Look at architectural renderings on a regular basis and soon you’ll start to spot stylized elements that pop up often enough to be called cliches, every one of them inserted into the image for a specific purpose. It’s all about selling the viewer on the concept, consciously and subconsciously, like any other form of marketing. The point of architectural renderings is typically to convince the client, the investors and the public at large that the project (and, specifically, the architect’s vision) deserves funding and support. They make it possible to envision what it will look like before ground is broken, not just visually but emotionally.

The best tactic to sell someone something, after all, is to appeal to their needs and desires. What does the public want out of a new museum or seaside park? How does a wealthy bachelor see himself in a new home? What can help convince investors that a project is prestigious enough to justify their participation? Sometimes it all comes down to a kid with a balloon, an otherworldly glow or lots and lots of fireworks.

The use of storytelling tools in architectural proposals certainly isn’t new. Back when they were all drawn by hand, renderings still had their tropes: a Zeppelin in the sky beside every tower, a futuristic skyline implying a certain cutting edge quality to the project. Today, there are enough digital tools to make the process of producing a convincing rendering easier than ever. Artists use programs like Revit and Sketchup along with Photoshop to depict architectural models in real world settings, often with photorealistic attention to detail. They can download packs of human figures dubbed “scalies” along with other elements like furniture, trees and kayaks.

Yeah, about those kayaks. Renderings are selling us an idealized version of reality, and that often means plopping structures into sanitized fictional scenes straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting or 1950s-era Archie Comics. There might be far more kayaks than technically warranted in one image, but they’re showing us how fun, lively and adventurous that project could be. The same goes for bicycles, rollerblades and kites. Hot air balloons are a hell of a lot more ubiquitous in renderings than they are in real life. See how lively the scene is? Don’t you want to go there?

So-called “scalies” are fascinating in their own right. Sometimes they’re translucent to keep the focus on the building itself, giving them a ghostly quality. These, too, are all carefully chosen: mothers pushing babies in strollers, students lugging backpacks, businessmen striding with briefcases in hand, shoppers struggling with armloads of purchases. Supermodel types stand around in evening gowns for no apparent reason other than adding to the ambiance. As with any form of marketing, sometimes there’s a scantily clad woman just to catch your eye. It can almost become a game of Where’s Waldo.

Then there’s the atmosphere. As crucial as lighting is to make a rendering realistic, sometimes designers just can’t resist adding all manner of effects to give the scene some extra shine. Lens flares and light trails are common, but even more egregious is the sort of artificial glow a building will never actually emit in real life. Glass facades are almost always portrayed as completely transparent in renderings when they’ll really be more like mirrors, changing the look of the structure altogether.

Overhead, there just happens to be a tranquil flock of birds, once again reinforcing the liveliness of the scene. The structure is so dazzling, wildlife is inexplicably drawn to it, even in the middle of the city. Maybe the structure is taken out of its real context and placed in a more pleasant setting, like a picturesque meadow.

Many renderings depict the architectural model in color while the rest of the scene is in black and white, blurred or lacking in detail.

The point, obviously, is just to keep the focus on the proposal, but the effect can be unsettling, as if the rest of the neighborhood has fallen into ruin. Look how great that building is – everything else pales in contrast!

A dark, moody dystopian quality can even be applied intentionally to give the scene a cinematic sense of drama, lending it a gravitas it might not have under blue skies.

The ubiquity of these elements has spawned many a think piece as well as parodies, like a series of comics based on architectural renderings of Future Memphis. And once you start noticing them, you can never un-see them.

None of this is to say these rendering tropes should never be included, or don’t achieve what they set out to do – but it’s fun to examine the details, and prudent to question their purpose and discuss how potentially unrealistic imagery can set us up for disappointment once the projects are finally complete.

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.

The carefully-crafted streets and avenues of the suburban neighborhood rarely strike anyone as artistic, though they do demonstrate a certain orderly attractiveness. The artwork of Ross Racine takes the suburban landscape to a place it’s never before been: the realm of fine art.

(all images via: Ross Racine)

Racine creates fictional suburban layouts, giving them each the kind of detail and symmetry that one expects to see in an actual neighborhood aerial photograph. Lovely little houses with perfectly landscaped yards surround clean, litter-free streets. Each community boasts an appropriately nonsensical suburban-planned-community-sounding name: Goldenwood Shores, Hickoryglen Estates, Sweetwind Junction, Stonywater Cove.

But there are notable differences between the real thing and Racine’s created worlds. While an actual neighborhood may consist of sharply-defined blocks and lazily curving cul-de-sacs, Racine’s communities feature dizzying concentric circles, impossibly jumbled street systems, insane layouts, and roads that lead nowhere.

It seems that the artist has skillfully blended real aerial neighborhood photos with his imaginary renderings of communities, but the truth is so much more impressive. Ross Racine draws all of his works digitally and freehand.

Using no photographs or scanned materials, he creates the types of suburbs he sees in his head. The neatly-lined-up homes and the lush vegetation are all directly from the artist’s mind – though he does take a measure of inspiration from Google Maps and other aerial suburban snapshots.

These idyllic little scenes are a playful examination of the way we plot out our world. The imagery is recognizable to just about everyone who has ever used a computer to look up an address or directions, but it is warped in a fun and rather loving way.

To Racine, the suburb is a type of organism. It is both abstract and deliberate; chaotic and organized; global and local. Like nature, these man-made constructs are fascinating in their complexity. And like aerial pictures of real suburbs, Racine’s fictional neighborhoods manage to be endearing yet removed enough to highlight the over-consumption that defines our modern lives.

Today, Photoshop and other photo editing tools are used extensively for everything from digitally slimming swimsuit models to retouching school photographs in an effort to erase the memories of adolescent acne. But some photo retouching has a rather more nefarious purpose: swaying viewers to one side or the other of a political debate. This practice is not a strictly modern one, though: people have been altering photographs for political purposes almost since the day photographs were invented. These political photo hacks date all the way back to the 19th century and continue up through the present day…because no one ever accused politicians (or their staff, followers or enemies) of being too honest.

Honest Abe’s Not-So-Honest Pose

(images via: Gajitz)

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most celebrated former American presidents, and this stately portrait of him standing in a rather regal pose has graced countless classrooms. But the truth is that Lincoln never posed for this picture; rather, it is Abe’s head (from a less-regal seated portrait) pasted onto the body of Southern politician John Calhoun. If you look very closely, you can see that the words on the papers have been changed from “the sovereignty of the states,” “strict constitution,” and “free trade” in the Calhoun photo to “union,” “constitution,” and “proclamation of freedom” in Lincoln’s.

Grant’s Grand Battle Scene

(images via: Gajitz)

Another iconic American history photograph is this one of General Ulysses S. Grant on horseback before his troops in City Point, Virginia during the Civil War. It’s a wonderful and oft-circulated piece of history…and it’s also a total fabrication. The portrait, bottom, is actually a composite of the three images above it: General Grant’s head on the body (and horse) of General Alexander McCook with a backdrop of a battle at Fisher’s Hill, Virginia.

Majestic Mussolini

(images via: Dartmouth)

In this 1942 portrait of Benito Mussolini, the horse handler holding the steed’s reins was thought to detract from the power and authority that the Italian Fascist wanted to portray. Therefore, Mussolini had him summarily dismissed from the photo after the fact.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

(images via: Dartmouth)

It’s rough falling out of favor with a political leader – particularly one who employs skilled photo editors to erase all photographic evidence of enemies’ existence. In all of these photos, a former friend, colleague or adviser was deemed unsavory after the photos were taken and subsequently edited out of the images. Top: a commissar is removed from a photo where he once walked alongside Josef Stalin. Middle: once Po Ku fell out of favor with Mao Zedong, Mao had him erased from this photograph. Bottom: Joseph Goebbels was one of Hitler’s closest advisers and a high-ranking Nazi official. Although his career experienced ups and downs, he never truly fell out of favor with Hitler, which is why it is puzzling that he was removed from this 1937 photograph.

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes, Dartmouth)

Likewise, Leon Trotsky (along with two other men) and Carlos Franqui suffered photographic deaths after publicly opposing the policies of Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro, respectively.

Grim Tydings

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

In 1950, with America in the midst of the Cold War and anti-Communist sentiment running hot, this apparent meeting between Senator Millard Tydings and Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party, was instrumental in Tydings’ unsuccessful senate bid. It was a fake cooked up by the staff of Senator Joseph McCarthy after Tydings insisted that the American government was not swarming with closet Communists, contrary to what McCarthy alleged. Even though the photo was admitted as a fake, Tydings lost his 1950 election and his made-up Communist ties were thought to be at least partly to blame.

Election Hijinks

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

(image via: Snopes)

(image via: Snopes)

During the 2004 presidential election, pictures surfaced of both George W. Bush and John Kerry in compromising positions. Bush was depicted as stupid and child-like, while Kerry was shown keeping company with unsavory characters or participating in activities that encouraged Americans to question his personal beliefs. Among the most memorable: the top picture apparently shows G.W. Bush reading a children’s book upside down, but it was clearly altered from the original image, show to the right. John Kerry was reported to have shared a podium with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam war rally, but the images was later revealed to be a composite of two photographs from two separate events. Kerry was also reported to have spent time with Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, as evidenced by this photo…a photo which was soon uncovered as a fake.

(images via: Dartmouth)

(images via: Museum of Hoaxes)

The 2008 election was filled with just as much photo trickery. The infamous Sarah Palin photo above, in which the former Governor of Alaska poses in an American flag bikini with a large gun, quickly spread all around the world. It was, however, just as quickly proven to be a fake. Also a topic of discussion during the election was Barack Obama’s pledge to quit smoking, which has proven somewhat troublesome for the politician. This photo of the president with a cigarette in his mouth, however, is not a photographer’s lucky catch of a slip of willpower; it was created by an anonymous internet prankster.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

(images via: Stinky Journalism)

In 2009, the director of Spain’s National Intelligence Center, Alberto Saiz, was accused of spending government money on lavish international fishing and hunting vacations. To disprove his presence on a certain fishing trip, Saiz released the bottom photograph above which was supposed to show that he was not present on the fishing boat. The only problem is that when his staff removed Saiz’s head from the photo, they replaced it with that of the man standing just a few feet away from Saiz…in the same photograph.

Legendary concept artist Syd Mead can be credited with creating some of the most memorable sci-fi movie worlds ever. Tron, Aliens and Blade Runner were all Mead’s work and all helped set new precedents for science fiction movies. Now, a new generation of concept artists is paying homage to Syd Mead in the most significant way possible: by creating a ton of new ideas for future transportation in the style of the legendary futurist. CGSociety’s Accelerate contest asked digital artists to come up with their Syd Mead-inspired visions of how humans may get from one point to another in coming generations. These are some of the most interesting entries from the contest.

The Sydpelin is a beauty of a flying machine inspired both by the classic Zeppelin and the iconic art of Syd Mead. Unlike the original Zeppelin design, the Sydpelin is powered by a plasma beam that heats the interior and keeps the engine churning. (Somehow this seems nearly as dangerous as filling a huge dirigible with hydrogen.)

Inspired by Mead’s hulking machine concepts, the creator of the NOMAD concept styled this vehicle to be a high-capacity mobile bridge and landing pad. Running on nuclear power, the vehicle can keep going for quite some time – even when working constantly. It builds roads, it scouts new locations, and it carries vehicles and supplies to where they need to be.

Is this what public transportation will look like in the future? Or is this merely a fantasy world in which we commute between work and home in flying metal doughnuts? This transportation concept assumes that most of us want our commutes to be shorter, so we will eventually develop transport systems that allow us to travel large distances in the blink of an eye.

Linking your cars to others in a convoy would allow the lead vehicle to take over while all following drivers could simply sit back, relax and read the news on the way to work. Sound wildly futuristic? A similar system is being developed and tested currently in the EU. The cars in that trial aren’t nearly as cool as the ones in this concept, however.

An ingenious idea that could save untold amounts of money, manpower and data, the Autonomous Database Transport vehicle was invented 2137 to deter the unmanageable number of hacker attacks. The ADT achieves this by going in a surprisingly backward motion: by physically transporting important data for government and private clients.

The Halo 49 single person transport is very strongly reminiscent of an actual Syd Mead transportation device, but it is also a unique new concept. Riders are seated in the Pac-Man-shaped vehicle and use two wireless disks to navigate to their destination.

Law enforcement officials of the future may have to deal with vastly different terrain, either here on Earth or on different planets, so it’s important for them to have a vehicle that can get them anywhere they need to go. The Trakker all-terrain vehicle can roll over just about anything in its path and get you to the most remote places on the ground.

In the near future, we won’t need to rely on archaic means of space travel that can take thousands of years to reach distant destinations. We’ll simply use vehicles like the Spacetime Runner which uses wormholes as “shortcuts” to other places in space-time.

Assuming we’ll still be recycling the traditional way in the future and we haven’t yet developed some programmable trash-degrading bacteria, we’ll need vehicles to collect our recyclables. This simple, common-sense design shows that even garbage collection trucks look awesome in the future.

When the Earth’s resources have been used up and the planet is in peril, humanity takes to living on walking cities. Using trees and plants harvested from Earth, each moving city has a breathable atmosphere inside its shell. The cities fertilize the planet they walk on with the waste created by the humans within.

In the year 2112 a new mineral was discovered on the moon. This mineral made a new type of high-powered laser possible; it’s so high-powered, in fact, that it supports this “green” urban train. Special buildings all around the city emit the lasers which can be re-routed when necessary.

The Vimana 2 is a vehicle built of solid light that explains many of the mysteries of previous generations. The vehicle is cheap and lightweight, but it has the pesky effect of causing reflections that burrow their way through the space-time continuum. In the 20th and 21st centuries, these strange lights in the sky were misinterpreted as UFOs.

Definitely inspired by the shape of Mead’s creations, the  MD 400 train concept is a truly beautiful example of future transportation. The thin trains hold fewer people than traditional subway cars, but mag-lev technology lets them move quickly and silently through their tunnels.

In a dystopian tale that would make Syd Mead proud, the creator of this concept explains that in a civilization called Praetoria, the surface of the planet is no longer safe. It is highly polluted and filled with gangs, forcing the wealthy to move to floating islands far above the surface. Emissions-free floating shuttles like the one above are the only way to travel between the surface and the islands.

This ATV concept uses not only wheels, but animal-style moving legs to get over rough ground. Its passenger pod holds the driver far above the ground, letting him spy trouble ahead.

Likewise, the Acinonyx concept blends the features of animal and machine to make an all-terrain vehicle that can handle even the roughest ground. This concept takes a bit more of its influence from the animal than the machine, which results in a fascinating form.

Crawling through desert worlds looking for suitable places for a human colony is a rough job. The Desert Mantis is a strange but rugged vehicle that uses its unique locomotion system to navigate any type of land. It can also be used to pull wagons of materials or passengers from one settlement to the next.

Stationary hotels become a thing of the past in coming generations, when cruise ship-like floating hotels become more and more popular. Having the size (and most of the features) of a small city, the Atlantis II is a nomadic hotel that guests will never, ever want to leave.

Four-wheeled cars take up so much space on the road and have mechanical limitations that make them impractical for use in the high-tech future. The Urb-01 is a two-wheeled gyroscopic city vehicle that makes commuting simpler and far more stylish. The two-seat car features a door that opens by sliding sideways.

When human civilization moves underwater, we’ll need a new form of transport to get us between the water-bound cities. The Octopus is a balanced blend of organic elements and machinery that allow the driver to both propel the vehicle and provide defense with the tentacles made of organic materials.