Reclaiming Shared Reality

In 2050, the AR-native city has arrived. Augmented reality is no longer a layer on top of the world — it is the world. Every surface has become a screen; every glance is monetized; every wall carries its sponsored overlay. The built environment exists simultaneously as material fact and curated image, and it is increasingly impossible to tell which is load-bearing.

Reclaiming Shared Reality proposes a translucent membrane — a new material surface stretched between buildings, inserted into the city's voids. It is not a wall. It is not a screen. It is a threshold: physically present but visually permeable, occupying space without claiming it. The membrane makes the city's invisible forces legible — wind, light, data flow, attention — by giving them something to press against.

The membrane is also an Anti-AR Interface. In a city where every surface has been claimed by digital overlay, it asserts the right to refusal. Transparent to the eye, opaque to the algorithm. It does not display; it diffracts. It does not communicate; it interrupts. The translucency is not openness — it is resistance, rendered in the most seductive material possible so that the refusal goes unnoticed until it is already too late.

In this speculative city, transparency has become the dominant aesthetic of power. Glass towers, open-plan offices, social media feeds — all promise visibility while extracting attention. Reclaiming Shared Reality asks whether there is a material practice that can turn this logic inside out: using the appearance of openness as a form of opacity, deploying legibility as camouflage.

The project is presented as a series of architectural drawings, material samples, and a speculative brief for a structure that does not yet exist — and may not need to. The traces it leaves are in the imagination of the city that might refuse to be fully seen.

Yue Fan is a UX Designer at Samsung, where she works on interaction design for hardware and spatial computing interfaces. Her practice bridges landscape architecture and interaction design — fields she pursued simultaneously, developing a sensibility for how designed environments shape attention, movement, and perception at both the scale of the body and the scale of the city.

Fan holds a Master of Design (MDes) from the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis research investigated the spatial politics of augmented reality in urban environments. Her speculative and professional work has been recognized with MUSE Gold and Indigo Gold awards for design excellence. Reclaiming Shared Reality is her first exhibition within a fine arts context, extending her design research into the register of spatial installation and speculative proposition.