Alternative Reality: An Augmented Daily Urban World Inserting Virtual Scenes Temporally

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new design strategy for integrating fictionality into the real world named Alternative Reality, which makes it possible to connect the daily urban world with the virtual world from a temporal aspect to influence humans to adopt better lifestyles. The worlds also can be seamlessly integrated because the virtual world consists of real landscapes, objects and persons. This means that it may be possible to enhance the real world by showing fictional events among real events: people experience the enhanced hybrid world as in the real world rather than in a fictional world such as a movie. To demonstrate the design strategy of Alternative Reality, we have developed two case studies. The first case study investigates whether a user can sense the improbable behavior of a moving object as realistic, where the user can interact with the object. The second case study investigates whether a user can experience fictional occurrences in the virtual world as they are experienced in the real world. In both case studies, a user wears a head-mounted display to increase the immersion in the hybrid world created by Alternative Reality, in which the virtual world is created by capturing the real world with a 360-degree camera. The insights of the experiments with the case studies show that Alternative Reality effectively augments the real world without losing touch with reality.