Fantasy Untethered: Participation and Mobile Augmented Reality in the City
Jihye Lee · 2017
Augmented reality is an optical process that adds sensorial elements by mapping them onto real spaces and locales. Contemporary “augmented” content, since the digital turn in the 1990s, has allowed mobile augmented reality (MAR) to penetrate into our daily lives in new and visually inventive ways. Despite this novelty for MAR’s everyday usage in different physical environments, there is a lack of research on cultural aspects of this technology. As a result, our focus is to analyze how and in what way mobile augmented reality comes to manipulate and modifyaspects of space, perception and body. In more specific terms, this paper discusses how properties of AR influence a user’s experience to construct reality in different contexts in public spheres. Taken further, those properties exist in a sense of AR’s constructive elements in what the authors’ forge is a “computational fantasy” delivered via MAR and formulated through several case studies.