Description
How augmented reality and virtual reality are taking their places in contemporary media culture alongside film and television.
T
This book positions augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) firmly in contemporary media culture. The authors view AR and VR not as the latest hyped technologies but as media—the latest in a series of what they term “reality media,” taking their places alongside film and television. Reality media inserts a layer of media between us and our perception of the world; AR and VR do not replace reality but refashion a reality for us. Each reality medium mediates and remediates; each offers a new representation that we implicitly compare to our experience of the world in itself but also through other media.
The authors show that as forms of reality media emerge, they not only chart a future path for media culture, but also redefine media past. With AR and VR in mind, then, we can recognize their precursors in eighteenth-century panoramas and the Broadway lights of the 1930s. A digital version of Reality Media, available through the book’s website, invites readers to visit a series of virtual rooms featuring interactivity, 3-D models, videos, images, and texts that explore the themes of the book.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 What Are Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?
2 The History of Reality Media
3 3-D Graphics and the Construction of Visual Reality
4 Degrees of Freedom: Spatial Tracking and Sensing
5 Presence
6 The Genres of AR and VR
7 The Myth of Total AR: Mirror Worlds and the AR Cloud
8 The Myth of Total AR: The Metaverse
9 Privacy, Public Space, and Reality Media
10 The Future
References
Index
