Instead of just imagining near-future applications of holographic virtual and augmented reality that we interact with individually on a small scale, what if we expanded them to colossal proportions? “Holographic Reality” by Behruz Hairullaev, Brandon Muir and Nicholas Licausi envisions holograms as collective experiences that can provide entertainment, education, information, news and more in public places.

Sci-fi films have already envisioned huge holographic billboards, but “Holographic Reality” takes the concept a bit further with huge sports games, sculptures, light shows and more projected into the sky via modular, skyscraper-like structures, allowing cities to become massive canvases.

The designers note that virtual and augmented reality innovations tend to focus on personal applications like games that people interact with individually more often than in groups. Users are isolated by putting on headsets and absorbing the content alone, disconnecting from other people and the immediate physical world around them.

“Holographic Reality,” on the other hand, brings people together to share experiences like simultaneously broadcasted live events by making holograms part of the urban fabric. It’s not clear exactly how it would work, and some aspects of the project raise immediate concerns, like the prospect of worsening light pollution and making cities feel more cluttered than they already do. But for special events and select locations, this kind of technology could be pretty cool, and it’s probably inevitable at this point anyway.

Technology has taken over so many facets of our lives that the real world sometimes seems a little boring by comparison. Never fear – technology is slowly creeping into even the most mundane corners of our existence, making sure that we never have to face reality without some sort of augmented component ever again. These 15 designs, apps, inventions and gadgets put a digital element right into the real world – for better or for worse.

Virtual Mask

Augmented reality has the amazing ability to transform our world while also transforming ourselves, as the Zaphat proves. Put on the Zaphat and your whole identity is immediately transformed…at least when you’re seen through the camera of a mobile device running the Zappar app. The little patch on the front of the hat is actually a target that indicates your head location and orientation to the app, which then overlays a three-dimensional virtual mask on top of your face. The person operating the device can manipulate the type of mask and even interact with it virtually.

Street Art Comes to Life

Typically, street art is a fairly stationary form of personal expression. But thanks to futuristic augmented reality, street art can come to life and dance around right in front of observers. The LZRTAG augmented reality app allows people to aim a smartphone at a target in order to see a short animated street art clip. Anyone at all can upload an animation and print out a tag to decorate the world, all for free.

Finding Twitter Friends

Twitter’s geotagging feature allows friends to find one another in real life with an app called Twitter 360. Using an iPhone’s camera, the app creates an augmented reality overlay map that guides the iPhone holder to nearby friends based on their geotagged tweets. Users just have to follow the arrows that appear on the screen to be led directly to the nearest contact.

Augmented Reality Cinema

If you’ve ever traveled to a specific geographic spot just because it was featured in a favorite movie, the AR Cinema app from developers Halocline will be an exciting concept. The smartphone app senses when you’re in a movie-related location and shows you the famous scene(s) shot there. It’s an interesting way to combine a love of travel and a love of movies – and maybe even our collective love of smartphones.

Window Games

On a long car or train journey, boredom can set in pretty quickly. This conceptual game would use a Kinect and other simple hardware to create an augmented reality overlay on the actual scenery outside of the vehicle in which you’re traveling. By touching the window, players would be able to add all kinds of fun objects and elements to the passing scenery. The game, called Touch the Train Window, is from Tokyo design team Salad.

Augmented Reality Park

(images via: Daily Mail)

If the beauty of nature is getting a bit boring, perhaps you’d like to spice things up a bit by throwing in some psychedelic visions and experiences. Swiss designer Jan Torpus has created a project called lifeClipper, in which visitors put on head-mounted display equipment for a walk through the park. The display shows the user’s actual surroundings but adds an extra layer to reality. This additional layer includes vivid colors, surreal characters, and an imaginatively enhanced landscape.

Real-Time Selective Video Editing

Changing your reality is simple when you’ve got high-tech augmented reality tools on your side. Software from a German university allows you to remove unsavory objects from your video footage as you’re filming it – just tell the software what you want to disappear and it magically erases it. The whole process takes only microseconds and is convincing to all but the sharpest eyes.

In a weak world economy where everyone is trying to be conservative with cash, new architectural projects go unbuilt more often than not. That doesn’t stop architects from designing incredible structures, though – it only means that they have to come up with slightly more creative ways of sharing them with the world. The Dutch postal service and the Netherlands Institute of Architecture joined forces to bring amazing architecture to the world via augmented reality.

The cooperative project aimed to present the public with architecture that would never see the light of day in the real world but still deserved to be admired. Working with Dutch advertising agency Gummo, the Netherlands Institute of Architecture and Dutch postal service created a very unusual sheet of stamps.

Some of the stamps display pictures of unbuilt but visionary architecture. Others contain QR codes that actually bring the structures to life. Holding one of the QR code stamps up to a webcam while visiting the project website makes one of the revolutionary buildings come to life right in the palm of your hand.

The project is a perfect example of how technology can help us overcome problems in new and unexpected ways. These wonderful buildings may not be able to find a budget in real life, but putting them into the hands – literally – of architecture enthusiasts gives them a chance to be seen and to provide inspiration.

Graffiti is one of those art forms that really is only for the brave. It takes a fair amount of courage to risk arrest just to put your mark on the world. For everyone who has always wanted to engage in some heavy tagging without the fear of doing time in jail, the Street Tag app from Channel 4 lets you use your iPhone’s camera to spray paint in augmented reality – no furtive glances or cover of darkness required.

(all images via: Pop-Up City)

The free app turns your iPhone into a virtual spray paint can, letting you tag any building you want in broad daylight. Feel like defacing the Empire State Building with your name? Go for it. Want to leave a big smiley face on the Sears Tower? No worries. The augmented reality abilities hold your artwork in place on an image of the building so that you can spray away to your heart’s content. While the app is full of cool and a lot of fun to use, there is a slight learning curve involved. But once you get the hang of it, you can upload all of your masterpieces to an online gallery – complete with geo-tags – to share them with the world.

There are many immensely talented artists out there who go to great lengths to make their paintings look as realistic as possible, mimicking the nuances of three-dimensional form, texture and lighting. But it’s rare that the opposite is true – wherein an artist seeks to make reality look like a painting. Meet Alexa Meade, who paints subjects not on canvas but right on top of themselves.

Meade’s thick acrylic brushstrokes turn living subjects into exaggerated, flat, painterly versions of themselves that are so accurately rendered two-dimensional, it’s difficult to tell immediately that there’s a real person under all that pigment. When the subject’s environment is painted as well, the effect is so complete that onlookers are stunned when what looks like some kind of painted sculpture suddenly moves and breathes.

“My painting technique pushes the boundaries of perception, compressing 3D space into a 2D plane and effectively blurring the lines between art and life,” Meade told Juxtapoz in a recent interview.

“Typically, when you look at a painting, you’re looking at an artist’s interpretation of the subject painted on canvas. In my artistic interpretation of the subject, I paint directly on top of the subject I am referencing rather than using canvas. Essentially, my art imitates life – on top of life. For example, with Portrait of a Self-Portrait you are simultaneously looking at a portrait I painted of myself, a photo I took of myself, and at me.”

Meade didn’t go to art school – in fact, she graduated from Vassar College with a degree in political science. When asked if her background in politics has influenced her art, she explained slyly, “My projects spin reality.”