Homefront Dissolve

Source: BLDGBLOG

Keiichi Matsuda, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, produced this fantastic short video in the final year of his M.Arch. It was, he writes, "part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality."  The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.  The bewildering groundlessness of surfaces within surfaces is beautifully captured by this video, and its portrayal of drop-down menus and the future hand gestures needed to access them is also pretty great. Augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow.  Now how do we use all that home-jamming ad space for something other than Coke and Tesco? What other subscription-content feeds can be plugged into this vertiginous interface?

Take a look—and you can find more thoughts, and another video, on Matsuda's own blog. http://keiichimatsuda.tumblr.com/

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Virtual Reality?

Since the beginning of video games, humans wanted to make games as realistic as possible to give the player the adrenaline, fun as well as experience of doing something that might not be possible for that person to do in the real world i.e. going into space or being a soldier at Second World War. Are the games really such a great and realistic experience? Well, sort of, some games are more realistic than others especially the simulation programmes made for training marines or pilots of choppers etc but then it's still not 100% real experience mainly because of the AI(Artificial Intelligence), computers are unable to think like humans, which means they're predictable and limited of their actions, so as long as other humans or machines thinking like humans are involved in the game being i.e. enemies, no game can achieve the real experience level. However, there are things that gives us something to think about: the virtual reality(a hypothetical three-dimensional visual world created by a computer), which leads us into a virtual world like i.e. in the Matrix. So far the development haven't reached a level near close to the one shown in the Matrix but it still requires lots of development and experiments and things like 3d goggles or special gloves allowing the user to fully control the arms in-game are only the foretaste of what the future can bring us.