Augmented Reality: Innovative Perspectives across Art, Industry, and Academia offers a wide-ranging exploration of the implications, challenges, and promises of augmented reality. Traditionally only covered from a technical perspective, augmented reality has become an increasingly important area of cultural inquiry in humanities scholarship and popular media outlets. This collection attempts to cross-pollinate the discourse, creating a multidisciplinary exchange among leading researchers and professionals who each advance different ways of understanding current (and future) forms of augmented reality. Another underlying mission is to bring critical reflection and artistic ingenuity into conversation with design thinking and software development. To that end, the collection features a mix of essays from humanities scholars, artworks by pathbreaking artists, as well as interviews with software developers and industry consultants. Among the first of its kind, the book also incorporates augmented reality into its own design by placing relevant digital content within the printed page using Aurasma.

"The interviews and the presentation of artworks provide a nice counterpoint to the scholarly articles. The interviews include important figures from the commercial world of AR (e.g., Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and Jay Wright) and the academic community (Blair MacIntyre): the heterogeneity of perspectives from business, computer science and the humanities is valuable. The art selected includes some of the best known of the admittedly nascent field of AR art, including the work of Tamiko Thiel and B.C. Biermann. . . . In sum, this volume does an excellent job of enlarging the space of discourse for Augmented Reality, illustrating the contribution that humanistic and artistic approaches can make to assessing the significance of a new media technology. I would definitely consider using this collection in various graduate or upper-level undergraduate classes that we teach here at Georgia Tech." --Jay David Bolter, Wesley Chair of New Media and Co-Director of the Augmented Environments Lab (AEL), Georgia Institute of Technology

Contributors

Scot Barnett, BC Biermann, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jason Farman, John Craig Freeman, Jordan Frith, Jason Helms, Steve Holmes, Jason Kalin, Bryan Leister, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, Conor McGarrigle, Sean Morey, Blair MacIntyre, Brett Oppegaard, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perey, Mark Skwarek, Tamiko Thiel, John Tinnell, Douglas Trueman, Joseph P. Weakland, and Jay Wright