Keiichi Matsuda's Augmented City

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Keiichi Matsuda, a designer and film maker, often enjoys explore futuristic design concepts through the medium of film. One of his latest experiments is entitled Augmented City, a small walk through a few
minutes in different people’s lives in a city filled with augmented reality technology. Beyond forecasting
the way people may live in the future, the video demonstrates a series of different technological devices
and interfaces.

Beyond the architecture we have built, the future in Matsuda’s eyes will be as much about
virtual architecture and information:

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from 'reality'. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.