A Walk on the Frontier of Art, Where the Sky Is the Limit
Aery, a new augmented reality platform tailored to digital art exhibitions.
On the iPad, a constellation of a rose appeared, at an angle in the sky and topped by a crown, as Mr. Humann intended.
For me — someone who looks at art for a living, but also avoids downloading new apps — experiencing three exhibitions of augmented reality art over a couple of weeks was a crossing of a threshold, one that more and more people will experience in the years ahead.
“It’s going to have a huge impact on the art world,” said Jay Van Buren, who, as chief executive and co-founder of the tech company Membit, helped create Aery, a joint venture between Membit and the real estate firm Related Companies. “Artists can do anything with it,” Mr. Van Buren said.
She likened the technology to a kiln or a paint brush: In the big picture, it is simply another way for an artist to create. “It’s a fabrication tool,” Ms. Sade said. “It’s a medium.”
In the same way that most sculptors do not cast a piece in bronze themselves — that work is done by experts at a foundry, to the artist’s specifications — Ms. Sade sent her photographs to Mr. Van Buren to be turned into augmented reality.
...to get each piece to appear, I pointed the phone at an object, usually a sign, part of process that the company calls “anchoring.”
The art is calibrated based on the position of you and the anchor, and when you have lined up the phone and the sign correctly you feel a slight vibration in the phone that the company calls “haptic feedback.”
For now, augmented reality seems to be getting more play among fine artists than virtual reality. As Mr. Van Buren put it, “AR loops you in more firmly to the place where you are, rather than taking you away into another world.”
Mr. Michelson said that the idea of multiple people holding up their phones to see his works at the same time also made him think of the technology’s “social possibilities.”
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/arts/augmented-reality-exhibitions.html