VPAP Philadelphia, installation text

VPAP: Philadelphia

VPAP: Philadelphia is Breadboard’s first project involving Augmented Reality (AR) and Smartphone technology. We could not have embarked on this venture without the partnership and guidance of the Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP). Like Breadboard, VPAP operations started less than a year ago. And our interest in working with VPAP is underlined by some shared themes: an interest in technology and its creative applications, and an interest in engaging the public in interactive and novel ways.

In the case of Augmented Reality, the augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements. It is the semantic context of AR art that is at the heart of its potency. The creative space between it and the reality that surrounds it seems to be what most of the VPAP Philadelphia artists responded to.

An art exhibit of this sort is new to Philadelphia, as it was to the growing number of VPAP exhibition cities around the world, including Rotterdam, Rio de Janeiro, London, Los Angeles, Dubai, Laval (France), Beijing, Tokyo and New York. The eight artists involved in this project are linking Philadelphia to the numerous cities previously mentioned as well as to all the cities that VPAP has yet to tag with artist-based public space projects. AR art opens up an exciting venue for creative interaction that will only get better with new advancements in digital media technology.

AR technology is going to quickly change the character of our personal and social interactions with and within the physical world. But it is a technology (and community) accessible only to those who can afford iPhone and Android mobile devices The VPAP Layar App is a free and relatively easy download but that doesn’t lower the barrier of access for those individuals and populations on the other side of the Digital Divide.

VPAP, Breadboard and our partners embarked on this experiment with the best intentions to explore a new creative media that raises crucial questions about where and how we access hybrid physical and virtual public spaces in emergent augmented realities. We hope to supplement this exhibit with content updates, interesting AR related links and interviews with the artists.

Breadboard will be working on a larger VPAP project in the spring and we welcome your feedback. Artists interested in working with Breadboard and VPAP in the future should email us at breadboard@sciencecenter.org (subject: VPAP).

Terminator, night vision

Augmented Reality

If you have ever seen the movie Terminator then you have seen Augmented Reality in action. Viewed from the cyborg’s perspective, everything the Terminator sees is enhanced by a stream of computed data that gives him information on what he is viewing—usually in neon green typeface, as if someone is typing the information out in real time.

Augmented reality adds graphics, sounds, haptic feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists. Both video games and cell phones are driving the development of augmented reality. Everyone from tourists, to soldiers, to someone looking for the closest subway stop can now benefit from the ability to place computer-generated information and graphics in their field of vision.1 You can purchase eyewear that operates like a smartphone screen, creating a more immersive AR experience, and researchers have successfully implanted pixels into contact lenses suggesting that someday our computer screen will literally be a translucent sheet of pixels layered over our eyes.

The Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP) merges the physical environment of public spaces around the world with site-specific virtual art. It does so by using the Layar Reality Browser. Layar is a Dutch company based in Amsterdam, founded in 2009. The Layar browser shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of the real world as seen through the camera of your mobile phone (Augmented Reality). Layar works by using a combination of the mobile phone’s camera, compass and GPS data to identify the user’s location and field of view, retrieve data based on those geographical coordinates, and overlay that data over the camera view. 2

Philadelphia artists worked with VPAP to develop content that was then geo-tagged to specific coordinates around the city so that when viewed with a Smartphone (equipped with the VPAP Layar App) the virtual artwork would appear on screen.

1 www.howstuffworks.com
2 www.layar.com