This STS Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant supports research to develop an empirical understanding of communities that create and advance augmented reality technologies, meaning any technology that combines real and virtual objects, superimposed in real time and in three-dimensional space such as Google's Project Glass. Many such devices have already emerged promising dramatic transformation across multiple domains such as medicine, tourism, education, manufacturing, national security, law enforcement, and entertainment. To date, however, there has been little empirical research into the communities that create and advance this technology.
Intellectual Merit
The project will map out future visions being advanced by four distinct stakeholder groups important to the production of augmented reality technologies: Academic developers, trade lobbyists, governing organizations, and the media. The project will examine how promises about the future are created and articulated, how these different stakeholder groups interact with each other, and how they attempt to persuade one another to align behind certain visions. The research will utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods; in doing so, it will integrate approaches from communication, sociology, STS, and policy analysis. The goal is to understand the discursive and institutional work that surrounds a rapidly emerging technology and how these promises are created, debated, circulated, and inscribed in the technology.
Broader Impacts
Interrogating the claims that shape technology will shed light a number of issues including how ethical, social, and political commitments get built into the discourse surrounding the development of augmented reality technologies, and the processes involved in creating these futures. Doing so will serve to provide new conceptual and empirical resources that can be used to improve science and technology policy and implementation, specifically in assessing the risks and benefits of emerging technologies and potential regulation of the content, access, and use of information technologies. It will also help educate practitioners and the public about the potential benefits and pitfalls of augmented reality technologies.
This project examined the community of stakeholders that are developing and pushing technologies that enable 'augmented reality' (AR) experiences. AR, depicted in Hollywood films like Terminator or Iron Man, refers to any digital overlay on top of the physical world that is real-time and occurring in three dimensional space. Our specific objectives were to shed light on the following questions: 1) How do ethical, social, and political commitments get built into the discourse of AR development and what is the process for creating these futures? 2) What pressures and motivations do different stakeholders in emerging technology face, and how do they shape the futures and promises they advance? 3) How do these groups communicate and interact, and where are the sites of meaning-making, sense-making, and aligning of perspectives? The broader goal was to build on our empirical understanding of AR development and potentially inform public policy and regulations about the technology. We believe our findings and outcomes were successful in meeting these objectives. Through participant observation of a series of domestic and international conferences on standards, industry, and academic research, supplemented by interviews with key leaders in the AR community, we highlighted several important findings that contribute to our knowledge of an emerging technology and the future possibilities of AR technology. First we documented a contestation within the AR community over the form AR should take, whether it should be accessed through mobile devices or headworn devices. The contestation is over the physical premise of the technology, not just as small adjustments over features; a longstanding vision of head worn devices is running up against a tantalizingly new and tangible alternative of mobile devices. The ongoing clash over the technological, market, and normative futures of each form reveals not only the stakes of the struggle and the concerns each coalition, but also helps to explain how social issues end up embedded into the design of the technology. Second, we found stakeholders within the AR community engaging in a fierce debate over the very definition of 'what is AR,' and therefore over the community itself, who belongs, and who has authority to speak for the technology. Different groups are advancing and defending different criteria for what constitutes AR; these represent attempts to include and exclude certain technologies outright, as well as marking the actors associated with them as inside or outside of the community. Third, we found an emerging relationship in the AR industry between AR companies and marketing/advertising firms, which has resulted in tangible changes in the technological capabilities of AR and continues to influence the priorities of AR companies developing these technologies. Lastly, we found an ongoing standards contestation taking place within the AR community, as the industry struggles to standardize the tools and markup languages necessary to create AR experiences. In doing so, they embed certain possibilities and presumptions into these standards and exclude others, which will also shape what is possible through AR moving forward. All of these findings speak to how these early groups are advocating for and developing particular versions of AR, which we believe will shape the immediate direction of the technologies and is a prerequisite to understanding its possible social impacts and potentially regulating the technology. There have been several outcomes that came out of this project. The first is a paper published in the journal New Media & Society, entitled: "Layar-ed places: Using mobile augmented reality to tactically reengage, reproduce, and reappropriate public space." That piece was about how emerging AR technologies may allow people to create augmentations in place that might alter our perceptions of place and practices in particular places. Another piece, specific to the burgeoning marketing relationship in AR, has been accepted and is forthcoming in the journal Information, Communication, and Society. Other manuscripts reporting findings from this data are in preparation, and will be submitted soon. Lastly, as a direct result of the data collected in this grant, the Co-PI was able to complete and defend his dissertation and obtain his Ph.D, before going on to take a position at Temple University in the Department of Media Studies and Production.
