Hacking Conference Presentations with Augmented Reality

Academic meetings are changing, as groups such as “THATCamp” turn spectator events into participatory workshops. It’s just one of several ways in which we are hacking academic conferences.

At this year’s HASTAC meeting in Toronto, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes showed us a way to hack conferences while still holding onto the traditional presentation format. His presentation, “New Narratives: Augmented Reality Art, So What, Who Cares?”  was the first time I’d seen someone present through AR.

Rhodes is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. He works across disciplines to create experiences that challenge the borders between the real and the imaginary, documentary and narrative, the actual and the fictional.   He hit a homerun in Toronto.

While the technology (Snapdragon) was  simple, the elegance with which  Rhodes used it made his presentation extraordinarily effective.  Take a moment to see how he used AR to hack another conference presentation “AR on AR-Occupying Virtual Space-a presentation by GARhodes

I hope to see more of this in the future.  If you have any examples of similar presentations please let us know in the Comments section.

– Kevin