1. Waiting for the Augmented Reality ‘Killer App’: Pokémon GO 2016

And it’s not just in cinema. In his essay, “Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin notes, after the presentation of Daguerre's invention in the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, “Things developed so rapidly that by 1840 most of the innumerable miniaturists had already become professional photographers, at first only as a sideline, but before long exclusively” (Benjamin 1999, 515).

Lumiere’s Le Jardinier (1895) is considered one of the first, if not the first, comedy film, and was part of the program at the December 28, 1895, premiere screening at the Grand Cafe (Gaines 2004, 1309).

I would liken this to the uncanny valley in robotics. A seamless integration of computer generated virtual with real is the goal of cinema special effects. A delineated integration of virtual and real is the realm of AR. And between the two lies discomfort or insult. It is interesting, in regard to the comparisons between photography, cinema, and AR, to note Masahiro Mori’s discussion of the effects of movement in “amplifying the peaks and valleys” of this phenomenon in his 1970 essay (Mori 2012, 2).

Translated by J. F. Prieto. The original Spanish: “El objetivo final de todas estas “máquinas de visualización” consiste en superar las dificultades de comprensión debidas a los diferentes niveles de abstracción conceptual que presentan los distintos sistemas de representación tradicionales empleados para comunicar un diseño espacial: planta, alzado, sección, perspectiva, axonometrías y modelos a escala” (Álvarez and José 2010, 114).

This particular fiducial was developed as part of the Pentag system for what would become SnapDragonAR, developed at York University’s Future Cinema Lab with Mark Fiala shortly before the iPhone was launched.

The Chicago 00 Project comprises a series of new media publications in apps, videos, and VR stills. The first publication was an app-based augmented reality experience at the site of the Eastland Disaster, where a passenger ferry capsized on the Chicago River in 1915. VR panoramas of the site, created as research tools, were shared on Google Street View, and because of their success (over a million views), subsequent projects used VR to share historical photos superimposed on their present-day sites: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, and the 1968 DNC protests. www.​Chicago00.​org.

In a footnote, Benjamin writes: “Before film had started to create its public, images (which were no longer motionless) were received by an assembled audience in the Kaiserpanorama. Here the audience faced a screen into which stereoscopes were fitted, one for each spectator. In front of these stereoscopes single images automatically appeared, remained briefly in view, and then gave way to others. Edison still had to work with similar means when he presented the first film strip- before the movie screen and projection were known; a small audience gazed into an apparatus in which a sequence of images was shown. Incidentally, the institution of the Kaiserpanorama very clearly manifests a dialectic of development. Shortly before film turned the viewing of images into a collective activity, image viewing by the individual, through the stereoscopes of these soon outmoded establishments, was briefly intensified, as it had been once before in the isolated contemplation of the divine image by the priest in the cella” (Benjamin 2008, 52). Doesn’t this sound like AR on the smartphone?