Tag Archives | industry

An Opus to AR – It Begins

By Tom Saunter on April 30, 2009 // academic
This entry is part 1 in the series An Opus to AR

Here it goes. The first entry of my grand opus on Augmented Reality, and why I think it will be the most impacting new media form we have had since the rise of the Internet. I will serialise a total of 10,000 words, hyperlinked where appropriate, and with illustrations where possible. The title of this work is as follows:

Assessing an Augmented Future: What is Augmented Reality, What are its Potential Applications in the Entertainment Industry, and What Will its Emergence Mean for the User in Society?

Series Order:

  1. Contents
  2. Abstract
  3. Introduction
  4. What is AR and what is it capable of?
  5. Gameware: A Case Study in AR Development
  6. Constructing a methodology
  7. Reverse Engineering: Locating AR within its wider context
    1. Virtual Reality
    2. The Internet
    3. Mobile Telephone
    4. Summary
  8. Deconstructing AR: assessing it’s socio-cultural impact
    1. Applying McLuhan
    2. Applying Baudrillard
    3. Applying Benjamin
  9. Conclusion
  10. Bibliography
    1. References
    2. Further Reading

Please stick with me, I plan to release each element over a the next few weeks beginning today with Part 2, my research abstract. Grab an RSS feed and please chip in with your contributions.

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Web Discoveries for April 7th

By Tom Saunter on April 7, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for April 7th

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Emotional Search in Web 3.0

By Tom Saunter on April 4, 2009 // design, Web

I urge you to go and check out We Feel Fine, a flash applet that scours the Interwebs  not for keywords you’ve chosen, but from a huge array of predefined emotions.

The result is a staggering visualisation of current states-of-mind across various social media sources, from feeling ‘angsty’ to ‘fine’ (of course) and through to ‘zealous’. Seriously, one cannot underplay the significance I feel this holds, as the way it comes across in its black and #ff005d imagery places monumental power behind the little dots and abstract shapes, each representing a different feeling, and crucially a different person. Allow me to elucidate…

Logging on you’ll start in an ocean of multicoloured shapes and colours. Mousing over will freeze the surrounding area allowing you to pick out a certain point  – a label appears signifying the attached emotion. A click on that point shows the sentence or image that the target emotion is connected to. A further click takes you away to that content’s permalink somewhere on the web. Immediately, at least to me, the significance of web browsing via emotional state is felt for the first time.

Jonathan Harris, digital artist behind WeFeelFine along with information architect Sep Kamvar,  has set upon a series of projects intended to exploit our increasing hyperconnectivity, and present back to us the visual representation of our online ongoings. Check out this video from coolhunting on the etymology of the project below:

As a member of the ad industry, I am excited by the potential to target users by their emotional state via WeFeelFine, or by Adrian Veidt-style trendspotting via Universe.

Conversely, as a member of the Open Web culture I know that this is art and should remain so. Let’s not sully this by exploiting human weakness, rather use it as a reminder of those core abilities the web and our hyperconnectivity to it can show us, and what we can learn from it.

That’s the true definition of good art, in my opinion.

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Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

By Tom Saunter on February 10, 2009 // Technology

This piece from The Onion brutally destroys both Sony, and the wider electronics industry for their shameless plugging of products they ‘think’ we all want. Of course, what we all really need is convergence between existing products, rather than entirely new products that defy comprehension. That aside, check out the video:


Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

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