Behind the Story: What It was like stepping into an augmented reality

Think what it would be like if your entire world became a computer screen. For example, imagine you just woke up and are brushing your teeth in front of the mirror with one hand, while in the other, combing through your emails as they are being virtually transposed in front of you, being displayed as a 3-dimensional figure through your bathroom mirror. Walking back into your bedroom, still enjoying the lingering Listerine burn, you here the rain ceaselessly pounding against the roof. You open the blinds and see the rain isn’t letting up. So, you voice activate the weather app through your window, seeing a digitally transposed storm cloud appear, hovering over your bed shooting lightning bolts in the middle of your room. This is what it was like to cover a story on augmented reality (AR).

Saying that our team had very little knowledge on AR reality at the beginning of this project would be an understatement. But through this research experience, we learned so much.

“Before I started on this project, I didn’t even know what augmented reality really meant. Now that I interviewed a professional and researched more about AR, I realized that AR will play a huge roll in our lives in the future. This story is extremely important because it will change the way we interact with the world (much like social media did),” said our audio/video specialist Ariana Afshar.

As our team had a limited understanding of AR, it was inevitable that we would also have a lot of questions. More specifically, we wanted to know how AR will change our lifestyle, culture and society. We were seeking answers to the big questions. Questions like, why is AR projected to become a multibillion-dollar industry within the next few years?

Our goal was to seek out Cal Poly students and notable people in the community who are paving the way for AR technology to come to fruition.

As journalism students and storytellers, we were fascinated with what a couple Cal Poly students, who have knowledge in this technology and who have incorporated it into their own personally designed apps, had to say.

“Something valuable I learned from covering this story was interviewing Mathew and Anna who work at Innovation Sandbox. It was fun and I got to learn more about AR with students who were invested in it.” said Bailey Ellis, our team’s multimedia specialist.

Mathew, Innovation Sandbox staff
Innovation Sandbox bldg
3D images of people
Using IR interface for scanning people and 3D printing them

It greatly benefited our team in developing this story having access to so many sources at Cal Poly.

What originally triggered our team’s interest in writing about this topic was a professor at Cal Poly who teaches one of the only marketing classes in the country that integrates AR into the curriculum. AR marketing specialist, Dr. Joachim Scholz, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Orfalea College of Business is one of the first people to ever have a paper published on augmented reality marketing was a very insightful person for our team to speak with.

Dr. Scholz helped our team gain a firmer grasp on what AR is and how it will simplify our lives and make it more interesting.

“The biggest thing between AR and anything else is that AR happens in your life. So, right now we are glued to our screens and it takes us away from what we are effectively doing… It takes me out of the experience — versus AR is the experience. AR transforms every surface on our physical world into a canvas for digital augmentation.” Said by Dr. Scholz.

AR was a technical subject that took our team out of our comfort zone and pushed our journalistic boundaries. “I have grown as a journalist from covering this story by expanding my writing skills. I have always been all about sports writing, so writing a feature article on a topic as advanced as AR has really made me think outside the box and refresh my writing skills as a whole.” Said Kenny Campbell, our team’s senior writer.