Reality Media

How augmented reality and virtual reality are taking their places in contemporary media culture alongside film and television.

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This book positions augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) firmly in contemporary media culture. The authors view AR and VR not as the latest hyped technologies but as media—the latest in a series of what they term “reality media,” taking their places alongside film and television. Reality media inserts a layer of media between us and our perception of the world; AR and VR do not replace reality but refashion a reality for us. Each reality medium mediates and remediates; each offers a new representation that we implicitly compare to our experience of the world in itself but also through other media.
 
The authors show that as forms of reality media emerge, they not only chart a future path for media culture, but also redefine media past. With AR and VR in mind, then, we can recognize their precursors in eighteenth-century panoramas and the Broadway lights of the 1930s. A digital version of Reality Media, available through the book’s website, invites readers to visit a series of virtual rooms featuring interactivity, 3-D models, videos, images, and texts that explore the themes of the book.Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 What Are Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?
2 The History of Reality Media
3 3-D Graphics and the Construction of Visual Reality
4 Degrees of Freedom: Spatial Tracking and Sensing
5 Presence 
6 The Genres of AR and VR
7 The Myth of Total AR: Mirror Worlds and the AR Cloud
8 The Myth of Total AR: The Metaverse
9 Privacy, Public Space, and Reality Media
10 The Future 
References
Index“It’s interesting that we still need the old medium of text to help interpret the new, but Bolter, Engberg, and MacIntyre’s new book is a great example of why. Reality Media is an excellent tour of virtual reality and its kin.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
 
“What roles will AR and VR play in our lives? Reality Media provides a fascinating answer by analyzing these forms as media that are intimately influencing, and influenced by, the other media with which they coexist.”
—Steven K.  Feiner, Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice



Jay David Bolter is James and Mary Wesley Chair in New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Senior Professor in Computer Science and Media Technology at Malmö University in Sweden. He is the author of The Digital Plenitude (MIT Press) and other books. Maria Engberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology at Malmö University. Blair MacIntyre is Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. MacIntyre and Bolter are codirectors of the Augmented Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where Engberg is Affiliate Researcher.