It is near impossible to keep up with the torrent of hype and cheerleading regarding Augmented Reality (AR). I have to admit that don't pay much attention to most of the content on this topic that streams through my news reader – I'm simply not interested in the marketing-focused slant applied to anointed technologies of the moment. As Bruce Sterling warned in his At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry talk last summer: "get ready for the trough of disillusionment" as it is the next phase of the hype cycle for AR. Remember VRML? What about Second Life? The design community certainly dined at those troughs.

With that disclaimer out of the way, please note the above video by Keiichi Matsuda, who is currently studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Matsuda's short animation Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop depicts a disturbing culinary interlude where every inch of surface area is plastered with advertising. Space is further sliced up through intrusive informational displays that bombard the occupant with the every minutiae of quantitative information available on their possessions and activities. This is definitely amped up to an absurd level as one of the displays (like those of The Sims) tracks the hunger, thirst and bladder capacity of the individual whose perspective we are experiencing this space through. In another equally cynical moment, an interface is presented to our subject where they can control the "ad saturation" of their space and be compensated accordingly. There are also suggestions as to how users might interpolate between domestic space and an updated 3D version of the traditional desktop GUI (recognize the wallpaper background of that scene?). This is all delivered with a wink and after suffering through countless optimistic/uncritical AR vignettes it is great to see one with a sense of humour. [via: ReadWriteWeb]

I was recently asked to write an essay to mark the occasion of Tori Foster's The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian being installed at the convenience window gallery here in Toronto. This was an exciting opportunity for me to wrap my head around the implications of Foster's project as she has prototyped a brilliant workflow for building super-composites out of thousands of photographs documenting a drive, bicycle ride or walk. The project functions in a similar manner to Google Street View but exploits the distortion of perspective and time to re-present an abstracted "continuous city" as a series of side-scrolling videos. The above photographs document when the piece was displayed at Toronto Image Works last summer and the project was also featured (at a prototype stage) in Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE.

The above image is a detail from one of Foster's videos and the smear on the right of the frame is registering a decrease in speed – these videos are as much about tempo and rhythm as the density of built form.

An excerpt from the essay:

…Foster has positioned herself as an urban curator – a collector of paths, routes and navigational idiosyncrasies. Rather than author a personal impression of the city she has devised a means of re-encoding the movement of others. By handing the reins over to three (ultimately) anonymous individuals – each with their own agenda and mode of transportation – Foster removes herself from the equation. It is precisely this absence that is one of the most compelling qualities of The Impossibility of Understanding, as rather than build a world around the "essential egotism" of an individual flâneur, the project instead foregrounds the homogeneous nature of the city as experienced on a moment-to-moment basis.

You can learn more about The Impossibility of Understanding via Foster's page documenting the project (where you can also download a PDF of my essay) – be sure to watch the demo video. The work will be up at convenience through February 13th.