Augmenting Our Reality: the Philosophical Foundations of AR-technology

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the key issues considered within the fra­mework of such a relative new trend in foreign philosophy as the philosophy of augmented reality. Augmented reality (AR) technology, which allows integrat­ing images of virtual objects into the surrounding physical environment, is be­coming increasingly popular today for solving a wide range of tasks related to the implementation of everyday digital communications. Nevertheless, rela­tively little attention is paid in modern philosophy to its conceptual understand­ing, since a significant proportion of philosophical research is still focused on the study of virtual reality technology, as well as on the analysis of various fantastic scenarios for the development of computer simulations. At the same time, many developers and media theorists claim that augmented reality will become the key technology on the basis of which most of our future digital practices will de­velop. For this reason, the author has attempted to analyze the main problems that foreign researchers pay attention to when analyzing this technology. These are, first of all, problems related to the conceptual explanation of the term “aug­mented reality” and the study of the metaphysical status of virtual objects gener­ated by the corresponding AR devices. In addition, the article briefly outlines the issues of epistemology and ethics of augmented reality. The author concludes that it is important to further develop philosophical studies of augmented reality, since, unlike virtual reality, the technology in question has long been actively implemented in almost all areas of our socio-cultural interactions and, as a result, has a significant impact on our daily lives.