Augmented Reality is the worst offender. Because AR relies on real-time cloud processing, localization maps, and device-specific rendering pipelines, it decays faster than any other medium. We have already lost dozens of AR art installations from the 2017–2019 boom. The Museum of Modern Art acquired an AR piece in 2018; by 2021, the app no longer functioned on modern iOS versions.
For the uninitiated, the name sounds like a psychedelic fever dream, a product of a startup pitch meeting gone hilariously wrong. Yet, for a brief, hallucinatory window between 2018 and 2020, AR Shrooms was a cult phenomenon. It was an augmented reality experience that promised to turn the mundane world into a psychedelic forest of interactive fungi. Today, it exists only in fragmented screenshots, dead Discord links, and the unreliable memories of a few hundred users. Its disappearance is not just a tragedy of preservation; it is a warning about the fragility of all cloud-dependent, geolocative art. To understand what was lost, we must reconstruct the experience. AR Shrooms (developed by the now-defunct studio Glitch Forest Labs ) was not a game in the traditional sense. It was a "living wallpaper" AR experience launching initially on iOS, with a brief, unstable Android port.
Today, you cannot download AR Shrooms . The binary is gone from the App Store. There is no APK floating around on archive.org, because even if you installed the APK, the app cannot phone home to retrieve the assets. It is a key without a lock. What transforms AR Shrooms from a failed startup into "lost media" is the community that still mourns it. A subreddit, r/ARShroomsLost, has 1,400 members dedicated to the impossible task of resurrection. ar porn vrporn shrooms q lost in love wit link
Users are attempting to reverse-engineer the lost entertainment. They have compiled a "Spore Drive"—a 2GB collection of compressed screen recordings captured before the shutdown. Watching these recordings is unsettling. You see a person’s living room in 2019, and superimposed over the sofa is a 3D mushroom that sways slightly. The user pans the camera left and right. The mushroom reacts to occlusion. It is a ghost inside a video of a ghost.
This raises a philosophical question: If an AI generates a new mushroom that looks exactly like the lost one, but was not coded by Glitch Forest Labs , is it the same piece of entertainment? The community is split. Purists argue that the lost media is the specific algorithmic behavior of the original shrooms—the way they shivered when a dog barked, the specific hex code of their bioluminescence at 2 AM. Replicas, they argue, are fan fiction. The disappearance of AR Shrooms is a microcosm of a much larger problem facing digital preservationists. We are entering an era of Ephemeral Entertainment . Augmented Reality is the worst offender
Consider the following: In the 1990s, if you bought a Nintendo cartridge, it would work in 2024. The code is etched into silicon. In the 2000s, a DVD might rot, but skilled technicians can often recover the data. In the 2020s, most "experiences" are not products; they are performances running on a rented server.
What made AR Shrooms distinct from other AR games like Pokémon GO was its lack of objective. There were no points, no leaderboards, no monsters to catch. It was purely meditative and aesthetic. Users could "grow" ecosystems, and the shrooms would react to real-world audio—a clap would make them pulse faster; silence made them release digital spores that floated away on the breeze of your air conditioning. The Museum of Modern Art acquired an AR
The studio shuttered on December 15, 2020. Because the 3D assets, shader models, and fungal growth algorithms were too large to store locally (most phones in 2020 had limited storage), the app acted as a thin client. The actual "brains" of the shrooms—their textures, their animation loops, the AI that determined how they grew—were streamed from Glitch Forest ’s AWS buckets.