Ryan Decker
ENGL 397: Digital Rhetoric
2 min readDec 7, 2018

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My AR overlays are a mix of serious and silly. I chose to overlay a picture of a quote from General Douglas MacArthur above the book of the dead for my first option. When looking at the chandelier, you’ll see his words from 1945 during the second World War in a picture taken from the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. I found them to be particularly inspiring when I visited there over the summer, and when I learned about the history of Memorial hall in this class during our long form video project, it felt like the perfect picture to use. My second overlay is a fun one I chose to put for personal reasons. Finding it on the second floor shouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you’ve had to visit the office hours of one business writing/detective enthusiast professor many times like I did this semester. That painting was the only thing worth looking at on that wall; it needed something to spice it up.

The process of making the overlays on the app was actually pretty easy. Figuring out how to get the app to work was much more difficult. Initially, I wanted to put in animated overlays, but for some reason they never loaded properly. And viewing the overlays themselves can be a trial as well. I noticed other students struggling to get theirs to show between the foot traffic of students, so I placed my overlays in places that should theoretically counter this issue.

This project has shown me that, provided it is readily accessible and available to all public audiences, augmented reality could have a place within our digital lives sometime soon. It has a powerful allure innately seeded in it’s conceptual design: to be able to find and see things invisible to the naked eye is in itself eerily fun. It lends users a certain power to their creative arsenal; lets them make a meme or a video or animation and stow it in the physical world behind a digital door and lock. When people see these creations, there’s a “look what I found!” moment that really lets you appreciate the medium. I was initially skeptical of AR, but i had fun with using it.

The future of augmented reality could look like a lot of things. Worst case scenario? Advertisements (yuck). But to be optimistic, I would love to see augmented reality be used as an extension of art and education. It would be cool if outside every hall in UDel we could find videos and pictures of whatever current events were happening with the departments and colleges those buildings belonged to. That would make for a cool add-on to student tours and orientations.

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Ryan Decker
ENGL 397: Digital Rhetoric

English Major. Anthropology Minor. Creative writer. Nature enthusiast. Passionate about video games. Swing dancer. I kinda do just about everything.