Indeed, according to the definition established by Kevin Chang, Avatar, or film as such, does not categorically fit the “augmented reality” brand. But I hadn’t heard of AR before reading about the strong marketing use of AR for Avatar-related products. It struck me while watching the movie that AR, at least theoretically, plays a major role in the conception of the Avatar storyline: you pointed out that onscreen there’s a lot of AR going on.

AR hasn’t reached the level it is prognosticated to be at in scenes taken from Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” where Tom Cruise is accosted by holograms and 3D advertisements without the use of a worn device; so far, our only experience of AR is possible through a computer, television, camera, or theater screen or webcam. In this respect, Avatar fits the AR brand since we’re being fed a product (the Avatar movie concept itself) through the conceptual manifestation — in place of the actual use — of mixed reality (human life interacting with CGI, onscreen and off).

I am inclined to believe that AR would not have achieved its current relevance if not for the metaphorical presence of film, which historically has paved the way, beyond the passage of photographic art, for our perception of reality to be augmented by a directorial manipulation of its primordial elements. The soul of cinema lies in the edit, the cut, and even when a scene does not cut, it is this intentionality that allows what is being seen to continue and endure — to remain a human decision. Film is a mixed composite of what we perceive to be scenes from the “real” (with human actors and sometimes, especially in contemporary world films, real geographic settings) overlaid with directorial decisions. These decisions are more often than not hidden perceptions of an inquisitive or allusive nature: watching film, as in reading its text, in search of what the author intends to do or is in fact performing.

Thanks to computer technology, the hidden intentionality that traditionally has made an art of photography and film is now made naked and visible: AR is aesthetic or utilitarian intention made visible. (AR is something like footnotes suddenly rising up and draping the text of a book with highlighted background and foreground minutiae, somehow simplifying the text by making it less allusive, yet more dense with annotation.) I would call this gross visibility or demystification of cinema, if you allow my theoretical posturing, to be the conceptual birth of AR and what it will bring to us.

All of this is just smoke and theory; at bottom, AR introduced to me a novel platform for analyzing Avatar without having to be snide or negative about its bluster and fatuity. Avatar may not be a great film, but it certainly is symptomatic of what mainstream filmgoers are coming to expect from cinema at the behest of our technologies. AR then would have much to do with film because it is indirectly modifying our expectations of what cinema can do. As you noted, AR’s gone a long way from just being a Boeing project that makes it “easier to assemble large bundles of electric wire for aircraft on the factory floor.” Utility has upgraded to metaphor.

The best talk on augmented reality I’ve seen: Kevin Chang of Twitter, comic behind OK/Cancel.

http://kevnull.com/2010/02/augmented-reality-is-it-real-should-we-care.html

What is AR, what is not AR, some cool examples of where it is going.

The definition of AR is certainly expanding, but I’m not sure where film fits in all of it. Nice article, though

and the boat-sloughing shadows
together or against each other and the way

two guys went with a girl, which recurred
every time we tried too

to feed love’s lymphatics
the spray of the sea; ocean violence

in our silent hearts and contesting and young
we met competing for a girl

until we saw in each other
the same envious narcissisms and saw

eventually we’d do better as friends,
winding in and through failure

because nobody really cares
when with a friend– those days sprawl

to a summer whenever and moreso as suns
burden early on the wharf.

Beyond the insightful articles about its technological groundbreaking, I was disappointed that Holywood-cheese philosophy remains completely in tact throughout.

The film is grotesquely pantheistic. Odd spiritual sorties are in keeping with a pagan, magical world of make-
believe. There is no wisdom in Pandora’s box, no rational context to the existence of the blue monkeys beyond keeping a big tree alive. Where modern man has erred in excesses and abuses of his natural resources, we are presented with a thesis which in many ways eradicates Man altogether and delivers him to a ‘better’ more perfect existence (which is utter nonsense as no intelligent man should swap ‘himself’ in favour of becoming a blue monkey.

I’ll keep this one short!
But I enjoyed the flick regardless as the artistry that went into making it is palpable.