New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

One Magic Leap For Mankind: Is this visual platform the magic bullet to remote learning?

The pedagogical shift from classrooms to chatrooms, exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic, has changed education—for better and worse. This blog post seeks to explore some of these issues and how Magic Leap 1, which is a wearable head-mounted AR...

By Paul Bugeja on 10/21/20 Comments Off

It’s a Small World – Oculus’ Quest 2 Redefine Distance

Oculus Quest 2, Facebook’s latest wireless Virtual Reality (VR) headset, was released in September 2020. Similar to its predecessor Oculus Quest, the gadget has been largely used for gaming, however this is not where the possibilities end. According to...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing, and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024. Many of...

By Max Rogall on 10/23/18 Comments Off

Googley Eyes

Microsoft is doing it (Hololens), Apple is doing it (Apple AR), Facebook is doing it (Facebook AR Studio) and last but not least, Google is doing it. Augmented Reality is the future of computing and all the big companies want to be the leader on this new market (The...

By Max Roest on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Hello, we’re from the internet: “Hacking” museum spaces using AR

A description of Augmented Reality as we know it today first appeared in 1901, when L. Frank Baum’s sci-fi novel called “The Master Key” was published. In this book, Baum describes the workings of a so-called ‘Character Marker.’...

By Aranka Kooi on 09/24/18 Comments Off

AR – the Way to Go When Art is Lost in a Fire?

The inferno that recently destroyed over 90% of Brazil’s National Museum’s collection has once again shown how ephemeral physical objects are. In order to preserve cultural heritage museums generate digital archives, but what about exhibiting lost art? Is augmented...

By Lisa Schlichting-G.E. on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Big tech goes to war over Augmented reality (AR) dominance

In the year between June 2016 and June 2017, AR went from being a fun optional technology in a handful apps - like Pokémon GO – to becoming a vital part of the future strategy for every technology company...

By Ståle Grut on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Who owns the playground?: Urban gamification and spatial politics in Pokémon GO

“Sydney park destroyed as thousands of Pokémon Go players descend” wrote Irish news website TheJournal.ie on the first of August. This is just one example of a situation wherein Niantic’s popular augmented reality game Pokémon GO puts a considerable...

By Stefani Mans on 11/14/16 Comments Off

Pokémon Go: A Blueprint for Augmented Reality?

July 2016, a cultural zeitgeist dating back to the 90s was unleashed upon the world with renewed and unprecedented vigour. Pokémon Go fever swept the world – at its peak in mid-July, it was estimated that over 45 million (Griffiths)...

By Rhubini Kunasegaran on 09/19/16 Comments Off

Microsoft HoloLens: A jump into Augmented Reality

Sci-Fi movies have teased the public for years with their in-movie holographic technology, which seemed, in our time, so far away. Think of holograms in the Star Wars movies and Tom Cruise’s home videos in Minority Report (2002). But...

By Sabina B. on 09/19/16 Comments Off

Augmented reality; Pokémon in the real world

After 20 years, The Pokémon Company announced the release of its latest project. A new mobile game called Pokémon Go, produced in collaboration with Nintendo and Niantic. The game will be available in 2016 for iOs and Android. For...

By Kimberly Leerkes on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Here, kitty kitty: Interactive Cat Street View Map

Cats are everywhere. They are on the streets, in our houses, our social media feeds, in magazines and Purrcast, YouTube videos, festivals and even on clothing. If you haven’t noticed, cats are a very popular part of internet culture...

By Xeniya Kondrat on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Design your own reality with Stiktu

Recently, Dutch software-firm Layar introduced Stiktu, an application that lets users be creative with augmented reality. The app runs on iPhone and Android platforms and aims to be the next best thing in social media, blurring the boundaries between...

By Robert Silvis on 10/05/12 2

Augmented Reality and Extending the virtual

The idea that the world is confined with boarders and barriers is slowly evolving to an open space during this globalizing age, without for example passport controls on the ground in the EU. The utopian idea of the world...

By Anne-Claire Verheul on 09/14/12 2

Netexplorateur Observatory. Talking about Crowdmash, VirtuRéalité and Webego…

Tuesday 25th of October I went to see a conference in Brussels of The Netexplorateur Observatory at Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales (IHECS). This observatory is formed of sociologists that analyse hundreds of innovation in the area...

By Aurelie Ghalim on 11/02/11 Comments Off

Interview with Hein Wils: Stedelijk Museum and ARtours

In January 2010 the Stedelijk Museum’s ARtours project started. Hein Wils (43) leads this augmented reality project and is also involved in everything that works with mobility. The project will end by March 2012, but he remains employed as...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 10/31/11 Comments Off

App Review: Wikitude

With the introduction of AR (augmented reality) software and its implementation into mobile devices there has been a considerable rise in apps that use such geo-location and AR features. One of these apps is ‘Wikitude‘ developed by the Austrian...

By Philip Breek on 10/09/11 Comments Off

App Review: Stiktu (Beta)

…is a new (not yet released) augmented reality app for Android and iPhone by the makers of Layar. It enables users to attach (‘stick’) texts and images to ‘real-life’ objects, whether it is a book, a pack of cigarettes,...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 10/08/11 Comments Off

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken...

By Kendall Grady on 09/25/11 Comments Off

The virtuality debate

Media mention the term frequently: virtual. Think of virtual worlds (Second Life), gaming environments (World of Warcraft) or simply social network sites (Facebook). Those are places that don’t exist in a physical, touchable form, except from the hosting servers....

By Erik van Mastrigt on 09/15/11 1

The Naked Eye: Toward an Object-Oriented Ontology in the Literature of Tao Lin

On being seen naked in the bathroom by his pet cat, Derrida likens the feline’s stare to “… the gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person,” (372). I am compelled to thwart such clairvoyance by putting my...

By Kendall Grady on 09/15/11 8

A(n Ever)note from the train

There’s something remarkable about the interaction between man and machine (and vice versa). Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams both had their own view in this classic debate about the social shaping of technology versus the technological shaping of society....

By Bree Tahapary on 09/14/11 1

Augmented reality: the first steps to a society of control?

Layla van Daalen, Chris Hoogeveen, Hanneke Mertens Every aspect of the world has an extra layer of information. It may not always be obvious, but these extra layers are most certainly present. Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis describe these...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 03/13/11 2

What are the trends in e-learning?

While I was wondering about the right topic of my master thesis, I was thinking of technologies that might have the biggest impact on e-learning in the future. That means, that I don’t want to write about Second Life...

By Anne Lukas on 11/01/10 2