Critical Mixed Augmented Reality Manifesto

by Diana Munoz

Opportunities for Accelerating the Viral Relevance of Mixed Augmented Reality

Prime Objective

 To ideate critical design foundations for shared mixed augmented reality and lobby for the visually paramount centralized production of large-scale incubation ventures

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”

-Abraham Lincoln

Introduction

The list of movies, shows, etc. that have already concepted some functional or artistic feature of mixed augmented reality is virtually endless. Although many fully functional augmented reality devices have already been developed, they are still a relatively niche product, as none have yet been able to hit that relevance-sweet-spot of successfully seamlessly elevating us all in our everyday wants and demands*.

To date, no mixed augmented reality device has been cheap enough, “cool” enough, nor intentionally designed to incite a meteoric viral impact. For example, the Magic Leap and Microsoft’s Hololens 2, despite having impeccable functionality, ease of use, and interface quality, were intentionally marketed to a higher status of developers, never gained layman consumer traction at ticket prices above $3k, same as the upcoming Apple Vision Pro.

Despite its high ticket price, the Apple Vision Pro will hopefully enlighten the public eye to the gravity of the functionality goldmine to come in a cult-like way that Microsoft could not hit. Its release will drive production demand for cheaper accessibility to mixed augmented reality, trickling down development demand and public interest through all applicable fields.

This manifesto concerns itself with driving up the mixed augmented reality production standards of live experiences as a necessary catalyst to indefinitely elevate the medium’s quality of dissemination.

Obliterating the wall between our current reality and how our hard working imagination can brighten it is what life is all about. Mixed augmented reality is the weapon that obliterates that wall, therefore the intent by which we create through it should be handled with the utmost respect for humanity’s maturity and seasoned eye for quality. The more great minds who feel invited to work and communicate through mixed augmented reality, the closer we all will be to our brightest days together.

*For in-depth inspiration, please watch Keiichi Matsuda’s “Hyper Reality” http://hyper-reality.co/

Hypotheses:

  1. The sustainable access point to subscribe world-audience viral engagement with shared mixed augmented reality is through prestigious, large scale live events because that is where people actively participate in physically co-experiencing standard reality under highly composable interactive guidance, and based on the perceived intensity of what was experienced, those audiences then naturally manifest editions to their daily personal and career purposes and disperse shareable engagement throughout non-present audiences.

  2. To ensure mixed augmented reality maintains and grows in relevance, live event enhancements must impactfully showcase how augmented reality can irrevocably increase the value, functionality, and future compatibility between all standard-reality experiences and augmented reality capabilities.

  3. Much how any high quality entertainment production company curates and fosters artistic talent to set industry ethic standards and consumer trends, mixed augmented experiential excellence with true-lasting impact requires the assembly of curated, preferably non-corporate-based teams of futurist-relevant visual artists and designers who carry translatable track records of timelessly innovative success.

Ideations and Speculations for Relevant Mixed AR

On acclimating audience acceptance of mixed augmented media by using it to drastically improve the experience of tangible media :

  • Critically dramatic impact and innovation-mindedness should lead creative direction in order to effectively attract audiences to immersive, seamlessly animated, realistic 3D storytelling as a supplement to the main attraction of artist(s) presence/performance.

  • By deliberately magnifying the core focus of physical live performance media with functionally consistent mixed augmented enhancements, events can foster audiences through digestible and attractive reality transitions in comparable fashion to the film industry’s developmental balancing act of effective storytelling through live action, puppetry, and CG.

  • The visual affiliate choices music production companies make when updating their brand to mixed augmented media will reflect on the quality of their artistic authority in a new light that can raise their artists’ art and the quality of their audience’s experience to new heights, or if done amateurly, do the opposite.

On inciting habitual adoption by all tiers of entertainment:

  • Current large scale live performance industry standards are archaically non-immersive, spatially impersonal, and supplemented only by two-dimensional screens that leave most of an audience at awkward viewing angles. That said, large scale events have the innate ability to incite innovation FOMO (fear of missing out) and highest potential for viral dispersal of shared augmented reality into subsequent event compositions and personal home-entertainment environments. 

On industry ecosystems and their relative augmented visual niche developments:

  • All artistic industries and visual languages will have the opportunity to come to life and tell their in-the-moment synesthetic stories. Existing entertainment platforms available for mixed augmented reality integration, such as live orchestras, have current creators and audience ecosystems that mixed augmented reality must serve to compliment in a way that respects and matures the habits of their existing tastes. Laying down the brickwork for the organization of visual artist production teams that are themselves intellectual members of niche ecosystems will be mutually vital to the overall relevant growth quality of applicable entertainment niches and AR syndication. Weaving mixed augmented reality into a meta-expressive tool that authentically augments the endless shades of other art forms’ true characters will be key to avoiding visual-for-the-sake-of-visual brand regurgitation.

  • The laws of existing physical entertainment environments dictate user-experience-minded augmented choices. The obsolete visual standards offered by traditional 3D movies should be mostly discarded as a frame of mind for Mixed Augmented Reality creation, as the traditional 3D movie format highly restrictive and dependent upon a single 2D plane format. Rather, an environmental, spherical volumetric space system of thought is truer to life. 2D can still be beautifully utilized by finessing opportunities for spatially aware 2.5D complexity in volumetric 3D space.

  • Measuring the potential impact that these improved standards of live visual entertainment can have for all involved industry economies can ensue once a a high-impact intended proof of concept is in public beta.

Conclusion 

A virally compelling peak-Humanist STEM-Renaissance is made imminently possible when carefully perfected marriages of artistic prowess, augmented reality innovation, and highly organized production intentionally shepherd in new foundational standards of problem-solving. 

Thoughtfully ensuring that the reigns of experiential genius are being pulled at the right time and place to cataclysmically exceed all previous attempts at making mixed augmented reality truly relevant, catalytically accessible and shareable by all, co-immersive, and used for thought-provoking and philanthropic creation can once and for all set a mass acceleration in motion toward professionally streamlined sum-positive, seamless real-reality manifestations, introspections and solutions.