Meet Me Halfway

a phygital public space of encounters

Meet Me Halfway is a multi-user extended reality experience exploring the potential and implications of architecture across realities. By creating a micro-performative hybrid environment, the project speculates on the future of how we will live together, investigating alternative meeting places and communication strategies inside a phygital garden of encounters. A phygital space is a place explorable between the virtual and the physical, claiming that the digital is not only an expansion of the actual but believing in a synthesis of both. Atoms and molecules are merging with bits and bytes, and we, the inhabitants and designers of the future domains, must research the technology that will be part of our upcoming everyday reality and interpersonal interactions. Several exploratory objects create the physical stage of the public participatory XR performance and guide the users through the experience, both as a digital and physical matter to touch and engage with. They become the tactile tools of immersion, technologically embedding the virtual into our naked organic intelligence.


The project was developed at ./studio3, the Institute for Experimental Architecture of Innsbruck University, and publicly accessible in May 2021 in the Hofgarten of Innsbruck Austria, which is both the digital and physical public space of experimentation.

It was exhibited at the L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual) Matadero Festival in Madrid, Spain, in 2022, and at the Laval Virtual Recto VRso 2022 in France, where it received the award for best project.


CREDITS
a project by Me AndOther Me / Cenk Güzelis & Anna Pompermaier
Creative Technologist: Burkart Schwaighofer ︎
Music: Chris Zabriskie An Extraordinary Camera Was Custom Built and Used Only Once