Augmenting reality for augmented reality

elements that can be integrated with camera-based AR systems but that are independently meaningful objects in their own right. We argue that this new wave of physically grounded AR technologies constitutes the first steps toward a hybridized digital/physical future that can transform our world. The technology space of augmented reality (AR), sometimes characterized using the more general term mixed reality, is one of the more exciting frontiers to emerge from HCI research in recent years [3]. However, like many frontiers, it is chaotic, overhyped, and misunderstood. In the absence of existing best practices to guide development of this new design space, a number of competing visions have taken hold, each of which seeks to colonize the future of our digitally augmented world. Microsoft's version of this future is embodied by the HoloLens, an untethered standalone visor running Windows 10 that superimposes translucent " holographic " overlays into the center of a user's field of view. HoloLens feels like the big brother to Google's Glass project, which traded computing power and graphical fidelity for mobility. Glass was designed to be worn in daily life, a decision that didn't factor in the social consequences of wearing a highly visible digital surveillance There are two competing narratives for the future of computationally augmented spaces. On the one hand, we have the Internet of Things [1], where the narrative is one of making our environments more aware of us and of themselves, and generally making everything " smarter " through embedded computation, sensing, and actuation. On the other hand, we have current approaches to augmented or mixed reality, in which the space remains unchanged and instead we hack our perception of the space by superimposing a layer of media between us and the world [2,3]. In this article we present examples of three projects that seek to merge these two approaches by creating and fabricating playful material