[From The Daily Mail, where the story includes several more pictures]
[Image: The world as seen through the LifeClipper helmet – it mixes the ‘real’ as seen through cameras with hallucinations created by computers]
‘A living dream’: The ‘augmented reality’ helmet that turns walk in the park into an encounter with alien creatures under a psychedelic sky
By Damien Gayle
Last updated on 5th March 2012
Most ‘virtual reality’ helmets plunge users into an unreal video-game world – but a new version mixes the unreal into the real world in a ‘living dream’.
The helmet only works in St Johann’s Park in Basel, Switzerland – but wearers explore a mixture of the ‘real’ park, seen via cameras, and 3D illusions created by computers, including ghostly, glowing grass, surreal insects and strange visions in the sky.
Lifeclipper is an entirely new kind of entertainment, plunging users into parallel worlds using a high-powered computer backpack.
The lifeClipper project is a game-like, interactive new media artwork implemented with immersive augmented reality technology (AR) in St Johann’s Park in Basel, Switzerland.
The system runs on a Windows 7 computer in a backpack, and shows users a ‘world’ made of a mixture of the real – seen through head-mounted cameras – and the unreal, created by computers.
It’s controlled via an iPhone.
The computer imagery was inspired, its creators say, by films such as Independence Day and Avatar, as well as surreal artists such as Rene Magritte.
Surreal 3D effects ‘swoop in’ from the skies, which are a mix of the real and a strange ‘cosmos’ hovering above the park.
‘An enormous, entire abstract cosmos surrounds the park plateau,’ say its creators, ‘Whilst at times it is barelyvisible through the sky, during certain climate phases it becomes the main reference system in an almost virtual world.’
The terrain of the real and virtual parks are almost the same, which allows users to navigate without falling over. But surreal features such as ghostly, glowing grass ‘grow around’ users if they stand in one place.
AR takes users’ audio-visual perception of reality and extends it with virtual content to make it an experience that is beyond what it really there.
In the case of lifeClipper3, the whole of St Johann’s Park is overlaid with a three-dimensional model hosting virtual audio-visual content and reveals to embellish the experience of users during their visit.
As they walk around the park wearing the lifeClipper backpack and headset, users’ perceptions switch between conventional daily-life and fantastic parallel worlds.
These parallel realities have different physical and cultural rules which create a mental-perceptual interference which makes users question their perception of reality.
The project started in 2003, bringing together artists and scientists in the quest for mind-challenging sensations and new ideas for mobile phone apps, electronic maps and smarter websites.
Unlike former incarnations, which referenced historic content, lifeClipper3 takes no cultural context from its surroundings.
Instead, narrative artistic content is used to extend the appearance function and symbolic values of the park’s landscape.
Jan Torpus, director of lifeclipper project, said: ‘Crucial to this project is the idea of challenging what we take for granted, like the earth-centred nature of our basic reference systems, gravity, or our notion of time and space.
‘The implementation of other parallel or superior worlds, which form reference layers with alternative logic, dynamics and dimensions, question visitors’ perceptions and offer them an opportunity to experience other dimensions’