integration” of the AR technologies, we have to create a technology that is embodied in the subject's perceiving body as in the case of transparent technologies such as glasses. Thus we have to design a mediated perception as close as possible to the natural and naked one creating an embodied relation working between the AR technology and the subject. Considering the AR technologies as a common perceiving instrument working in the positional act of perception, we can use the post-phenomenological approach, which analyzes how tools become transparent and embodied in the living body [Leib] of the subject, in order to identify the focal points that need to be improved to establish such a relation.