A
sensor chip now under development would glow in the presence of
anthrax, making possible a handheld device for detecting the deadly
biological agent.
You've
seen them. Maybe you're one of them. They're the zombies of the New
Media Era: the unthinking, the unseeing, the undead. They are all
around us.
The man who sits on the subway, his headphones obscuring his
hearing, so closed off from the people next to him that he starts
singing out loud.
The woman talking on her cell phone walking down the street,
her eyes half shut, her thoughts miles away, until she sinks up to her
ankles in a puddle of melting snow.
The man in the coffee shop who has his laptop screen up more
to shield himself from having to engage in conversation with amiable
strangers than to get any work done.
The person driving home from work who gets so wrapped up in
the chatter of talk radio that he doesn't notice when he drives past
his exit.
These people are using mobile technology to cut themselves off from the world.
What if we could use these same technologies to engage with the
world more fully? That's a goal of research and experimentation in
"augmented reality."
People have been talking about virtual reality for decades
now—the idea that we can create imaginary environments that engage all
of our senses and that we can move through as if they were real
environments. Augmented reality turns that premise on its
head—heightening our awareness of the real world by annotating it with
information conveyed by mobile technologies. Augmented reality has powerful new applications for education, tourism, and storytelling.
In early February, a powerful demonstration of augmented reality
took place at Boston's Museum of Science. Eric Klopfer, an MIT
professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of
researchers from the Education Arcade (an MIT-based consortium devoted
to promoting the pedagogical use of computer and video games) conducted
what they called "a Hi-Tech Who Done It." The activity was designed for
middle-school kids and their parents. Participants were assigned to
teams, consisting of three adult-child pairs, and given a handheld. For
the next few hours, they would search high and low for clues of the
whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang. Thieves
have stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to
museum's newly installed Wi-Fi network and the players' location-aware
handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview
cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment,
and trade their findings.
Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role—biologists,
detectives, or technologists—enabling them to use different tools on
the evidence they gathered. As I followed the eager participants about
the museum, they used walkie-talkies to share information and to call
impromptu meetings to compare notes; at one point, a hyperventilating
sixth grade girl lectured some other kid's parents about what she
learned about the modern synthetic material found in the sample picked
up near the shattered mummy case. Racing against time and against rival
teams, the kids, parents in tow, sprinted from hall to hall.
I was with one of the teams when they solved the puzzle. A young
girl thrust her arms in the air and shouted, "We are the smartest
people in the whole museum!" What a visceral experience of empowerment!
The same girl said that everyone else in her family was smart in
science but that on this occasion, she felt like a genius.
Talking to the parents afterward, one woman told the research team,
"This is the longest time I've ever spent having a substantial
conversation with my son in as long as I can remember—without any
fighting." Many of the others had in the past dragged their kids to the
museum kicking and screaming. This time, however, these same kids
wanted to go back and spend more time looking at exhibits they had
brushed past in their investigations.
The activity had forced the kids to really pay attention to what
they were looking at, to ask and answer new questions, and to process
the information in new ways. These kids weren't moving in orderly lines
through the science museum; they owned that space. It wasn't a
sanctuary; it was their playground.
But
there was nothing chaotic about their play. This was hard work, and it
engaged every corner of their brains. Though the robbery was imaginary,
the kids had to go through something akin to the real-world scientific
process to solve the mystery—gathering evidence, forming hypotheses,
challenging each other's interpretations, and in the end, presenting
the data to the judges to see how close they came to figuring out all
of the case’s nuances.
Klopfer's
museum experiment seems calm and contained compared to geo-caching,
which one website calls "the sport where you are the search engine.” A
treasure chest, containing a logbook and perhaps some rewards, is
buried in some obscure location. The GPS coordinates are posted on the
Internet and people come from all over, scrambling through the bush or
grubbing in the dirt to try to track it down. When they find the cache,
they take a memento, sign the log book, and leave a gift for the next
searcher. Sometimes, the chest contains another set of coordinates,
sending the finder scampering off for a new location. Geo-caching has
become a worldwide phenomenon.
Many of the publishers of tourist guides are already
experimenting with electronic versions of their texts. But they are
underestimating the ways these devices can alter where we go and what
we see. Take, for example, the History Unwired project—an initiative of
Michael Epstein and Cristobal Garcia, entrepreneurial graduate students
in MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. This project is working
with the tourism boards in Venice and in Alcala de Henares (Cervantes’s
hometown) to develop new applications for handhelds. Venice may be a
city with a rich history and a unique atmosphere, but most tourists
experience it as a theme park ride—hop on a gondola and drift down the
main canal. The local merchants and the city officials want use
handhelds to lure tourists into other parts of the city to share the
wealth and avoid the wear and tear on their fragile environment. The
content of the tours is being developed at a grassroots level involving
discussions with local community members.
Another initiative coming out of the MIT Comparative Media Studies
department allows visitors to Paris's Marais neighborhood to view old
photographs and historic illustrations of the city. This project,
called Flâneurs Savants, was developed by graduate students Andrea
McCarty and Rekha Murthy. While the program encourages visitors to
engage with the area’s modern inhabitants, Flâneurs Savants also
invites people to scan the buildings and landscape for traces of a
world that may no longer exist but that shaped how the neighborhood
developed. You could imagine a tour that worked in the other direction,
mapping onto the current city the speculations of urban planners and
science fiction writers about what it might look like in 50 or 100
years.
Or imagine the ways these tools could help activists and
urban planners to better understand the problems confronting a local
community. The handheld could encourage people walking through the
Boston Common at dusk to be more aware of the homeless people sleeping
on the ground, or encourage amblers to look for signs of pollution as
they cross the Charles River.
We can move through these environments at our own pace, look at what
interests us, and access multiple layers of annotation. Of course, you
can do that with a guidebook in your hand. But the handheld delivers a
media-rich experience, enabling you to access photographs, sound files,
and moving images that complement what you are seeing with your own
eyes.
Some researchers believe that these devices may also become
effective vehicles for storytelling. Last Halloween, MIT grad student
Epstein organized Ghosts at the Granary in Boston. He worked with the
Freedom Trail Foundation to produce a spooky tour of a local graveyard
that combined live performers interacting with animated characters that
appeared to visitors on their handhelds.
Creative artists have long been fascinated with trying to tell the
multiple stories that unfold in the same community and the different
ways that participants see each other. Imagine a digital artist doing
in a real space what Edgar Lee Masters achieved in Spoon River Anthology, or mapping onto the houses of a small town the kinds of stories Sherwood Anderson spun in Winesburg, Ohio. As we look closely at the outside of the buildings, we struggle to figure out where fiction ends and reality begins.
Writing in 1959, Kevin Lynch, a founding figure in urban studies,
proposed new ways to map our experience of the city. He wanted to
create tools for explaining the life of the city—tools that enabled us
to see the most common routes and best remembered landmarks, that
allowed us to feel the "interconnectedness" of the urban experience,
and that recorded "particular zones that for any one individual might
be more intensely felt." The location-aware handheld represents such a
resource. These devices may wake us from the stupor with which we so
often move through our neighborhoods. They may break tourists from the
tyranny of the guidebook. They may empower us to move through the space
with a purpose and invite us to look at each detail from a more
informed perspective.
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