Keynote exploring how World AR could give us a heightened spatial intelligence, and what that would do to the way we move through cities.
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?
Drawing on architecture, cartography and early AR research, the talk argues that the overlay matters less than 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.