Comments on: Reality Augmented: Birdsong Identification Tour https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/04/21/reality-augmented-birdsong-identification-tour/ Clarify Today, Design Tomorrow Fri, 18 Aug 2017 18:01:37 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.1 By: Lyn Jeffery https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/04/21/reality-augmented-birdsong-identification-tour/#comment-476 Fri, 01 May 2009 20:55:24 +0000 http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/?p=3243#comment-476 Nice, nice post. Thank you for sharing the birdsong experience. Augmented reality? Of course. At IFTF’s Blended Reality conference last fall, Walter Greenleaf (http://greenleafinstitute.org/Walter%20Greenleaf.html) talked about how little it takes to stimulate the human imagination to fill in the gaps between grounded reality and other experiences. In fact you don’t need 3D 360 degree VR caves (nothing wrong with them, of course), but can take people to all kinds of new places by simply using some sounds and some crude images. He does this via a screen, but it doesn’t have to be done that way. It’s about the wonderful (or horrible, I suppose, depending on what you are trying to do) suggestibility of the human mind.

I definitely want my reality augmented with birds and their songs–whether they are cardboard cut-outs or holograms or flesh and blood animals. But maybe that’s just me. If you asked, probably a lot of people wouldn’t want birds in their augmented realities at all, unless they were bigger, better, faster, scarier, more colorful, etc., than the birds who were already there.

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