Low Res City – Realised Augmentity, Y5. Tutors: Prof. Laura Allen and Prof. Mark Smout. The immense success of Pokémon Go created public awareness about ‘Augmented Reality’ and a phygital – partly physical, partly digital – stratum of city fabric it brought. With a guerrilla installation I wanted to create awareness for the presence of these digital creatures, weaving them back into the urban fabric. A Snorlax that appeared near my school was therefore rebuilt in 1:1 scale as paper model and placed at the point of its appearance. The function of the smartphone, once used as device to augment reality, was flipped: using Photogrammetry software, it was employed to perceive reality. Having obtained a 3D-scan of the reenacted scene, a technique borrowed from game development – the downsampling of data into low resolution meshes keeping a high resolution texture – forms the basis for a newly developed crafting technique: the Papercast.
