DESIGN FOR EMERGING MEDIA

Design for Emerging Media: How MR Designers Think about Storytelling, Process, and Defining the Field

Cross-Reading

It feels natural and obvious that Rouse and Barba work together after Rouse amongst others built up on Barbas text „A Scale Model of Mixed Reality“ (2011) in 2015 with „MRx: an interdisciplinary framework for mixed reality experience design and criticism“

Here are a bunch of quotes after having somewhat cross-read both articles (2011 and 2015) mentioned above:

* Relevance: MR experiences „are receiving new attention from researchers in communities outside the core technical community that has traditionally done MR related research“ (Barba 2011, 117)

* Relevance: AR and MR „have captured the interest of a variety of fields in the humanities, arts and design. Each field brings its own history, vocabulary and perspective to bear on design and criticism. (Rouse et. al. 2015, 176)

* Motivation: „Such growth is a healthy and necessary step in the evolution of new media, and has historical precedent in the adoption of other media forms associated with film, television, and the web (Barba 2011, 117)

* Motivation: We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of Milgrams definition (Rouse et. al. 2015, 175)

* Approach: The current model of MR experiences is rooted in its history as a collection of technologies. Hower, MR begins to play a larger role in mediating human experience. (Barba 2011, 117)

* Status Quo 2015: Barba et. al. have presented a famework – „a starting point for a humanistic engagement that we will extend (Rouse et. al. 2015, 177)

* Approach: Questions like this should be addressed „How do the media forms of AR/MR relate to former media practices, such as writing and performance? How do these new formats extend, reenvision, or supersede former practices?“ (Rouse et. al. 2015, 176) #mediaarcheology or „What are the social and political implications of AR/MR as an extension of other formal or informal social groups, etc.“ #society

* Approach: We identify the concept of spatial scale as a central, and largely unconcious, component of MR (Barba 2011, 117)

* Background: Milgram and Kishino: MR == continuum between two extremes of purely physical reality and completely virtual reality, importantly characterized by their method of „display“, usually visual. Foundational work but a number of shortcomings… The conception of MR must be broadened… (Barba 2011, 118)

* Background: Majority of previous work can be divided into two categories 1) research on enabling technologies, computer graphics and tracking and 2) evaluation of users abilities to accomplish tasks. Such work does not fully engage the experiential dimension of the technology and how it fits in the wider context of everyday practices. (Rouse et. al. 2015, 176)

* Definition: From Azumas definition, that specifies three criteria…to a working definition of MR with following five elements: mapped, embodied, spatial, temporal, framed: Mixed Reality maps physical and virtual elements into a hybrid frame of reference that mediates interactions in time and space(Barba 2011, 120)

* Definition: „Milgram´s and Azuma´s technical definitions were developed in a period when AR was an experimental technology. They are not suited to capturing the experiential aspect of AR or MR as they move beyond the research lab and becomes part of everyday media culture.“ (Rouse et. al. 2015, 177)

* Milgram and Azuma are centered on the screen, understood as a technology for combining two radically different types of information (virtual and physical). The Barb-MacIntyre approach is centered instead on the user as a perceiving and embodied subject. They have given us a cognitive lens through which to measure MR experience design. We will propose three additional lenses. We extend Barb-MacInyre to take into account the cultural and social dimensionsof MR experiences. We focus on the quality of the experience and only secondarily by the mediating technology (Rouse et. al. 2015, 177) Short intermezzo: What would McLuhan say?

*MRx instead of MR. MRx are hybrid, deeply locative and often site specific and esthetic, performative and/or social. Our interdisciplinary framework is not intended as a replacement but rather as a complement to the technical work or AR and MR computing communities. In order to get a more nuanced understanding. (Rouse et. al. 2015, 180) Short intermezzo: Okay, but is it useful?