DAILY REPORT

Daily Report: Imagining the Road Ahead

By 
  
If predictions about the future are true, many of us will soon be riding around in self-driving cars. But a crucial part of making that prediction a reality is making sure that the car can see — or sense — the world around it. 
One interesting way to sense the world is through 3D scanning, in which laser scanners perceive the built environment around us. ScanLAB Projects, a design studio based in London, has taken that technology to an artistic level. As Geoff Manaugh writes for The New York Times Magazine, the studio’s team is trying to scan “not just the shape of the city streets but the inner life of the autonomous cars that may soon come to dominate them.”
The resulting images are somewhat dreamy and otherworldly. And that seems to be part of the point.
“ScanLAB’s project,” Mr. Manaugh writes, “suggests that humans are not the only things now sensing and experiencing the modern landscape — that something else is here, with an altogether different, and fundamentally inhuman, perspective on the built environment.”