Body Architectures Real time data visualization and responsive immersive environments

Abstract

This project sets up a design framework that promotes augmenting the human body's interactions exploring methods for merging and blending the users of physical and virtual environments, through the design of wearable devices that are embedded with sensors and actuators. This allows for haptic and visual feedback through the use of data that reflects changes in the surrounding physical environment, and visualized in the immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. We consider the Body Architectures project to serve as mechanisms for augmenting the body in relation to the virtual architecture. These wearable devices serve to bring a hyper-awareness to our senses, as closed-loop cybernetic systems that utilize `digitized' biometric and environmental data through the use of 3D scanning technologies and cloud point models, virtual reality visualization, sensing technologies, and actuation. The design of Body Architectures relies on hybrid design, transdisciplinary collaborations, to explore new possibilities for wearable body architectures that evolve human-machine-environment interactions, and create hyper awareness of the temporal, atmospheric qualities that make up our experience of space, as `sensorial envelopes' (Lally 2014).