Is this our future?

Augmented Hyper-reality City

This was a student project done by Keiichi Matsuda, which portrays architecture not only as physical reality but as virtual/digital reality co-existing and even becoming the 'reality'.

Through this video and project, Keiichi puts out an argument that the contemporary architecture not only exist on the physical space but more and more exist on the 'synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organize."

Keiichi visions our future to become more dependent on the digital space and that virtual media will no longer be distinguishable from the real 'reality'.

I think this project is fascinating topic...if this could become true, then it will solve many of the sustainability issues (although not all) since many things will be satisfied virtually. For example, if you want your house to have nice marble tiles on the floor and your sofa to be genuine leather from Italy, it will take an instance to change them. However, the flaw I see in the 'Augmented City' is that it only deals with vision, which is only one out of five senses we have to make the synthetic reality to become just like reality. The marble tiles will not feel like, smell like, taste like( although you would've never tasted marble) its real property if the 'real' material which the marble tiles were projected on was wood, for example. But at the same time, such idea creeps me out that we will no longer be able to distinguish what is real or not--sounds like some sci-fi dystopian movie to me. Other than that, I think the project is very successful in that people can project and see information floating around me anytime I need or want.