The Great American Pixel

The Curious Case of Inchvisible Houses

I’m not sure what the exact percentages are, but “pretty much every” vacant lot in Detroit tells the story of a house (or building) that’s disappeared. Actually, there’s a decent chance the house is still there buried in the ground. One of the preferred demolition methods is to just push the-artist-formerly-known-as down into the basement and cover it with dirt. The ole urban farmers delight.

Here’s a slide that gets shown at every Detroit Works Project meeting (slides here), visually demonstrating the decline in housing stock on one block from 185 homes in 1950, down to 40 homes in 2010. 

The decline of livable housing is shockingly obvious, but what about the decline of material on the block, given “the burial method”. Is 80% of it still there? 60%? 40%? Using incredibly fuzzy math, if even 20% of the material from the 149 demolished homes is still there, that’s enough raw material for 29 homes.

All I know is we dug about a foot deep into the Plymouth microhood when we poured the foundation last spring, and like some sort of miniature archeologists we were pulling up bricks even at that depth. It was one of the moments that reinforced how the microhoods could be a great platform for Augmented Reality: using virtual reality overlays to show what was there, what could be there, and whatever inchvestors want.

One of the early ideas we brainstormed with Rita King was “inchvisible houses”. Simply point your camera phone at the microhood and see the inchvisible structures appear like so:

Well, we never did it (partially waylaid by the destruction of our solar-powered camera stand, partially distracted by other shiny objects), but way goes onto way with things as open-ended as a Detroit micro real estate project, and paths circle back. We were recently approached by two University of Michigan students, Amanda Peterson and Erin Guido, who got in touch with Rita and have picked up the mantle of inchvisible houses. Now they’re trying to get a grant to pull it off, and we’re trying to help them.

If you’re an Augmented Reality developer who’s interested in making a smartphone app that can recognize a symbol on the ground and rez housey structures, they’re looking for you, and they may have a decent budget shortly. The basic sauce can go: see a marker on the ground, point your camera at it, house pops up. Bam. The sauce can go deeper (multiple houses, multiple codes, user-creation, beyond), but that’s all it takes to start.

If you’re incherested, these are Amanda and Erin (talking to Mary). They are fun and awesome, and we can all coordinate over email and skype, as inchvisible architects do.