LAMY specs vol.4: Taking On New Perspectives

LAMY specs vol. 4 and LAMY Lx Rosegold Fountain pen. Photo: Helen Papagiannis

The latest issue of LAMY specs is out! Vol. 4 explores the theme of taking on new perspectives and it's fittingly Augmented Reality enabled. 

Use your smartphone and the LAMY app (iOS and Android) to scan the pages of the magazine and see the AR content come to life. The cover experience has you feeling like Alice stepping through the looking glass into LAMY-land. Objects twist and twirl, gravity is suspended, and light refractions and subtle shadows invite you to look closer.

Christoph Niemann in collaboration with LAMY

One of the AR experiences highlights Christoph Niemann's collaboration with LAMY: an anamorphic mural he designed on the facade of the NYC Concept Store. If you've played my game “Real or AR” on Instagram (I’m @AugmentedHuman), you know I'm big on optical illusions! AR is used in the magazine to show how the illustration shifts depending on where you're standing: if you look at the illustration on the store facade from across the street, the distortion disappears and the artwork is revealed.

LAMY gold nibs in production

The magazine also features an AR video showing LAMY's fountain pen nib production process. The video plays atop a photo of nibs that reminds me of Marcel Duchamp's famous painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" from 1912. The Philidelphia Museum of Art writes about the painting, "The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers." The painting is a perfect symbol of the many precursors to AR and is a nice tie in to the movement and choreography of the pen across the page.

LAMY Lx Rosegold Fountain pen

And what about the LAMY Lx pen? How does it write? It's as light as a cloud and writes like a dream. And as I learned while reading the magazine, the reason for this is the nib; thanks to its elasticity, the nib reacts to your hand writing pressure. I wish I had it with me for my SXSW "Augmented Human" book signing!  

You can get a free print issue of the magazine at specs.lamy.com 

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