Hellish short film shows a future we never hope arrives

[A terrifying short film shows what would happen in an augmented reality future /Tech Insider]

Augmented reality may look like the future, but if it’s anything like what filmmaker and designer Keiichi Matsuda thinks it might be, we’d much rather stay here in the present.

In his six-minute-long concept film, Hyper-Reality, Matsuda takes us to the not-so-distant future, where augmented reality is ubiquitous and almost inescapable.

It litters advertisements everywhere, and despite some of the perks it provides, such as placing your grocery list on your cart or gamifying almost everything, it’s prone to some terrible glitches and even cyber theft, where you could lose everything.

The concept film came to reality (no pun intended) after Matsuda set up a Kickstarter campaign for the project back in 2013, and it was shot in Colombia.

According to Core 77, Matsuda would like to turn Hyper-Reality into a trilogy, with one film looking at an upscale augmented reality user and another from the eyes of a hacker.

While his film paints a rather bleak view of the future, Core 77 also says Matsuda is working with a start-up to bring some of the tech in the film to life. Here’s hoping if it does arrive, that reality will be much better than fiction.