Augmenting reality for augmented reality

There are two competing narratives for the future of computationally augmented spaces. On the one hand, we have the Internet of Things [1], where the narrative is one of making our environments more aware of us and of themselves, and generally making everything “smarter” through embedded computation, sensing, and actuation. On the other hand, we have current approaches to augmented or mixed reality, in which the space remains unchanged and instead we hack our perception of the space by superimposing a layer of media between us and the world [2,3]. In this article we present examples of three projects that seek to merge these two approaches by creating and fabricating playful material elements that can be integrated with camera-based AR systems but that are independently meaningful objects in their own right. We argue that this new wave of physically grounded AR technologies constitutes the first steps toward a hybridized digital/physical future that can transform our world.