Hasta La Ideas

Greg Tran recently completed his degree at the arvard Graduate School of Design, where he won the Thesis Prize for his research on “Digital 3D,” a fascinating, if highly theoretical, exploration of the future of augmented reality.

People assume we have digital 3D already but this is a fallacy. When you rotate your model on ascreen or watch a Pixar animation is actually just a digital 2d REPRESENTATION of material 3d.What people are calling 3DTV and 3D movies are just a form of shallow depth or Bas Relief, not true digital 3D.

The critical/operative imperative of the digital 3D is that there is a subject moving through space. The digital 3D is in its beginning stages, but will evolve in a similar way to the digital 2D. The digital 2D began as a specialized, singular medium which was largely used for documentation purposes, but has evolved towards personalization, interactivity, fluency and distribution.

True digital 3D—if (or when, according to Greg’s account) it becomes a reality—would essentially blur the line between web sites and real-life ones, including social networking and communication. Tran reimagines the traditional Graphical User Interface as an architectural feature in itself, envisioning a future in which these staid sci-fi tropes will eventually allow for more fluid interpretations of digital 3D-activated interior and exterior spaces.

The full 18-minute version is after the jump…

It’s heady stuff for sure, maybe a little more than lunch-break fare, but it’s not so much that Tran bitten off more than he can chew; rather, it’s a coherent vision for a digital future, where a virtual architecture is not just artificially superimposed on reality but exists as a tangible, interactive framework embedded in space and time.

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