Media studies, mobile augmented reality, and interaction design

You are walking in the Sweetwater Creek State Park near Atlanta and using the Augmented Reality (AR) Trail Guide, a mobile application designed by Isaac Kulka for the Argon Browser (Figure 1). The application offers two views: a now familiar Google-style map, with points of interest marked on its surface, and an AR view, which shows these points located in space. You see the map view when you hold the screen parallel to the ground; when you turn the phone up to look at the world, you get the AR view with the points of interest floating in space in front of you. This simple gesture of raising the phone changes your relationship to the information. You pass from a fully symbolic form of representation to a form of perceiving symbolic information as part of your visual environment. The AR Trail Guide, developed in the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech [1], illustrates a new realm in AR design that goes beyond current commercial applications. In this article, we discuss some of these new areas, such as designing for experiences in cultural heritage, personal expression, and entertainment. At the same time, we want to address a larger issue. ACM interactions has often been a place for exploring new paradigms and the relevance for interaction design of unusual approaches from other disciplines. In that spirit, we pose the question: Can the humanistic discipline of media studies play a useful role in interaction design? Media studies looks at the history of media and their relationship to culture, and we will focus here on digital media and their relationship to other media, both present and past. Looking at digital media in a historical context is relevant because of the dynamic relationship between "traditional" media (film, television, radio, print) and their digital remediations. How can media studies be made to contribute to the productive work of interaction design? We believe one answer lies in using the historical understanding gained through media studies to develop a kind of media aesthetics that can guide designers as they explore new forms of digital media such as the mobile augmented reality application described above.