AR Site Specific Design. Percepire la città aumentata

Our streets are filled with information. Advertising posters, bus shelters, screens that project news, artistic displays, temporary events. Cities, especially from this perspective, are constantly changing and accelerating, in line with the contemporary trend of input overload and consequent reduction in the amount of attention we pay to each of them. In this scenario, the evolution of Augmented, Virtual or Mixed Reality technologies allows the opening of a range of new possibilities and interactions with spaces. We tend to refer to these technologies in their application to confined environments, such as private houses or museums. However, open and public spaces offer a possibility of interaction and experimentation that is increasingly being taken into consideration by designers and artists who make these technologies their expressive channel. If we expected to find ourselves wearing articulated headsets and futuristic glasses 24 hours a day, we were disappointed. Smartphones, however, are the means, the window through which our reality merges with its digital counterpart, giving shape to new immersive experiences that have the power to radically transform our perception of what surrounds us. This type of site-specific installations is attracting the attention of many artists but also of companies such as Apple, which is preparing to launch a series of temporary virtual reality installations near its stores in major US cities. An equally interesting experience concerns a Google initiative, carried out in collaboration with the well-known Milanese data visualization studio Accurat: Building Hopes is a free application that allows each of us to create and leave around our cities permanently virtual “totems” that represent our expectations and hopes represented as colored “balancing rocks”. The paper aims to analyze these innovative forms of expression reflecting on their potential to change the perception of public places and to favor new and unexpected uses, with the support of an approach to design open to immersion and interaction with end users, that become an integral part of these experiences and their output on the territory.