Wutopia Lab treats architecture as a medium for constructing parallel realities inside the everyday, spaces where imagination is embedded into ordinary urban life.
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: "do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?" At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
A few years ago, I climbed over a gate and found myself gazing down at a valley. After I'd been walking for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the sky, there was a shift in my perception. Everything around me became intensely real. The fields and the bushes and trees and the clouds seemed more vivid, more intricate and beautiful.
Each of the individual parts - the headrest, arms, backrest, and seat - move along individual horizontal paths so that they aren't accelerated by gravity like a swinging rocking chair. At the same time, very smooth bearings cut resistance and friction to a minimum, allowing the chair to follow your body's natural movements. Dr David Wickett, the designer of the chair and co-founder of DavidHugh Ltd, says this system is so sensitive that 'even breathing can lift the entire body'.
When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen ( The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.
Accomplishment Hallucination is a cognitive state in which speed feels like competence, output feels like accomplishment, and work feels done when the actual work-the thinking-through, the failure-mode analysis, the sitting with uncertainty until the problem reveals its structure-hasn't happened at all. Physics need not apply. AI can create a similar state in waking life—literally, as your very words assume form before your eyes like a conjuring sorcerer. But, like real life, the code may be buggier than we realize.
Close your eyes and picture an apple. Most people see something-a faint, slightly blurry image, less vivid than a real apple. A few, however, will see it as clearly as if it were sitting right in front of them. This ability is called hyperphantasia. Hyperphantasia, literally meaning "beyond imagination," refers to exceptionally vivid mental imagery. It is often described as the opposite of aphantasia, a condition in which people report little or no ability to form mental images.
Yes and no, says cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, who with Halely Balaban recently published a paper titled "The Capacity Limits of Moving Objects in the Imagination." If you're like most people, you probably thought about some of these things, but not others. People build mental imagery hierarchically, starting with the ideas of "person," "room," "ball," and "table," then placing them in relation to one another in space, and only later filling in details like color.
This story is about complexity, advanced math, cognition, and machine computation. But hold on. For this exercise, my task is to take this complex idea and reduce it-to simplify it into something less daunting and (I hope) a bit easier to understand. So, let's take a step back. My bet is that most of us learned our first piece of geometry with two letters: x and y.