[ISEA2022] Paper: Anton Nijholt — Weaving Augmented Reality into the Fabric of Everyday Life

Abstract

Full Paper. Session: Human Nonhuman Encounters and Distractions / Technical and Haptics Realities

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Multisensorial Augmented Reality, Digital Technology, Ubiquitous Computing, Public Spaces

AR is a technology that will be integrated into public spaces and become part of ubiquitous computing rather than remain a single-user technology for small-scale physical environments. We illustrate our argument with a multisensorial view of Piano Stairs, the musical stairway that has been introduced in cities around the world.

In 1997 Ronald T. Azuma introduced the now generally accepted and followed definition in Augmented Reality (AR) research. In short, it tells us that in AR we introduce virtual content into the real world, this virtual content needs to be aligned with real content, and a user of an AR environment can interact with the (dynamic) virtual and real content in real-time. This definition leaves open how virtual content is generated, which display technology is desired and which senses are addressed. This has advantages, but it is now becoming clear that these missing aspects lead to confusion, also because with the current smart technology in general and ubiquitous computing in particular, AR technology can no longer be considered in isolation. We present the arguments that lead to this conclusion. We will explain the arguments with examples in which the vision, auditory and olfactory senses play a role. Starting point and conclusion obtained is that AR eventually will become an everyday technology that will merge into reality.

  • In 1989 Anton Nijholt (NL) was appointed full professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. For some years he was a scientific advisor of Philips Research Europe. At Twente, he initiated the Human Media Interaction group where now he is an emeritus professor. His main research interests are human-computer interaction with a focus on entertainment computing, playable cities, augmented reality, and brain-computer interfacing. He edited various books on playful interfaces, playable cities, and brain-computer interaction. Nijholt, together with many of the Ph.D. students he has supervised, wrote hundreds of journal and conference papers and acted as program chair and general chair of large international conferences on affective computing, multimodal interaction, intelligent agents, and entertainment computing. Nijholt is Chief Editor of the section Human-Media Interaction in the journals Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers in Computer Science, and series editor of the Springer Book series “Gaming Media and Social Effects”.