Augmented City: The Creator of Domestic Robocop Blows Your Mind Again

Augmented City: The Creator of Domestic Robocop Blows Your Mind Again

I know some of you already seen the following clip on other blogs, but when I contacted Keiichi Matsuda two weeks ago, he asked me to wait till the final version is ready. Luckily, the wait was shorter than expected.

Keiichi Matsuda, the creator of the now famous dystopian short clip Domestic Robocop, is at it again. In "Augmented City", a project that got him nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Silver Medal award (and no, there's no golden one), Matsuda pushes forward his belief that modern cities are more than concrete, metal and glass occupying a physical space but also the digital information that is produced and consumed by the city's residents.

Or, in Matsuda's own words:

Augmented City explores the social and spatial implications of an AR-supported future. 'Users' of the city can browse through channels of the augmented city, creating aggregated customised environments. Identity is constructed and broadcast, while local records and coupons litter the streets. The augmented city is an architectural construct modulated by the user, a liquid city of stratified layers that perceptually exists in the space between the self and the built environment. This subjective space allows us to re-evaluate current trends, and examine our future occupation of the augmented city.

AR coupons may be littering the streets in Matsuda's vision, but it still looks amazing -


I crossed my eyes to see this clip, but if you go on and watch the clip on Youtube you'll be able to pick a red-cyan version and use your favorite 3d glasses. Want to learn more? Check out Keiichi Matsuda's thesis.