In 2016, designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda released Hyper-Reality, a concept film that envisioned an augmented reality future where physical and virtual realities merged, resulting in a “saturated city.” in the media.
The 6-minute film offered an exploratory and mostly dystopian view of how our reality could soon become information overload. Although the film is the better part of a decade old, it remains relevant to modern discussions about how to conceptualize use cases for emerging virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.
The film was widely distributed and widely covered in the media and news agencies at the time of its release. Despite its contrasting and deliberately provocative imagery, it’s a very impressive concept, or perhaps more accurately, a hypothetical cautionary tale for those working on the technologies that enable it to become a reality. Matsuda himself subsequently began working in AR after the film’s release, leading design teams at Leap Motion (now Ultraleap) and Microsoft.
Eight years after Hyper-Reality, I found myself on a media tour in Japan with Psychic VR, a VR/AR startup based in Tokyo, who presented me with their plan for a large-scale development project called CityXR. presented. It’s a concept for augmented cities that at times can veer into the wrong side of the hyper-reality landscape it seems to borrow from.
CityXR is just one of the many bold visions Psychic VR has for the future of VR and AR. During a three-day media tour in Tokyo, the company presented me with a set of these ideas in an almost immersive way.
Air Race X was the furthest project along the pipeline of bold visions to (virtual) reality, culminating in an in-person event in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Media, investors and many others gathered to see how Psychic Technology reimagined the competitive sport of air racing into an immersive hybrid format that saw digital aircraft compete over the skies of Shibuya in VR and AR devices. While an admirable concept for how the sport might undergo all-out reinvention, the technology shown in the final race was ultimately overlooked for lack of blocking.
Air Race X: A Tokyo startup’s bold but flawed vision for VR/AR sports
Air Race X offers a bold but flawed vision for the future of VR/AR sports. Read about how Psychic VR wants to revive competitive air racing in an immersive format here:
The core technology behind Air Race X was implemented on Styly, the foundational platform for all Psychic VR designs and projects in development. As I discussed in my article on Air Race X, Styly is a versatile tool for makers and consumers and the foundation of the company’s CityXR vision.
With CityXR, Psychic sees cities like Tokyo becoming augmented and immersive playgrounds with “space entertainment.” By adding augmented content to physical spaces, Psychic “proposes a new form of entertainment that uses XR technology to extend the city space itself into an experiential medium.”
Real-world spaces, such as Shibuya Crossing, will have social, music, game and art layers, for example a user can switch between similar channels on a TV.
It’s an ultra-futuristic vision that also depends entirely on VR/AR technology getting to the point where people are always wearing a headset, glasses, or some kind of augmented reality device. Notably, this vision of augmented reality layers is also very similar to what was shared in the early days of Magic Leap, before the company laid off many of its workers.
With recent investments from media companies, telcos and real estate companies, it’s clear that Psychic has been able to convince those with the budget that the technology is within reach.
However, for now, prototypes are operational via mobile AR and can be created and viewed using the Styly platform. Throughout our media tour, Psychic showed us a variety of mobile AR experiences that tie into CityXR’s larger vision, the hope being that one day these experiences will become more immersive and native, perhaps viewed with a pair of actual augmented reality glasses.
Outside Rowan’s office in Shinjuku, we were shown an augmented reality experience designed for the quiet street leading off the entrance. On a rugged 12-inch iPad in front of us, we’re guided along a blue-hued underwater AR world lined with glowing bubbles, fish, and submerged plants. Arrows lead us away from the cars and along a narrow pedestrian lane before ending up at a nearby playground to watch a whale swim in front of us.
It’s a basic experience that anyone who’s ever dabbled in mobile AR has likely seen. A more impressive angle is how the experience is designed specifically for the streets around the psychic offices.
This hyper-specific geo-content is the basis of CityXR Augmented Reality, tailored to your real environment. For certain implementations, Psychic uses geographic data provided by the Japanese government to develop things like this. This is the same technology that makes the planes in Air Race X fly precisely around the buildings of Shibuya.
Psychic isn’t the only company working on a geo-based system for augmented reality content. Niantic, creator of Pokemon Go, launched a visual positioning system for AR experiences on a global scale in May 2022. Just over a year later in June 2022, Niantic laid off 230 employees, though the company says it remains committed to creating “for the emerging class. MR devices and AR glasses of the future.”
At the Psychic offices, I was commissioned to create a Styly AR experience of my own, designed in the platform’s web editor with a template that includes detailed buildings and geographic data for Shibuya Crossing. When loaded in Shibuya, my build is accurately placed amidst the chaos of the world’s busiest crosswalk using mobile AR.
Confused by the choices, I created a scene that included giant gorillas, a cruise ship in slow motion, and a flickering holographic billboard that displayed a picture of Hello Kitty that I had taken the day before. I also applied various effects and animations to the models, then saved the scene to be viewed two days later in Shibuya.
Psychic knows that as good as Styly can be as a creation tool, it’s nothing without a library of content created by a wide variety of creators. To encourage and educate creators, Styly has created the NEWVIEW project, which aims to bring together people working in fashion, music, film and more to create new experiences using AR/VR technology, supported by Styly. A NEWVIEW graduate, Keisuke Ito, went on to create Sen, a VR experience featured in the immersive selection at this year’s Venice Film Festival. That said, although Sen was a collaborative effort between Ito, CinemaLeap, and Psychic VR, it was ultimately created using Unity.
While user-generated content is one aspect of Psychic’s vision for cities to grow, another key and potentially more monetizing aspect is content created alongside larger companies and media companies. On a rainy Sunday morning, we saw some hands-on mobile VR experiences that show a side of CityXR that’s most relevant to companies involved in Psychic’s recent investment rounds, a mix of media, telecom, real estate and retail companies. Gives.
The first #kzn was a virtual music/concert featuring the AI of Kizuna, a popular “virtual YouTuber”. The experience placed Kizuna in the middle of a Shibuya intersection, where he went from augmented to virtual as the world around him danced to the music while standing as tall as the buildings around him.
The second layer was described as an example of a “game layer” that could be applied to Shibuya Intersection, covering buildings with skins and decorating the surrounding area with other virtual billboards, graphics and NFT advertising icons. The “game” element, although mostly in Japanese, was basically a building turned into a slot machine, which could be spun by pressing the phone screen.
Most forms of gambling are illegal in Japan, so the experience slot machine did not deal with real money. You can still hit the jackpot, though, and although the in-game reward was unclear, a pile of virtual coins poured onto the walkway in front of me.
Then I saw my own world created by Styly in Shibuya, featuring giant gorillas, twirling palm trees and a holographic Hello Kitty billboard in all their chaotic glory.
As with Air Race X, the only consistent part of all three experiences was the complete lack of obstruction. Considering we were on the world’s busiest crosswalk, there were plenty of people walking around. All Style AR content sits on top of them instead of covering them properly for full immersion. It was another reminder that even before the promise of a permanent, all-day wearable can be reached, there are technological hurdles that even mobile AR has yet to clear.
Earn money from the city
Given the CityXR’s promise, it’s hard to feel completely confident about its direction. On the one hand, it’s admirable to see Psychic’s effort to create a platform to easily create and deliver city-scale AR experiences. On the other hand, it depends on the technology reaching a point of sustainability that is very difficult to identify. Companies have died trying.
And while CityXR is a concept that caters to different ends of the spectrum from an indie creator at home to a major media company looking for a new content horizon, it’s hard to see a way to make money that doesn’t eventually rely on it. the second At the end of the day, Psychic VR is a startup company following CityXR with heavy external investment, and ultimately, the project needs to make money.
The path to monetizing user-generated content, like my early experience in Shibuya or the underwater AR journey through the streets of Shinjuku, requires a lot of work and a very large pool of creators to really be viable. Meanwhile, it’s fairly easy to see how other aspects that naturally focus on monetizing virtual billboard ads, transaction-focused games, and the commoditization of attention and physical space could become CityXR’s focus.
Which brings us back to hyperreality.
Awesome augmented reality
Psychic VR’s vision for CityXR isn’t inherently overly realistic, there’s clearly Psychic’s genuine enthusiasm and encouragement for what CityXR can bring in terms of user-generated art and immersive experiences.
However, from a practical perspective, it also attempts to create a technological foundation that enables something closer to that grim, dystopian image. And of course, the companies investing in Psychic and CityXR are the ones who stand to gain the most from the result of what looks like something like Hyper-Reality.
What that movie showed us is that if you’re not careful or creative, the application of augmented reality can easily become ad space everywhere. What the Styly and CityXR lack is a compelling alternative, especially given the lack of strong occlusion.
Earlier this year, UploadVR author Henry Stockdale spoke with Keiichi Matsuda and asked him about the lasting impact of Hyper-Reality.
“You know, that movie came out in 2016,” he said. I started making it in 2013. So it’s actually been ten years since I started working on it myself and it’s kind of incredible how people still ask me about it.
“Going to conferences or industry events, sometimes on the last slide of some speaker’s talk, it’s like, ‘Don’t forget, this is what I’m not going to do.’ And that’s great. It’s more than that.” I could imagine, really being able to impact the industry in that way, being able to have that kind of cautionary tale about what happens if we don’t take care.”
It’s interesting, although often things that are critical or satirical in some way don’t often come to any particular conclusion. [actual] “It ultimately has an effect, because I think people are motivated by anything that stimulates their company.”
According to CityXR, Matsuda’s comments are eerily relevant, perhaps even another cautionary tale in danger of being overlooked.
Disclosure: Flights, lodging and meals were paid for by Psychic VR for the three-day media tour.
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Image Source : www.uploadvr.com