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Bruce Sterling Releases AR App For Aram Bartholl's Dead Drops

An app that helps you locate the hidden peer-to-peer flash drives in your city.

We write about Augmented Reality a lot here on The Creators Project blog, mainly because it’s such an exciting new medium with masses of potential. You could say the field is currently in a sandbox phase, where artists and technologists are playing around with the technical capabilities and having fun with the hybrid reality they enable. And It’s only going to become more integrated into our lives as the technology improves and the interface becomes as familiar as a QWERTY keyboard. But until we’re blessed with AR eye implants, the portability of smartphones is the ideal technology to explore the medium—using the front facing camera you just hold up the phone and then peer into this data enhanced wonderland.

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Someone who’s been writing about AR long before it even became an everyday reality is sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, so who wouldn’t be excited by the news that the writer, futurist and AR-seer has released his own mobile app? As “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena CA, he’s perfectly positioned to put his ideas into practice. "Sometimes it's easiest to teach by doing," said the novelist and design critic. "I used to write science fiction about Augmented Reality back when it was mostly imaginary. Now that it's become a real industry, I had to conjure some up for myself."

The app, called Dead Drops and written for the Layar platform, is in collaboration with Layar coder Menno Bieringa, Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl and Layar artist-in-residence Sander Veenhof (featured in our Tech Q&A last week).

"I wrote a contribution for a new book about Aram's artwork," says Sterling, "and I realized his Dead Drops network meshes perfectly with the Augmented Reality ideal. It's all about hidden data revealed in real-world, three-dimensional spaces. So, suddenly, I had a class project. Now I'm a registered Layar developer."

We’ve written about Bartholl’s Dead Drops previously, they’re flash drives hidden in public places where users can upload and download files. Bartholl's unique form of urban intervention is currently in the Talk to Me exhibition at New York’s MoMA and he’s also released a “How-To”, should you want to install one in your own city.

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Sterling's app helps users locate these hidden Dead Drops by letting you scan the nearby area, then you can hunt down the nearest drop using the information displayed on the screen. Wanting to test it for ourselves, we ventured out onto the streets near our London office. After searching for and then launching the app in Layar, and setting the search range at 300m, we were informed that it had “Found 1 point of Interest”, which was confirmed by a white dot appearing in the circular radar disc in the corner of the camera screen. You could follow this little dot, but it might take you some time, so fortunately there are other options. These include looking at your destination on Google Maps or choosing “list” from the options.

In the list option, you’re helpfully given the name of the location (along with a description) and the option to view some pictures—ours told us it was at Pure Evil Gallery on Leonard Street. So we chose “Take me there” and followed the directions on the map—it happened to be just around the corner, about 179m away. After arriving, we went inside and asked the gallery assistant if she knew about the Dead Drop. She didn’t, so we had a quick look round and eventually found it outside, just to the left of the gallery, as you can see below.

See, it works! And you could find yourself rewarded with a Bruce Sterling story to boot. "Now that the app is launched, Menno, Sander and I have some provocative ideas about new features," says Sterling. "Aram's network is growing steadily. I'm writing a new work of augmented fiction specifically created for Dead Drops."

We think it’s a fab idea and one which can only be improved with more artists and people getting involved, leaving interesting (and, hopefully, virus free) files on there. This won’t be the last you hear about the app at The Creators Project either, as Bruce Sterling will be writing about the development process behind it and also discussing the attraction of AR in these troubled times, in an exclusive article that we’ll be publishing very soon.