Meet Me Halfway

Meet Me Halfway is a multi-user extended reality experience exploring the potential and implications of architecture across realities. By creating a micro-performative hybrid environment, the project speculates on the future of how we will live together, investigating alternative meeting places and communication strategies inside a phygital garden of encounters. A phygital space is a place explorable between the virtual and the physical, claiming that the digital is not only an expansion of the actual but believing in a synthesis of both. Atoms and molecules are merging with bits and bytes, and we, the inhabitants and designers of the future domains, must research the technology that will be part of our upcoming everyday reality and interpersonal interactions. Several exploratory objects create the physical stage of the public participatory XR performance and guide the users through the experience, both as a digital and physical matter to touch and engage with. They become the tactile tools of immersion, technologically embedding the virtual into our organic intelligence. The project re-examines the public garden elements and redesigns them, exploring virtual and actual materialities, rethink them investigating the impact of immersive technologies on contemporary architectural design.

Master Thesis // Supervisors: Kathrin Aste, Cenk Güzelis, Christian Dummer