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'Travels in Augmented Reality'

6,000 word Article and 5 augmented reality (AR) artworks

This article describes ground-breaking artworks collaboratively undertaken using the emerging medium of Augmented Reality, and gives an outline of how it works, its predecessors and its developing nature. The authors evaluate the five AR projects they have produced in aesthetic, conceptual and technical terms.

Leach’s expertise is primarily in technical aspects of the medium, whilst Goto contributed the conceptual and creative components of the projects.

Works were either completely original, created specifically with the available functionality of Augmented Reality in mind, or adaptations of previous artworks. Included in this output are exhibited print versions of AR projects (see portfolio).

AR is a new platform, explored by few artists. The relationship of virtual image and information to physical location is a core property of the medium. The authors explored this first in ‘West End Blues’ by placing silhouettes of historical musicians in the actual locations they once played at. Sound clips and text panels offered further information based on extensive research into the history of jazz in Britain.

‘The Invisible Artist’ further refined location-based tracking with a specially made satirical piece, which placed a headless guide into a number of leading London contemporary art galleries.

‘Gilt City AR’ introduced a new innovative interactive element, using which the responses of viewers to a group of outsiders placed in the City of London were monitored.

‘Joseph Wright AR’ explored a new image-recognition feature of the Layar AR platform. Working directly with Wright’s paintings in the Derby Museum, contemporaneous figurines from the Derby Porcelain Factory are precisely placed before the canvases. The project is underpinned by extensive research into Wright, the porcelain factory, and cultural debates in the late eighteenth-century.

The significance of the Goto/Leach AR projects lies in their unique combination of technical fluency with imaginative and intellectually weighty artworks.