A typical day in the future
You may have seen this short film made by Keiichi Matsuda depicting his take on hyper reality. It’s making the rounds and many are questioning whether Matsuda’s vision is what our future entails, and others ponder how soon this could happen to our lives.
The gist of the film
In this film we are riding on the shoulder of a woman who does routine things like riding a bus and grocery shopping. But we get her hyper reality views too as she plays a tile based game in the air, chats with her boss, checks her pain currency and adopts an avatar puppy at the store. The hyper reality glitches, and changes, and ultimately she is robbed of her points and identity and plunged back into the dull, grey, bare world. The film ends with the woman entering a church and becoming a first level catholic after having her identity aggressively stolen.
The film feels like a neon techno reality show meets blade runner. Advertisements and music overlay everything. We can tell she’s dissatisfied with her life but there are so very many distractions to help.
What does “hyper reality” mean?
So what is hyper reality? From the filmmakers perspective: “Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.”
Hyper reality is part of the trend that imagines the mixing of the digital and real words and reactions to it range from excited to highly critical.
It’s not dissimilar to the “augmented reality” being developed by Magic Leap. Even as far back as 2011, we covered rumors of glasses-free hyper reality 3D images on iPad.
Is this what the future really holds?
Despite the social stigma associated with innovative devices like google glass, hyper reality seems in some ways inevitable. Weather it will look more Iron Man or this rather disturbing viral video remains to be seen.
