Augmented Reality

Stub note: This page was created during the ingest of Spatial therapies and requires fuller treatment as more sources on hybrid digital/analog space are ingested.

Definition

Augmented reality (AR) names technologies that overlay digital spatial content onto existent physical space — Qureshi's examples are the first-generation prototypes Microsoft HoloLens and Google Glass. His contribution is to define AR's architectural significance through interior architecture's own core operation: AR "projects hybridize and amalgamate the preexisting context with new spatial installation," producing "unprecedented applications of hybridized digital/analog space, no longer solely defined as adaptive reuse by existing context and new installation in the solely physical sense." Where adaptive reuse combines an existing building with a new physical installation, AR combines the existent analog context with an imposed digital one — adaptive reuse's operation continued into the virtual, with interior architecture "as a bridge between these worlds."

The concept thus belongs to the "post-analog" condition Qureshi diagnoses: the deprioritization of the physical — "an existential crisis for architecture" — answered not by digital escape but by a designed hybridization "that is neither alien nor outside the normative practices of the discipline." AR's vision "to hybridize imposed digital and existent analog space, and even the past/present/future via their dynamic combination" extends the discipline's temporal operation (spatial-therapy) into the perceptual register.

Key Thinkers

• Ziad Qureshi — frames AR as the virtual continuation of adaptive reuse and assigns interior architecture the bridging role.
• Blaine Brownell (discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log) — architect and materials expert whose "disruptive application" (building on Marshall McLuhan) supplies the mechanism: "conventional solutions are unexpectedly replaced by new ones leading to innovative and advantageous developments."

Related Concepts

• digital-architecture — the computational production that AR installations require; Qureshi emphasizes the discipline's digitally produced fabrication and "advanced material specificity."
• spatial-therapy — AR as the newest domain of the past/present/future amalgamation: "even the past/present/future via their dynamic combination."
• simulation-hyperreality — the wiki's critical counter-register: where Baudrillard's hyperreality substitutes signs for the real, AR is here framed as joining rather than replacing the analog.
• interior-architecture — the discipline whose normative practice ("existing context and new installation") AR reproduces in virtual form.
• transarchitecture — the explored relation from the digital side: transarchitectures "explore the relationships between virtual and physical space" (Jacobus) — the same virtual/physical interface AR designs through interior architecture's reuse operation.
• dematerialization — the process AR manages: the virtual layer as the interior's next dematerialization, here converted into a designed hybridization "that is neither alien nor outside the normative practices of the discipline."
• tabula-rasa — the open risk: whether the digital overlay erases or augments the preexisting.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the "post-analog" diagnosis, Brownell's "disruptive application," HoloLens/Glass as prototypes, and AR as hybridized digital/analog space within interior architecture's normative practice.
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the media-history warrant for the same condition: digital media as the third cultural register, transarchitectures "explor[ing] the relationships between virtual and physical space," and the interactive surface as "a direct and literal example of this phenomenon, wherein the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself. We've begun to expect more from the physical surfaces that surround us." Where Qureshi designs the hybrid (AR as interior architecture's virtual adaptive reuse), Jacobus names the expectation the hybrid answers: surfaces must now deliver "what they deliver virtually and intellectually." See transarchitecture, dematerialization, digital-architecture.
• source-notes/webb-2018-inside-out

Open Questions

• Does the digital overlay preserve or dissolve the "existing context" it amalgamates — is AR an augmentation of the real or a new simulation (simulation-hyperreality)?
• Whose "new spatial installation" is projected in AR — can the hybridization of digital/analog space respect the protective relation to the past that alteration theory demands, or is the overlay always an imposition?
• How does AR-space relate to the everyday's virtualization documented by Poster — is the post-analog everyday lived in hybrid space?