Will augmented reality be quite this unpleasant?

Augmented reality, where stuff is visually superimposed on the real world using special glasses or whatever, is often touted as a more convincing and likely future than, say, everyone ending up in some kind of VR entertainment matrix hooked up to nutrition and shitting tubes. Sadly, AR will be even worse, at least if it resemble Keiichi Matsuda's hellish Hyper-Reality.

Hyper-Reality (total runtime approx 6 minutes) is a concept film by Keiichi Matsuda. It presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media. It is the latest work in an ongoing research-by-design project by Keiichi Matsuda; previous works include Domestic Robocop, Augmented City 3D and Keiichi’s Masters thesis Domesti/city. If you are interested in supporting the project, sponsoring the next work or would like to find out more, please send a hello to info@km.cx.

The short has a lightly-sketched Black Mirror-esque story about identity and solipsism and getting hacked, all against the lurid advertising-soaked backdrop (frontdrop?) of augmented reality. But that's still today's problem superimposed on the future. Hell is always something unexpected.