The phrase “bring a project to life” is thrown around casually by creative types of all creeds, from industrial designers to conceptual painters—people whose daily lives involve intense engagement with communication tools that allow the ideas in their heads to exist in the physical world. Emerging technologies from 3D software to VR goggles have revolutionized the way that clients can experience a designer’s vision, and now, Hyperform, a new collaborative and data-driven design tool, allows the design industry to literally immerse themselves—digitally—within a working project, blown up via augmented reality technology to 1:1 scale.
Hyperform comes from a Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) collaboration with Squint/Opera, a creative digital studio, and UNStudio. These big-name studios believe that their immersive software will enable designers to make the best decisions for the project and the client much faster, as the interactive elements are closer to complete project visualization than anything we’ve seen yet.
Jan Bunge, managing director at Squint/Opera, said, “Hyperform marks the first time we can feel and sense a spatial condition before it gets built.” Client and designer can walk around a project, experiencing its massing, spatial qualities, and materiality, and simply use hand gestures to edit, delete, and alter this type of digital file in real time before it’s too late or too expensive to make a change.
In a concept film, the Hyperform user is depicted as a disembodied hand, the viewer’s own, pushing at virtual buttons suspended in space and scrolling through horizontal libraries of architectural drawings, 3D models, and plans. Selecting a model and blowing it up with verbal cues to immersive size, the user shares it with a life-size colleague who materializes in a pixelated form before our eyes, calling in and “ready to join the meeting.”
BIG has debuted this new tool at its curated exhibition, FORMGIVING – An Architectural Future History from Big Bang to Singularity, at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. Amid the exhibition of 71 BIG projects currently on the drawing boards, representing the firm’s active proposals for the future, Hyperform exists towards the end of the exhibition’s “timeline”—near the top of the staircase near “singularity”—as the software represents the step beyond perceiving mere reality, going beyond into creating new realities—digital ones.
