Peter Anders has been involved with work at the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University, in particular Arch-OS and discussing its potential. Here’s an interview discussing the similarity of imaginary or virtual space and physical space.

Listen to it here or Read Below

Sabine Breitsameter:
Peter Anders, in your publications and your lectures, you always refer to the similarity of imaginary or virtual space and physical space. What’s the advantage of bringing these quite different concepts of space together?

Peter Anders:
People don’t realize that it’s actually a very old thing. There’s a lot of innovation that’s going on in the technologies right now, but few of us understand why that technology is being driven forward the way it is, and why it’s had the success that it’s had in the media. I think all of us grew up with fairytales and myths, and … sort of narrative spaces that merge physical reality and imagined spaces, and imagined people together. And I think that virtual reality, or augmented reality, which is what my topic is, merges physical and non-physical in a similar sort of way.

Sabine Breitsameter:
Could you give a description: How does this experience work?

Peter Anders:
There’s a book, actually, that I wrote, called “Envisioning Cyberspace”, and my topic of research in that book was the way we use space to think, and how that would influence the design of information environments. And from my standpoint, and of course I’m bringing along the baggage of architecture, as well, but we use space to think, in the sense that we construct the space that we see. We think that we are in a room, in this case a fairly confined recording studio, but in fact, all we really have to prove that is our sensory input, and everything from the senses is processed and used as this illusion. And of that course, makes mute that there is a reality, versus a not-reality or virtuality. And that’s kind of the point of departure about this merging of abstract and concrete spaces in the same mind.

… continued at Audio Hyperspace