Page 12 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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These two fields – virtual and augmented reality – have provided a new space and an opportunity for those involved in creating culture. To cite the most obvious example, those who compile travel guides can now prepare new kinds of content that, superimposed on cities and people by an optical device, give visitors the maximum amount of detail on the place they are visiting.
Recreations of virtual reality, whether super- imposed on actual reality or not, also open
up a different field of creation, from the most obvious artistic generation of objects, buildings, cities, landscapes and worlds in 3D to a more sophisticated use of these objects for consumers and citizens. The potential for education is also evident – the capacity to introduce new devel- opments in 3D for learning tasks has soared.
These two fields – virtual and augmented reality – have provided a new space and an opportunity for those involved in creating culture.
We have arrived at an overlap of new layers of information both cultural and service orientated in our urban landscapes. Meanwhile, the videog- ame sector goes beyond the more conventional, taking advantage of these machines’ capacities with processors that all of us have in our pock- ets. In this way, games such as Pokemon Go have managed to integrate a fantasy world, with characters, stories and places to play, into the world’s cities, thereby turning streets into safaris with fictitious animals ‘hunted’ in one shot by hurling virtual ‘Poké balls’, while running around the main monuments of a neighborhood where the best hunting pieces are likely to be situated. The imagination that the videogame industry has for exploiting all the sensors in a cell phone previously mentioned in this article cannot be compared with the cultural sector which usually does a simple dump of scarcely modified content created analogically on the new communication channels.
The world of education4 is also being inundated by new kinds of teaching aids related to aug- mented and virtual reality, which are giving
very good academic results. Some are worth thousands and even million of dollars and others don’t hit on a sustainable business model because they are trying to introduce the old model as it is into a world where the rules have changed.
The new role of cultural buildings
It’s not just about the changes being brought to us by new cities connected by more information on the existing city or new cathedrals of data on the main urban landmarks. Classic experiences such as a visit to a conventional exhibition present significant changes in pubic behavior. Obviously museums, for example, have audio guides that can be listened to through your own cell phone, not to mention multiple Google searches related to the paintings and sculptures in the collection; each visitor is carrying a potential guide on their person. But there are other aspects of a visit that have undergone big changes. Many people want to leave a record of their experience in a museum or at a concert and in these cases – if the etiquette barrier weren’t so huge – we would see thousands of people taking a selfie in front of the orchestra in a classical concert, the same as we are now seeing in the Prado museum in front of Goya’s The Di- sasters of War. This phenomenon has gone even further and is being used by certain artists who are creating entire exhibitions or part of their exhibition specifically for visitors to take photos. At the end of 2017, Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition Infinity Rooms, in which you had 30 seconds to take a photo with your cell phone in a room filled with mirrors, was being talked about around the world. El País’ SModa magazine wrote5, “Since February, thousands of people have succumbed to the charms of Yayoi’s infinity rooms and the possibilities of photographic play afforded by the artistic installation filled with mirrors, LED lights and figures bearing the hallucinogenic spots that
THE NEW CONNECTED CITIES AND CULTURE · MARIO TASCÓN
Digital Trends in Culture