Bolter and Grusin ask the question: "If we can have computers everywhere, why do we need virtual reality?" While true virtual reality creates a sense of mediation transparency, augmented reality can act in a similar way by placing itself as a medium between the user and the physical world (p. 216). Society, as I mentioned earlier, has reached an era of ubiquity in which anyone with access to a smartphone can compute wherever they are. This growth in technology use opens up the world of augmented reality to the average cell phone user. I come back to QR codes now and how they work. A user sees a code, a physical representation of a code, on a display or in a magazine or any number of places. That code is an "anchor" for a piece of information in the virtual world, whether it is a website or an app or just a piece of text. When the user scans this anchor, they are either led directly to where the anchor leads or they are prompted to go there. For example, on my phone I can choose whether or not to follow the anchor once I scan the QR code, while the application I downloaded for my iPad takes me directly to the link. This is admittedly a very rudimentary version of augmented reality. In order to access AR this way, there obviously has to be a QR code for a user to scan. The code also does not necessarily have to relate to its physical surroundings. QR codes are not very transparent; you must point the phone/device at the code and let the intended destination load. In other words, you can see the medium at work.

Despite the QR code's shortcomings as an access point for augmented reality, it is the first AR technology that every smartphone user should be able to use easily. The hypermediacy of our devices and how they have the ability to scan the code, interpret it and send us to its destination has opened up many new AR possibilities, and as our technology continues to improve, so will the continued synchronization between the physical and virtual worlds.

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