Virtual Reality

With smart cities on the mind as a basis for so many of the developments and decisions relating to sustainable development today, it is not surprising that we're seeing more and more virtual reality. Whether it is because virtual cities are the epitome of smart cities or because virtual reality is a tool for realising our utopia, our ideal smart city, there is no shaking the incredible development in this field - a technology which allows us to see ourselves surrounded by technology. 

The video below allows us to imagine a world where we  become the smart phone and connect in with the city, seeing all the systems around us. 

Source: Matsuda, K 2016, Hyper-Reality, 19 May 2016, accessed 19 May 2016, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs>.

This world presents us with something more than virtual reality, a 'hyper-reality' as described to us by the author. Where we not only see an enhanced version of the world around us but can interact with it. Buildings, infrastructure, even people project a code to the system enabling users of the system to identify every element and then an intelligent computer system provides the user with possible responses to the stimulus it receives. What is particularly strange about this hyper reality is that is hasn't actually changed the way the citizens in this imagined world do things, it has simply made them easier to do. The user still has to go to the shop to buy groceries and motor vehicles still litter the busy streets. And when the system is corrupted, the world around the user appears completely unchanged from how we know it today. Digitisation of the city's components and its people hasn't made the city a better place for the people, it has reduced them to a code in the greater system, it has robbed them of their identity. And, touching on the privacy issues related to big data collection, it was so easy for a hacker to steal the created identity of this woman. 

It may seem now to be an exaggerated portrayal of the future of smart cities, but the recognisable integration of ideas from social media platforms and smart phone apps along with the excessive advertising makes this portrayal seem all too real. It is not entirely far-fetched and it touches on some of the very real issues with the integration of information and communication technologies in our cities today.