Keynote exploring how World AR could give us a heightened spatial intelligence, and what that means for how we connect with the cities and places we move through.
If augmented reality could annotate the world in real time — overlaying history, infrastructure, ecological data, the invisible patterns of how people move and gather — what would that do to our relationship with place? Would we become more attentive to our surroundings, or more mediated from them?
The talk draws on examples from architecture, cartography, and early AR research to argue that the most interesting thing about World AR isn't the overlay — it's the attention it demands. Held up to a place, AR is also a tool for noticing: what's there, what was there, what's changing.
Delivered as a keynote at Beyond Conference, Belfast, 2021.