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Visitors to the Venice Biennale are seeing an Australia that never existed - but could have.

Australia's exhibit at the six-month long Biennale of Architecture is built on a virtual tour of 22 buildings over the past 100 years which reached the design stage, but never made it off the plans.

The 23 ^rd building featured is the soon to be built new Australia Council Venice pavilion.   The old one was demolished before this Biennale which helped to shape the exhibition as a virtual one, rather than a physical one, with just a big orange ‘cloud space' to protect staff and visitors.

Augmented Australia is available as an App, which visitors download and point at targets in the cloud space pavilion or in the  catalogue, to experience a three-dimensional tour of buildings such as a cathedral designed for New Norcia in 1958 and Harry Seidler's design for a stadium for the 1956 Olympics.

The Australian team is largely made up of architects from UWA, with staff, students and alumni all working on the project for the past year. Architects from other institutions, historians, writers, animators, technology consultants and curators are also on the team.

Augmented Australia traces our history of design using the most modern of technologies, and feedback from the thousands of visitors has been very enthusiastic.

(We ran a story about UWA's involvement in this project in the print issue of UWAnews earlier this month, but thought you might like to easily click through to the website and the app through this version. Ed.)