XR Atlas is an educational collection of interdisciplinary applied and research-orientated projects revolving around virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and augmented reality (AR). XR stands for extended reality, referring as an umbrella term to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables.

While the metaverse is becoming one of the buzziest words in technology, gradually making its way into architectural practice and research, the collaborative online platform XR Atlas offers under the umbrella term of extended reality an alternative roadmap to enter and understand the history of virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Instead of presenting a comprehensive historical overview of the technological advances over the last centuries, lesser-known examples from literature, film, theatre and multimedia arts are gathered that speculate on spatial perception in the liminal, the gap between of our material and virtual worlds.

XR Atlas aims to extend and subvert the dominant narrative of VR as an escape from reality, and question whether a more embodied, enacted and embedded understanding of virtual technologies, freed from their representational capacities, could open up the field for narrative, fictional and speculative design proposals and a new form of spatial research native to the medium.

XR Atlas is aimed at practitioners and researchers from all disciplines to inform and facilitate chronological and/or thematic overviews for exhibitions, editorial projects, and various other media.

XR Atlas is curated on a day-by-day basis and can be extended by adding further images, text, and categories. If you wish to add any further content, please select the section and help us in furthering its objective to question the future development and use of virtual technologies, by reinvesting in its past.

XR Atlas is part of Paula Strunden's ongoing PhD research conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna within the framework of TACK: Communities of Tacit Knowledge – Architecture and it’s Ways of Knowing that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 860413.

For any other questions, comments or submission proposals, please get in touch via info@xr-atlas.org or follow us on >>> Instagram