My Matterport virtual tour of the Medicine Wheel Garden: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=Dj6rbeQbJF9
A few notes on my tour: Some of the scans somehow got all scrambled up when I was lining them up on my phone and I was unable to undo it when creating the space. Some of my annotations also got displaced after I created them, and for some reason I just couldn’t make them stay where they were supposed to. So, if any annotations appear in random places, that’s why! Apologies!
In the past, I’ve been to museums and other cultural institutions that use what I would have thought of as “virtual reality”; for example, the Field Museum of Chicago had dinosaur exhibits where visitors could text the number displayed with them and “ask the dinosaurs” different questions. However, I now have a much better understanding of the difference between the concepts of “virtual” reality and “augmented” reality after our readings, especially the two articles written by Nathan Jurgenson. Basically, the idea of virtual reality is that it is totally separate from “reality”, or basically the aspects of life that aren’t digital. People often assume that social media presence and “real life” are two separate lives, but in reality, we often use social media to maintain “real life” friendships, connections, hobbies, etc. On the darker side, real-life inequalities such as misogyny and racism are seen all throughout Internet interactions. For example, a friend of mine sometimes engages in political spaces on Facebook. The fact that she is a woman in real life absolutely reflects in the comments responding to her, usually from men.
“Augmented” reality, on the other hand, operates on the idea that “the digital and physical are increasingly meshed.” (Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality). Online presence and “real life” presence are intertwined, whether that’s in local communities organizing events on Facebook or international activism assisted by online communication, our “real life” actions and online actions affect each other.
When discussing the benefits of augmented reality on the humanities, I can’t believe I didn’t think to talk about this experience from my undergraduate program. Covid hit at the end of my sophomore year, and as I’m sure every university experienced, my professors had to completely change course and make the rest of their syllabi somehow virtual. One of the ways that my archaeology professor found to keep the class engaging over Zoom on such short notice was to show us some virtual tours of natural history museums/historical sites. I remember thinking how even though it wasn’t exactly the same as being there it person, how amazing it was that technology had progressed to a point where I could “visit” museums and sites across the world from my bedroom in Mississippi.
I was really impressed with learning more of the ways augmented reality has been applied to the humanities, especially the “Ultimate Dinosaurs” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (Augmented Reality Livens Up Museums). I was also really impressed with the amount of people, time, and labor went into augmented reality projects like the church in Florence. I feel like seeing the amount of human labor required to make digital projects like that work ties into one of the big ongoing themes we’ve been discussing in this class, which is that while digital tools are amazing, it’s how we use our imaginations in applying them that truly makes the difference in what sort of results we can get with them.