CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Practical Uses of AR in Arts and Culture

AMT Lab @ CMU: Since its first iteration, Augmented Reality (AR) has been disrupting education, health, entertainment, and many other fields. By enhancing the senses and abilities it has delighted but also aided in solving difficult problems. In arts and culture, AR has transformed static museum displays and provided special effects for stage productions.

2 comments:

Ari Cobb said...

I love Augmented Reality and all of the things that people have done with it; like Pokemon GO, to interactive experiences, and even shopping. I think this article did a pretty good job with explaining how augmented reality works and even provided a simple diagram to go with it. I think seeing it in more artistic settings could bee pretty cool as well, outside of museums. Using it to design and actually see how things sit in the various spaces could be pretty helpful. I know that Cirque du Soleil did a show a little while back called Toruk that was based off of Avatar and used a lot of projection mapping and augmented reality paired with the set and some props. The video example they included for Cirque’s Hololens set demo was really interesting as well, though the human models used were a little strange to look at. One thing that does come to mind is that AR and 3D visuals can add another layer of complexity to the process and could wind up making things take more time than necessary - similarly to the CNC router that Booevers has talked about in class. In our setting, things don’t need to be 100% perfect and can be fudged a little, so taking the time to virtually 3D it into the space might actually waste time. Overall I think it’s a really cool thing and hope to see more of it.

Unknown said...

"There's definitely a lot of cool and useful things that AR could do. As it gets better and more reliable, you could do whole sets with AR and give everybody glasses so that the actor on an empty stage appears to be on a set. You could change the look of the house to the audience so that it looks like they and the people sitting next to them are, say, sitting in an airplane. Or you could use it more sparingly to just do really nice lightsaber effects.

And that's besides the useful implications for creating the theatre int he first place. It seems like its probably pretty feasible to make an app for one of the ar glasses sets that could essentially overlay a ruler on to sticks of lumber so you dont even have to measure it. Or an app that could lay out scenery virtually from an uploaded BIM file so that you can see where all the pieces go in little holographic detail as you lay out a flat on a table to build. AR glasses hooked up to sound or lighting measurement tools could overlay sound pressure level or brightness readings as you look around a space, allowing for quick diagnostics and better visualization as systems are being set up. Stage managers could have an overlay of their calling script scrolling by to more easily call cues as they watch a tricky sequence, so they don't have to be looking two places at once. Maybe it doesn't replace a paper book, but it could be a useful addition. AR glasses have the potential to make so many tasks wildly more efficient. "