XR for XR – Context Craft: An extended reality platform that transforms local environments through play
Carl Hayden Smith, Jay F. Cousins · Electronic workshops in computing · 2019
The aim of Context Craft is to develop a platform that shrinks the gap between imagination and reality. Players become crafters of their own context – hacking their reality for the benefit of themselves and their communities. Imagine if you could take what you made in Lego or Minecraft and make it in reality with household tools and some globally accessible waste (such as soda bottles, water bottles, sticks for core framework, plastic bags, fabric, cans etc.) and “mine” reality in order to transform it via polygon structures that can be used to make anything from furniture, to bike trailers to shelters and community buildings. XR (Cross or Extended Reality) is a recent, controversial, umbrella term that attempts to simplify the understanding and adoption of the full range of immersive technologies that generate new forms of reality, recognising that in the future we will see people interacting with the virtual world and real world in seamless and continuous ways, not bound by delineations of experience between VR, AR, and MR. Recently, another organisation Extinction Rebellion also adopted the acronym XR. This serendipity led to the questioning how can these XR technologies relate to our Extinction Rebellion (XR)?