Sorry to steal from Geoff Manaugh yet again, but if you're not one of the millions of people reading his excellent
blog, you need to see this video, a project called Domestic Robocop from graduating student Keiichi Matsuda at the
Bartlett School of Architecture.
See the video
here.
It's been getting a huge amount of attention from the Augmented Reality (AR) crowd, who are convinced that 2010 will be the year of AR, and given the evidence of commercialised technologies - especially prolific gaming systems like
Wii they might not be wrong.
What I like about Matsuda's AR is the premise: making a cup of tea. The allusions to chanoyu are interesting, given that this scenario is absurdly technologically precise: the kettle counting down by the millisecond, and even directing your attention and actions to the milk and cup. The temae or artistic performance of the tea-making is far from the meditative perfection sought in chanoyu, but we get a glimpse of respite, a paradise overlay of info-packets and serene landscapes... which I think is the incredibly interesting aspect of AR, when we can 'switch it all off' or in this case, simply replace it with yet another AR. 'Mixed Reality' is becoming a more common term, and I think we are already more mixed up in many realities right now then we care to be conscious of, so although this clip presents an overwhelming amount of visual information, Matsuda's project also suggests that this is only a mundane part of our future augmented realities.
You can see in this original recording of Matsuda's space
here, the mundane physical reality, which opens a whole other conversation which I'll save for another time...
More from Keiichi Matsude
here.