Alice Through an AR Looking Glass
Exploring AR as a New Art Form
The first publicly shown film, in 1895, was essentially a product demo. No one yet knew how to tell a story with moving pictures. The earliest films were locked-down, silent, single shots — a camera pointed at a train, at dancers, at animals at play. There was no edit, no pan, no zoom. Filmmakers had to invent the vocabulary of film before cinema could become an art.
Augmented reality is in those same early days. AR is spatial, interactive, multi-disciplinary, and nonlinear — it asks for a language all its own. And that is precisely what makes it exciting.
A Wonderland Worth Building In The Marblehead Arts Association's "Alice in Wonderland Gala" was the ideal place to experiment. I built a door into Wonderland in augmented reality and invited the costumed guests to step through it: Alice Through an AR Looking Glass.
Composing in a New Medium This wasn't a single effect but a layered world. I combined Lewis Carroll's own words, John Tenniel's original book illustrations, music, 3D models, animations, and a scattering of literary references hidden for those who look closely. None of these elements is new on its own — but assembling them into a spatial experience that lives in the room around you is something only AR can do.
Inventing the Vocabulary of AR Like those early filmmakers pointing a camera at a train, we're still borrowing from the languages we already know — film, app design, video gaming — while we discover what is intrinsic to AR. Every problem solved, every new thing attempted, adds a word to a vocabulary that doesn't fully exist yet. Alice, with her looking glass and her doorways into other worlds, turns out to be the perfect collaborator for that exploration.
Just Getting Started We're in the earliest days of this medium, and that's the thrill of it. There's a whole art form waiting to be written, and Alice Through an AR Looking Glass is one more experiment in learning its language.
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