Augmented Reality and Phenomenology

Augmented reality is one of the most innovative technologies of our time and it pursues a fascinating goal: to merge the digital and the real world together. The aims of this thesis are to improve its design and to study its knock-on effects on our everyday world and on our living body. Augmented reality does not need an engineeristic approach only, but it also calls for theoretical studies on perception in order to reach its goal. The thesis uses phenomenology in order to tackle this topic from a perceptual point of view because the focal point of this branch of philosophy is to analyse how the subject perceives and so it helps to understand how the subject is perceptually captivated by this new technology. Moreover, by studying how augmented reality interacts with the subject, it is possible to provide the characteristics this technology must have in order to be a completely new technology without reducing it to mimic “old” kinds of technologies, such as ubiquitous computing. The thesis demonstrates that augmented reality has to produce digital objects instead of displaying information about the surrounding world. It shows that the objects should be perceived in a “transparent” way and it displays the parameters to be followed in order to achieve such a transparency producing a device which can easily become part of the subject’s living body. Only by following this path can augmented reality merge the digital and the real world together and become a new technology different from the previous one. Augmented reality has to create “digital materiality”. The second aim of the work is related to the knock-on effects yielded by this new technology and they are analysed thanks to a phenomenological aspect as well. Phenomenology does not take technology as an isolated being, but it considers technology deeply interconnected with the subject and the world. Therefore, this conception makes it possible to study how these terms are modified by the variation of one of them because they are intrinsically related. More specifically the introduction of a new technology changes inevitably what the subject and the world are because they are strictly intertwined due to this threefold relation in which they are enmeshed. My work shows how technology in general deeply moulds our living body and our everyday world by shaping what we consider their most natural and primal bases. Therefore, augmented reality will not have knock-on effects concerning what lies on the surface of our life only, but it will deeply affect the most basic core of our living body and our everyday world too. In conclusion it is clear that augmented reality has to produce “digital materiality” and that such a creation will yield the knock-on effects of turning our world into a world dwelt even by digital beings. Tomorrow’s world will be composed of digital matter along with the common one.