Through the looking glass

London – Critical thinking-focused designer Keiichi Matsuda has released Hyper-reality, his terrifying vision of a world immersed in augmented reality.

• The film expands and refines some of the concepts from Matsuda’s 2010 short film Augmented Hyper-reality: Domestic Robocop
• Hyper-reality is a collaboration between Matsuda and a production team at Fractal in Medellín, Colombia, where the film is set

Two-and-a-half years in the making, Matsuda’s conceptual film uses post-production techniques to imagine a world in which media is all around us and our interaction with the physical world is covered by a layer of augmented reality. The film also raises questions about how wealth will influence our access to different levels of technology and create barriers between different social classes through alternative realities.

The film also features the rise of a new kind of biohacking crime, when an attacker steals a small sample of the protagonist’s blood and is able to instantly hack her identity. According to Matsuda, this is the first in a series of interconnected shorts that re-imagine the augmented hyper-reality world to paint a picture of our possible future in the city.