You Can See All that from Right Here? A Content Analysis of in Situ Augmented Reality Tweets
Tony Liao · Communication Studies · 2021
As social media continues to evolve, some applications are experimenting with augmented reality (AR) visualizations that can call up posts generated around the user’s precise location and overlaid on top of the physical place. Despite being publicly available, little academic research has looked at AR displays of social media in space. While the location has been studied with regard to social media posts, existing work has primarily examined the location as a collective topic or how to map those geographically at a macrolevel. While research studies into location-based games and neighborhood forums have more explicitly looked at the role of location as the mediator of information, they have not considered the overlay of social media posts or spatial AR displays. This study reports on data from a Layar channel called Tweeps Around, which augmented tweets posted around your physical location. The researchers manually cataloged tweets (N = 277) sent near one fixed location over several months and coded them for key themes. This study helps understand what content is generated from one place as well as some of the content implications of in situ AR tweets. Unlike Twitter feeds that are sorted by who you follow, Tweeps Around can call up strangers’ tweets by proximal location alone, which changes the potential audience of viewers, the risks of that content, and the user experience. Understanding these types of technologies can help build on our understanding of not only communication about places but also communication through places, and what social media may become in the near future.