• philosophy of technology
• phenomenology
• mixed reality
• augmented reality
• post-phenomenology

Augmented reality is one of the most innovative technologies of our time and it
pursues a fascinating goal: to merge the digital and the real world together.
The aims of this thesis are to improve its design and to study its knock-on
effects on our everyday world and on our living body.
Augmented reality does not need an engineeristic approach only, but it also
calls for theoretical studies on perception in order to reach its goal.
The thesis uses phenomenology in order to tackle this topic from a perceptual
point of view because the focal point of this branch of philosophy is to analyse
how the subject perceives and so it helps to understand how the subject is
perceptually captivated by this new technology.
Moreover, by studying how augmented reality interacts with the subject, it
is possible to provide the characteristics this technology must have in order to
be a completely new technology without reducing it to mimic “old” kinds of
technologies, such as ubiquitous computing.
The thesis demonstrates that augmented reality has to produce digital objects
instead of displaying information about the surrounding world. It shows
that the objects should be perceived in a “transparent” way and it displays the
parameters to be followed in order to achieve such a transparency producing
a device which can easily become part of the subject’s living body. Only by
following this path can augmented reality merge the digital and the real world
together and become a new technology different from the previous one.
Augmented reality has to create “digital materiality”.
The second aim of the work is related to the knock-on effects yielded by
this new technology and they are analysed thanks to a phenomenological aspect
as well. Phenomenology does not take technology as an isolated being, but
it considers technology deeply interconnected with the subject and the world.
Therefore, this conception makes it possible to study how these terms are modified
by the variation of one of them because they are intrinsically related. More
specifically the introduction of a new technology changes inevitably what the
subject and the world are because they are strictly intertwined due to this threefold
relation in which they are enmeshed.
My work shows how technology in general deeply moulds our living body and
our everyday world by shaping what we consider their most natural and primal
bases. Therefore, augmented reality will not have knock-on effects concerning
what lies on the surface of our life only, but it will deeply affect the most basic
core of our living body and our everyday world too.
In conclusion it is clear that augmented reality has to produce “digital materiality”
and that such a creation will yield the knock-on effects of turning our
world into a world dwelt even by digital beings.
Tomorrow’s world will be composed of digital matter along with the common
one.