Augmented Reality • By Marc Pesce • Polity Press • 168 pages • ISBN 9781509540945 • £14.99 / $17
Virtual reality (VR) has a long history, with many false starts and retrenchments, from the Nintendo Power Glove to Second Life to Magic Leap. Augmented reality (AR) actually goes even further back, to Ivan Sutherland s 1968 head-mounted display, nicknamed the Sword of Damocles because of the way it hung from ceiling rigging, although it was Pokémon Go that made AR a mainstream reality at least for a time.
That collision of technology with the physical world can be entertaining and inspiring, but it raises some major questions about who is building the interface between the physical and digital worlds, and who will get to control AR s annotations and overlays. In