Augmented Grounds: Introducing smart construction technology using Augmented Reality
Winning competition entry for the International Garden Festival in 2020, Augmented Grounds is a landscape installation built using smart construction technologies based on Augmented Reality.
The project is located in the Métis garden, Prince, Québec, Canada, the design is characterized by a continuous flow of lines that follow the orography of the terrain. The project takes inspiration from traditional Sash, one of the most persistent elements of traditional Métis dresses, a recognizable icon of the Métis culture. The sash is a finger woven belt made of brightly coloured wool and plant fibres. The Augmented Grounds interprets the sash through the use of colorful ropes made of twisted fibers that remember the finger woven and the distribution of these ropes follows the curves of the terrains as the sash follows the geometry of the human body.
The project celebrates the real time and intuitive communication between designer and maker, taking advantage of AR lenses to transfer data from the digital twins and stream them in the visor weared by the human builders creating a superimpositon between virtual environment and physical reality allowing the construction of complex geometries directly on site. This approach to construction is a game changer technology that allows to simplify the construction process, reduce costs and enable to construct complex geometries augmenting human capabilities thanks to virtual reality. The overall geometry is designed through mathematical algorithms that allow to interpret and repurpose the traditional patterns and adapt to the topography of the terrain, the combination of traditional materiality and mathematical form surrounded by the beautiful forest of Reford Garden.
The design team, led by Soomeen Hahm Design Ltd, includes Architects and Landscape Architects with expertise in human ecology, computational design and machines from Seoul National University and KOH SX Studio Inc. The project is the result of research that focuses on the construction of complex computational geometries by augmenting human capabilities, thanks to the use of wearable devices that extend human capabilities to establish a bridge between digital and physical worlds. This project and the construction strategy was a response to current global health conditions that imposes restrictive measures to keep distance between workers and offers an insight of a possible future in which traditional methods of work are rethought to take full advantage from contemporary technologies. This project is an example of the future way of working and collaborating from distance, provides a good key study of the potential applications of current technologies and at the same time offers a reference for everyone that aims to challenge current technologies applied in the construction industry.
