Hello, I'm Rafael and I'm here to present our study of
augmented reality activism.
I worked with Erica Cruz from Carnegie Mellon University
as part of our internship at Snap
and we extended on research I did
at the University of Washington
in collaboration with Dayton Kelly.
We were mentored by Drs Daniela Rosner from the UW,
Andrés Monroy-Hernández,
and Fannie Liu at Snap.
In this presentation, I will be talking about:
our motivation and related work,
the methods that we used,
findings, open questions and opportunities,
and I will close with our contributions.
Before starting, I will clarify some of the
language that I will be using here.
We use the term augmented reality, or AR,
to refer to the technology that digitally embeds
visual and auditory information on physical environments.
We use the term activism
to refer to the act of promoting social change,
and the term creators,
to refer to the people who make AR projects for activism.
Now, I will be talking about the prior work
that motivated our research.
AR incubated for decades in research laboratories
before reaching mass consumer audiences
through millions of smartphones and apps like
Snapchat filters and Pokemon Go.
These developments created the
ideal conditions for a new form of activism
that uses consumer AR technology to promote social causes.
Examples of this type of activism includes:
the virtual defacement of corporate logos,
unofficial AR installations at museums,
and participating in protests through AR.
We draw from prior HCI work that concerns
blending online and offline action,
referred as hybrid activism.
This could be using online tools to support offline action,
or performing synchronous online and offline action,
as for example, attending a protest through telepresence
We view AR activism as a form of hybrid activism.
AR blends online and offline action in new ways
by digitally augmenting physical objects and locations
that are associated with social causes.
Researchers have suggested that,
by using AR in this way, activists could convey
more immersive messages for their causes,
while overcoming physical barriers, as such,
access to physical locations when protesting is not allowed,
or surreal situations like having cartoons walking in real life
Therefore, AR could be a low-cost, yet potentially
high-impact way, to achieve activists' goals.
Despite all this potential, we know little about
how people are actually using AR for activism,
including,
why do they choose it,
and what role it plays in achieving their goals?
Now, I will be talking about the methods
that we used to address those questions.
We recruited 20 participants
located in six countries,
that reported a variety of backgrounds, including
artists, community organizers, and engineers.
We conducted 60 minute
semi-structured interviews through video call,
where we asked about creators' rationale for using AR,
the influence of AR on their projects,
and their broader experiences with this technology.
After the interviews,
we ran an inductive qualitative data analysis
that resulted in the findings that I will be presenting next.
I will be focusing on a subset of our findings,
please read our paper for all the results.
We found that creators used AR in activism to...
reshape physical contexts,
to evoke emotional reactions,
and to mitigate risks associated with their actions.
First, creators used AR
to reshape elements of the physical environment,
such as public spaces and objects,
in order to help audiences envision and
contextualize their physical reality new ways
without having to physically change it.
For example, one creator described
how they used AR to reshape an university's public space,
by creating a virtual memorial for a sexual assault survivor,
when they faced significant hurdles
to creating a physical one on campus.
The project used AR to introduce, among other things,
a virtual plaque featuring a quote chosen by the survivor.
They shared that they found in AR
a lightweight means to modify the physical space,
according to their goals,
without needing the political or the physical power to do so.
In addition to modifying physical spaces,
creators also used AR's immersive quality
to evoke emotional reactions that encourage
audiences to critically engage with their projects.
For example, one creator's project
that addressed environmental justice,
required the audience to walk short distances,
virtually navigating through 3D scans of forests
to collect AR oxygen capsules,
and pieces of the narrative shared by the main character.
The experience relied on
the audience's body movements to build up its narrative.
The creator reflected on how they wanted
people to actually see the world
and found in AR a way to do that
by helping the audience connect more emotionally to the story
by moving their bodies,
instead of just sitting in front of a screen
and using a mouse to click through the narrative.
Creators also discussed how using AR for activism
reshapes the risks and consequences
typically associated with traditional activism.
As an example of associated risks,
consider this project where two creators worked together on
remotely modifying election campaign ads
to expose a corrupt government from a developing country.
They shared that if they had
physically painted the words on the posters,
instead of using AR,
they could be imprisoned or killed.
At the same time,
some people were concerned
about the legal uncertainties around AR.
For example,
a creator of a similar project on the Trump campaign
was concerned about where they
might overstep and get sued.
This shows that,
while AR has a lot of potential benefits to supporting activism,
there are still significant hurdles that
are associated with its novelty,
and lack of legal precedent.
These challenges bring us to key
open questions and opportunities in this area.
There are several that we discuss in the paper.
But for the purpose of this talk, I will briefly highlight two.
First, participants highlighted that
AR's potential for social change
lies less in the tools itself,
than in the institutional conditions
in which these tools are situated.
The uncertainty around laws relevant to AR activism
carries a potential for HCI to inform
equity and accountability policies to support creators,
such as collective management of platforms.
Second,
many participants found that either
they were able to, or wanted to, achieve higher quality
and more impactful projects
with interdisciplinary collaboration.
However, finding productive and respectful collaborations
can be challenging.
We encourage researchers, activists,
platform developers and organizations
to consider community-driven strategies
that emphasize long-term engagement
and participatory planning to address
some of these challenges.
In conclusion,
we contribute one of the first studies
detailing creators' experience with AR activism,
including how they use AR in activism
to reshape physical contexts,
to evoke emotional experiences,
and to mitigate risks and consequences.
From this, we also highlighted
opportunities for institutions and tools
to better support AR activism and its creators.
Thanks for watching and don't forget to check out our paper!