The Real Virtual or the Real Real: Entering Mixed Reality

As part of the international discourse on the revival of the Mixed Reality hype, the main goal of this paper is to present an exploration of combining application fields of human interaction with large-scale environmental data flow in the realms of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The multidisciplinary research project, Landscape in Transformation, at Aalto University in Finland aims at developing an innovative platform in VR/AR to enable the designer and the future users of landscape architecture and urban design and planning projects to actively understand and interact with the hidden layers (datasets) of the site. The perception, imagination and engagement with abstract data aims to open up new possibilities for revealing the relevance of datasets in relation to design.