[ISEA2008] Artist Talk: Helen Papagiannis – Flipping Between Analog and Digital: Lenticular Augmented Reality

Artist Statement

The intent of Lenticular AR was to create a tactile object that could store and display multiple moving AR images, combining both analog and digital modes of memory. Two distinct AR maker patterns are contained within a single lenticular lens (see Figure 1); each of these patterns reveals a different moving AR image when the lenticular object is slightly tilted. Lenticular AR embodies early principles of animation and pre-cinematic devices, married with the virtual in AR. The end result is a layered form of a futuristic moving image, one which comes to exist via an analog mode of animation.

Lenticular AR may display memories over time from past to present, combining both archival film footage with contemporary moving images. The viewer can ‘flip’ between the two moving images in the same hand-held object, mid-clip, reverting between each, crossing over time with a slight hand gesture.

I am particularly interested in the dual memory inherent in Lenticular AR. Although the augmented image is stored digitally, activated upon recognition of the AR marker by the software, the lenticular lens also contains an analog based memory system to store and reveal the two different markers. Each technology, AR and lenticular, presents an architecture which serves as a memory container with the final image only coming into full-view upon activation by the user. The completed images otherwise remain hidden from the viewer; the AR digital image appearing only as a geometrical pattern to the human eye (without software), and the lenticular analog image a sole static still, unanimated.

Although the AR image output is reliant on the software to translate and produce, the AR markers are initiated by the physical maneuvering of the lenticular lens by the viewer. Both analog and digital methods must work together and coexist to disclose lenticular AR.