Cara Heitz, ASTE’s 2012 Alaska Teacher of the Year, views ARt
through her iPad at the 2013 ASTE conference in Anchorage.
Hand-drawn images link to a video of the students creating
them underwater.
of ways. A piece of artwork by first
grader Mia triggered a video of her
holding up her artwork and explaining how and why she created it. In
another example, a logo created by a
high school design class triggered a
one-minute time-lapse video they recorded about their design process.
ARtwork triggers more ARtwork. There
were unique examples of this, most of
which happened totally on screen. For
instance, some students created two
self-portraits with exaggerated facial
expressions. The first portrait on the
wall triggered a second virtual one,
and both came together on the screen,
facing each other, engaged in an inner
dialogue.
In another display, a teacher took
photos of her students and asked them
to modify them in two ways: digi-
tally with Photoshop and in RL using
markers. Scanning the original photo
on the wall triggered the Photoshop
version to appear on the screen, and
touching the screen brought forward
the marker version, generating a piece
with multiple layers that showed the
progression of the artwork.
The Future of ARt
I was fortunate to have Canadian
communications and media theory
philosopher Marshall McLuhan as
a teacher during the 1970s. Two observations of his seem particularly
salient when it comes to ARt:
When we create a new medium, we tend
to first fill it with the content of the old.
That’s why some of the earliest movies
were recordings of plays. Eventually,
pioneers emerge who realize that the
new medium offers unique opportunities for expression, and that’s when
it finally comes into its own.
I see this happening now with ARt.
At the moment, we are using this new
medium to explore a blend of new
and old expression, but we are just
scratching the surface of the kinds of
art we can make that is unique to the
AR world. We just need more creative
minds to continue to move it forward.
“The medium is the message.” In other
words, the medium shapes what we
can say with it. This turned out to be
true as we watched the gallery visitors
view ARtwork using devices of different screen sizes. Some things that look
good on a tablet don’t have the same
clarity and detail on the smaller screen
of a smartphone, so ARt producers
have to decide how to address that
when planning a project. I decided
to use both the RL and VR canvases
(the wall and the screen) and to lean
toward optimizing the ARt gallery installation for iPads. This worked well
because our ARt gallery installations
were at technology conferences, where
many attendees had iPads. But in
other situations, this might not be the
