ARvertising and the Remediation of Meaning

Augmented Reality (AR), a recent technology that involves the overlay of virtual contents on physical objects, poses new challenges to linguists. As I will try to argue, AR seems to require an µaugmented¶ approach that considers not only how the verbal and the visual codes interact, a feature of media discourse already explored by multimodal analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 2009), but also how the simultaneous perception of real and virtual layers may produce meaning (Furht 2011; Logaldo 2012). The interplay between verbal text and imagery is still vital in AR. Particularly in µaugmented advertising¶ (ARvertising), the presence of printed Quick Response (QR) or Augmented Reality (AR) tags is essential for the connection between online and offline information. On the other hand, there are relevant textual differences involving the verbal discourse, specifically the claims. While focusing on advertising, my analysis also investigates meaning-making processes activated by AR from a more general perspective. A crucial instance is that of defining semantic continuity or signalling the communicative function of semantic gaps. In fact, despite identification codes and systems of geolocalisation, the alignment between virtual and actual objects is far from following a one-to-one correspondence.