Do you sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by the future, the speed of change, the possibilities of tech tomorrow? We haven’t even started yet.
Hyper Reality is a short film by Keiichi Matsuda. It depicts a person living in Medillin, Colombia, doing everyday activities – riding on a bus, going to the supermarket, crossing the road. The twist is that everything she sees is enhanced with computer graphics, social network updates, games, adverts and other digital ephemera.
Think Google Glass on steroids.
The whole story is filmed from one woman’s point-of-view, wearing a pair of (fictional) “augmented reality” glasses – and as her day in the city progresses, it soon becomes clear that all is not quite right:
While the world Matsuda has created is from his own imagination, it is rooted in the new technologies of virtual reality currently being developed by everyone from Google to Facebook, Samsung and Apple. However Matsuda wanted to paint a less corporate vision of what this augmented future might look like. “You get a lot of tech-utopian videos coming out from the big tech companies,” he says. “They all feel a little sterile; they don’t feel very real. They don’t encapsulate the everyday frustrations that I go through life living with technology.”
As a result, the vision he has created is both inspiring and claustrophobic – and it’s impossible to absorb everything going on in only one viewing.
The reality for people like you and me, is that we need to learn to stay calm, to cope, and find new ways to process information, and everything else that bombards us. This is partly about being comfortable with not knowing everything, and knowing we don’t need to. But it is also about seeing a bigger picture, being able to synthesise and simplify the things that matter most. And still have time to breathe, laugh and thrive.
This piece first appeared on The Genuis Works website here.