Interviewee:
J. Michael Wheeler (He/him)
In your own words, tell us about your business, organization, or initiative.
Reality Lab®️, creates AR (Augmented Reality) apps for business, art, and communication. With AR we are pioneering a new media, defining the vocabulary of AR, and seizing the opportunity to tell stories that inspire, awe, and delight our users.
Tell us a bit about you and why you do what you do. Share your passions for your business, organization, or initiative.
I continue to be passionate about exploring the influence of technology on storytelling: from print, to multimedia, to CD-ROM, to the early excitement of the internet, and now, AR (augmented reality).
These are early days of AR, similar to the early days of the movie camera’s invention in the 1890’s. No one knew then how to tell a story with moving pictures. The first films from those hand-cranked cameras were of commonplace occurrences — trains approaching or people dancing in front of the camera.
Today you can capture, edit, and distribute amazing films with the phone in your pocket. The technology of video (moving pictures) has created a generation of new storytellers.
I am exploring the new storytelling technology of AR: what can we do in AR that we can’t do in any other medium? What is unique, what is intrinsic to this new media? That discovery will be the power and promise of AR.
Like all new storytelling advances, we borrow vocabulary from the languages that came before: books, film, web, apps, video gaming.
Pioneering AR, defining the vocabulary of AR, and seizing the opportunity to tell stories in AR are the inspirations that have driven me to launch Reality Lab.
What is the last thing you read, watched, or listened to that had an impact on you?
Great science fiction is always inspiring. When we are ideating an AR solution, I tell my clients to “think in science fiction!”
What’s the one thing people would be surprised to learn about you or your business?
I first started exploring AR after reading the 2007 William Gibson novel “Spook Country” that introduced the idea of “locative art”. In Gibson’s novel, locative art is art that can only be seen through a specific technology, in the real world, at a specific location.
In other words, location based AR…
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