Introduction

In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and driven by cyber culture, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. The computer has accelerated the digital electronic communication in the demassified niches of the internet. The internet operates not only on this micro scale but also on a macro scale and transforming our cities into global entities in which local cultures remain only as traces. Situated precisely between the real and the virtual, architecture is challenged, yet resists.


The purpose of this research is to examine the matrix of themes to do with the integration of human life and technology and its subsequent translation into architecture. The most crucial task is not the engineering of buildings to accommodate networks and computers nor is it the exploration of the formal and cultural possibilities of immersive virtual reality. Rather it is to think of solutions to create spaces that satisfy important human needs in effective new ways that surprise through digital enabled combinations of the unexpected. In a sense, extended architecture can be seen as a version of mixed reality that incorporates flexible creative environments as a duplication of physical space.

What does exist as the next level is an architecture that acts as a “Plug-in” to the existing structure. It is an invisible architecture that makes numerous parallel virtual worlds visible. Architecture as an enabling platform for all where the medium is the architecture and myself means many selves – at least two: 1 and 0.

Conceiving architecture as a quantum object that can be in two states at once (real and virtual)

It is against the traditional perception of architecture which knows only either-or; either 1 or 0, either inside or outside, either enclosing or excluding. It is an invisible architecture that makes numerous parallel virtual worlds visible. It is an upside down architecture as a pure infrastructure. At its heart, It is an architecture of genuine interface between the real and the virtual – a dynamic open space, an enabling platform – place of “permanent frenzy in nothingness,” or a place of “ceaseless innovation and change.”

“As humans”, argues Kas Oosterhuis, “we must learn to relate to the dynamics of super-fast real-time computation processes. We must build the computational tools for collaborative design and engineering in order to meet the rich expectations created by looking at the world from one or two levels up… it leads in the same manner to a major paradigm shift in the way we connect to buildings as running processes… this new kind of building is not only designed through computation, it is a computation.”

Let’s think of the following ON/OFF scenario: you enter a space and switch on, instead of light, a data flow, which fills the space in a sec with a “world” – and you are suddenly in the Louvre, at a bazaar in Cairo, on board a spaceship travelling to Mars, in a research lab or simply at home. All you need is data – plus super fast data transfer, super-fast computation power, plus the right architecture.

An architecture which integrates the interconnected IT infrastructure in a way that creates powerful distributed knowledge spaces which will be largely self-managing, self-diagnostic and transparent to the user enabling higher-order acting by the individual as well as virtual organizations.

Virtual Guggenheim Museum commissioned to the New York firm Asymptote Architects is at the first phase of a three-year initiative to construct an entirely new museum facility. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet as well as real-time interactive components installed at the various Guggenheim locations. NYSE Virtual Trading Floor is the first business application of an interactive virtual architecture. Displayed on the trading floor on an array of nine large flat screen high resolution displays it allows for day to day monitoring as well as crisis management of all aspects of NYSE trading floor activity. The array of large flat screen monitors mentioned above is a center piece of the design. This along with imbedded ribbons of text in various surfaces captures the essence of the different ‘flows’ that encompass the Stock Exchange trading floor.

The E – formations research project asserts that architecture takes place on the edge of real and virtual. Virtual is projected onto the real to create alternate spaces and multiply the experience of the user. In this way architecture exists in layers and user has the control to switch in between the different layers of experience. It erases the concept of location and orientation for the person within the space and is very much the same phenomena as on the World Wide Web where we exist as text and image – phantoms of our own selves.

It brings us the concept of augmented reality and infused environments as an integration of physical and simulated spaces. Azuma's definition says that Augmented Reality combines real and virtual, it is interactive in real time and is registered in 3D. Additionally Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino defined Milgram's Reality-Virtuality Continuum in 1994. They describe a continuum that spans from the real environment to a pure virtual environment. In between there are Augmented Reality (closer to the real environment) and Augmented Virtuality (is closer to the virtual environment).

The aim of the project is to find an application of this research in the defense sector and to explore the augmented reality technology in terms of hardware and software requirements. Then to provide the necessary support infrastructure.