Augmented Reality

We human beings are defined by our limitations. The most obvious—the temporal—is, in a way, the one that serves as a guide for directing our actions, our aspirations and our desires. However, our bodies can also be conceived of as an active compound of limitations, impossibilities and frustrated potentialities. This is why the objects that surround us inevitably provoke a sense of alienation, a radical asymmetry between the physical possibilities within our reach (seeing, hearing, smelling, loving) and the intractable resistance that constrainsour experience of reality.

This anxiety between what our body can do and what the world is prepared to allow has at the same time represented one of the major problems of ontology.

When Heidegger considered the worldhood of our experience in Section 18 of Being and Time, he incorporated the essential category of the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), in which action and the way we experience the world are intertwined:

The ready-to-hand is encountered within-the-world. The being of this entity, readiness-to-hand, thus stands in some ontological relationship towards the world and towards worldhood. In anything ready-to-hand the world is always “there”. Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically. (Heidegger, 1962: 114)

And it is precisely out of this relationship between our perception, our action and the ontological fabric that surrounds us that the possibility of augmented reality (AR) emerges, as both a technology and a field of reflection.

Referencia completa

Rodríguez Serrano, A., Martín-Núñez, M. García-Catalán, S. (2020). Augmented Reality. En: M. Filimowicz, V. Tzankova (eds.) Rei­magining Communication: Mediation. (pp. 163-176). New York: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781351015431-10 [ISBN: 978-1-138-49890-7]