At this moment it’s hip to use AR on your smart phone. Handy, but I think affordable small headsets will spring to life on the streets within years. Instead of staring at a computer or smart phone screen, you’ll stand in the middle of the action. The city will reveal (new) information to you, right before your eyes.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It’s the overlaying of digital data on the real world. By contrast, ‘virtual reality’ replaces the real-world with a simulated one.

A lot of cities use AR, a great way to imagine new spaces or buildings. Project developers can literally ‘show’ us how the future will look like. Not by looking at a flat screen or reading a technical drawing from an architect, but by projecting a clear image ‘in’ the current environment. This method will change urban planning because city planners see the impact of their changes. Also, architects get better insights because they can scale their buildings, making them bigger and smaller.

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, but we can also help the eye. Let’s add AR to a beautiful piece of cultural heritage, a medieval pottery for example. Let’s add music of the time, extra information in text or as virtual image, the area in which the old bowl has been made or a depiction of the original decoration. Our AR Lab had a three months exhibition in Boijmans van Beuningen on this theme: called Sgrafitto in 3D.

AR is an addition to the real world. You look with your own eyes. Although I don’t like the name AR, maybe a term like ‘mixed reality’ is better.

Mobile’s next big thing is all about overlays. Several games fuse the virtual and physical worlds. While 2008 – 2009 were the high days of the AR information apps, the technique was still a bit young and inaccurate for the development of games. In 2011 more and more games enter the market. The wave of new games released on the Layar-mobile phone platform last year is called the second generation layers.

In 2010 the team of PICNIC – a conference about sustainable creativity and new media in Amsterdam – launched a very interesting AR game. While the goal of the game seems a bit boring and simple – ‘Answer a string of questions to discover the city of Amsterdam’ – the main goal was to help international visitors discover new places and alleys in the city centre. Players described the game as addictive and were constantly looking for new and unknown places.

What is from the past, we can relive and nowadays visualize with AR. Although not perfect, it’s still in the experimental phase, we can replace new buildings with the former buildings or open space. Look through your smart phone and it will add a virtual environment. The NAI has done a good job.

We perceive the real world and we see virtual images at the same time. This is Augmented Reality (AR)

Yolande Kolstee runs the Dutch AR Lab in The Hague: a group of artists, designers, scientist, technologists and students, who share the love to explore and research the strange and exiting bond of virtuality and reality. She helds the post of Lector (researcher) in the field of Innovative Visualisation Techniques in Art Education at the Royal Academy of Art.