Today’s featured hack is the result of a collaboration between BIG, Kollision and Schmidhuber + Partner. Together, these three teamed up to bring BIG’s vision of future urban mobility to life at last year’s AUDI at Design Miami.
According to the developers, the 190 square-meter 3D LED surface provides a glimpse of the future of our cities where infrastructure and public space is shared between pedestrians and driverless cars. The installation demonstrates how the city surface continuously gathers information about people’s movements allowing vehicles to interact with the environment.
Kollision developed a real-time graphics engine and the tracking software, which receives live input from a staggering 11 Xbox Kinect cameras mounted above the visitors’ heads. Through the cameras, the movement of the visitors are processed into patterns of movement displayed on the LED surface. The installation sets the stage for Audi’s A2 concept, which had its U.S debut at the design fair and is dedicated to the future of urban mobility and is capable of communicating with its environment. The exhibition car continuously emits arrows showing its path, navigating between visitors at the stand.
BIG originally presented the concept as an entry for the 2010 AUDI Urban Future Award introducing a future city paved with a digital surface that liberates the streets from existing boundaries and allows for a new flexibility of public use.
What do you think? Did the developers successfully portray what our future urban landscapes would look like thanks to the Kinect?
It’s a cool concept, but how will it become affordable as urban infrastructure? It would be great to have street markings that changed as needed for different functions. For instance, a block party where the crosswalks and parking spaces disappear to become spaces for games, dances, announcements, and whatnot. As for the car? Well, it’s robotic. It drives itself out of the way to another location to make room!