The Unreal Garden Is San Francisco’s Selfie Museum For The Burning Man Generation
I’m surrounded by flowers and animals, some virtual, some real, with a $5000 Microsoft Hololens strapped to my head. In front of me unfolds a phantasmagorical wonderland, with floating neon bushes and luminous rabbits and birds. “The environment reacts to you, touch something and it will change,” explained Leila Amirsadeghi cofounder of Onedome, who soft launched this surreal botanical scene — a.k.a. The Unreal Garden — in San Francisco, mid-October. “And here are the selfie stations.”
Yes, this world of magically augmented reality has selfie stations. After all, your cell phone can only capture what your eyes see unassisted — what’s really happening takes place in the Hololens. The selfie station merges virtual and physical reality to create a shareable picture, a psychedelic blurring of parallel worlds.
“The stations cater to consumer behavior,”Amirsadeghi said. “People want to have fun but also to share that, it’s about wanting to be out there and seen doing different things. We try and provide visually stimulating areas for those for those photographs.” Onedome’s set to open ten more venues across America over the next three years, and they have a ten year lease for their current building.
Sold out experiences like The Selfie museum and the Museum of Ice Cream have whetted people's appetite for experiences that are also Instagram worthy — here the tech crowd gets a turn. The Burning Man crowd may be bashful about ‘mainstream’ selfie opportunities, but in tech-heaven, they can duckface with the best of them.
Amirsadeghi said they designed it with an emphasis on storytelling — it’s not super obvious but all those little decor tricks come together to create a “world placed on magical ley lines and nature took over what was formerly inhabited by humans.” She says they may make this more apparent in future iterations.
“Our mission is to create artful immersive spaces inviting a shift from Me to We,” said Bertram Meyer, Onedome’s CEO. “We are specifically choosing interactive experiences that are built to be shared with friends or family, and that invites a moment of awe and beauty, collaboration and presence.”
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2018/11/11/the-unreal-garden-is-san-franciscos-selfie-museum-for-the-burning-man-generation/#2e4e6a0e422d