Building Universes from Code: AR as the Lens that Turns the World into Data

Tim Ellis
Nov 19, 2025
1 min read

Updated: Dec 8, 2025

A cartoon-style scientist stands in a dark forest holding a glowing AR tablet. Around him, teal holographic grids, point-clouds, wireframe shapes, and markers labelled A, B, and C float in the air, showing how augmented reality scans the environment and converts the forest into digital data.

When we use AR to scan the world around us, something extraordinary happens.A wall, a corridor, a forest - things that feel solid, familiar, and immeasurable - suddenly become data, captured not in stone or air, but in millions of points suspended in digital space.

It’s as though AR gives us a new sense, a way of seeing the world not as objects, but as geometry and information. Nature becomes quantised. Surfaces become coordinates. Depth becomes a number.

But AR doesn’t just capture detail. It captures scale - vast, sprawling environments reduced to immense clouds of points, sometimes millions per second.

More data than any person could comprehend.

More than any engine can naively accept.

And so, we ask our first question:

How do we take this overwhelming flood of reality and make it usable?

In the next post, we’ll explore how we turn oceans of raw data into something structured, meaningful, and - crucially - efficient.