Applying Andre Bazin’s Asymptote to Augmented Reality

The AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) space is approaching a tipping point. According to CB Insights, the AR/VR funding space has seen a sharp uptick in funding this first half of 2017 by almost 60% in the US alone, where almost $1 billion has been invested by private venture capital. In 2016, AR/VR in the US drew a combined $2 billion over some 200 deals.

Last summer, I wrote about how augmented reality show stopper Pokémania was actually one of mankind’s greatest preventative health programs, empowering kids (and many adults) to walk, skip and run across the real world in search of virtual monsters.

In fact, the encroachment of AR/VR into the realm of reality reminds me of the Second Volume of André Bazin’s classic : What is Cinema? (or perhaps simply the é from Poké triggered my subconscious memories of André).

The first essay of the book is the legendary “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism” in which Bazin traces out the characteristics of the New Italian School in contrast to the early forms of cinema in Italy and elsewhere (including his views on the use of non-professionals, its advantages and shortcomings).

There are strong parallels with today’s production quality of AR/VR in the way that Bazin illustrated how he believed that realism in cinema is more of an aesthetic choice than an ontological byproduct and how this “realism” could in fact be controlled to present a world view of the director without being so authoritarian; “realism in art can only be achieved in one way — through artifice.” Bazin then proceeds, using arguably one of the best movies of all time, Citizen Kane (1941) as an example, to elucidate the conflict between using deep camera focus (which back then could only be achieved perfectly in a studio setting) and using real locations (which until today are cumbersome from the point of view of cinematography) and, hence, proves why every technological advancement that helps bringing cinema closer to reality must be embraced.

The same could be certainly said of today’s AR and VR technologies, not just in gaming or entertainment, but across a variety of industries — including healthcare and e-commerce, where even companies such as Amazon have been filing very interesting augmented reality patents. My interns last year developed (OBlue) — a virtual reality educational game whose aim is to increase diabetes awareness across the Middle East and North Africa. (OBlue) provided patients with a set of scenarios set in a fully immersible virtual reality. In each scenario, players experienced the symptoms of both low blood sugar and high blood sugar, to fully appreciate the reasons of why it happened, and how to treat it.

But back to Bazin. André’s grand opening is followed by more extremely insightful individual essays on key neorealist films such as Visconti’s The Earth Trembles (1948, “La Terra Trema lacks inner fire… no moving eloquence to bolster its documentary vigor”), Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957, “I even tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist aesthetic”) and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1947, “Ladri di Bicyclette is one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”) and Umberto D. (1952 “De Sica and Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality”). This final quote is of utmost importance to our discussion today on AR/VR, wherein Bazin, step by step, clarified his championing of realism in cinema and his stance that realism in cinema must be concerned only with appearance and not meaning (“Realism is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and neorealism by a specific relation of the means to the ends”).

Together, these sets of essays and visionary points by Bazin must be taken into consideration by contemporary AR/VR developers. Whether Utopian or Dystopian in nature, these artificial worlds can never reach or replace our existing reality, they will merely approach it, as an asymptote would.