I’m working on the AR Popup Storybook Companion Application. The technological goal of this app is to bring to life children’s books using augmented reality technologies and the iPhone. The user goal is to increase children’s interest in reading by leveraging the widespread parental usage of screens to entertain and distract children. The ultimate goal of this project is to spark joy and wonder at a young age.
I’m excited to be working on this project. I am passionate about Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (XR) in a way that’s difficult to communicate unless you know my herstory. Unlike many developers in AR, VR, and XR communities, my origins don’t trace back to an interest in gaming. Due to gender norms in the 90s and 2000s, I was discouraged from gaming and so never developed a distinct passion for creating games.
This blog post documents my origin story which may surprise, excite, or confuse you. It starts in English Literature and continues here into computer science and AR, VR, XR.
Books such Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Ready Player One byErnest Cline have been cited as inspirations for the creation of virtual reality technology. Luckey Palmer, the founder of Oculus VR, mentions these exact books as motivations for building his VR HMD (head-mounted display) in The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris.
My journey too starts with a book. But, not these books. It starts with a thin black book with a dusty image of a palm tree trunk in the foreground and more palm trees amongst telephone poles in the background. The title of this book: The Little Edges. The author: Fred Moten.
The Little Edges is one of Moten’s poetry collections. I was assigned to read the poems “forted.fortrn” from this collection for one of my undergraduate courses in English Literature. I still can’t exactly tell you what the poem is about; there is a history to it embedded in blackness, anti-black violence, and jazz. I can tell you – It’s a beautiful poem that ebbs and flows and dances. It plays with words, structure, affect, sound, and concepts of being, presence, and reality.
Here are some excerpts from the poem. Included to demonstrate the content and structure. Included also because of love.
Forted.Fortrn Excerpts
As a naive poetics theorist and non-computer science major, I raised my hand and said this poem reminded me of code. My professor corrected – “Well…It’s more like jazz.” He was correct. This poem is nothing like code!
Yet, I saw code because like code appears to a non-programmer this poem was structured weird and made absolutely no sense. But, it started me thinking about alternate realities –
- “a box with a lid on it” into another world
- “live, remote.. // machine ecolog[ies]”
- “iron [men]”
- “program[ed]” bodies
- “real presence”
Which if you think about it (these excerpts) long enough, you’ll notice they are also the poetics of virtual reality.
So, what did I do with these new insights? Change my major to computer science? Nope! I dug in and became of literary scholar.
I studied Black Existential Philosophy and poetry and poetics for my master’s program in English literature. Most of you know poetry; less of you poetics, which is the theoretical and linguistic study of poetry; and few of you know Black Existential Philosophy, which is a school of thought that examines existence in the context of blackness.
All together, I was interested in how non-white bodies came into existence and how this world in the culturally and conceptually normative sense didn’t know what to do with us. I was tired of being unmappable and unintelligible.
People said, “You look Asian.”
Then, they’d ask, “Why’s your last name Montez?”
I’d reply, “You tell me.”
Then, they’d assume, “You’re dad’s Hispanic?”
They were correct; my dad is Hispanic and of Mexican heritage. But, they were still wrong about me.
I’d have to explain, “I’m Hispanic through adoption.”
Anyways, I was tired of this disconnect with the world and the confusion I generated in others. So, I really started my studies in search of a different world or at the very least a way to break this one.
In studying blackness, I learned a lot. I learned that the mere fact of my existence is the break and I learned that it is near impossible to break out of this world. However, it is possible to touch and see other realities. Perchance to visit. By studying blackness, I had “opened a box with a lid on it” and entered a different world even as it was impossible for me to inhabit.
I also learned that studying English can only take you so far in crossing worlds and upending realities. First, and most brutally, the general public isn’t interested in philosophical and literary treaties. Second, as a scholarly practice, the study of literature is geared towards critique and examination versus application and creation.
Technology on the other hand has revolutionized the world with inventions like the personal computer, internet, and mobile phones. However, as Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, Shayna Small, et al. and Netflix’s Coded Bias documentary reminds us, technology is not without its limitations. These works opened a space for me to enter into technology and computer science. I felt invited in by their subject matter and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, here I am studying computer science and learning about AR, VR, and XR.
I am still in search of different worlds and believe augmented and virtual reality technologies can build them.
See for example, Breonna’s Garden, an iOS AR application which serves the purpose of restorative justice through the preservation of the memory of Breonna Taylor.
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