AUDI URBAN FUTURE

Kollision, BIG and Schmidhuber & Partner teamed up to bring a vision of future urban mobility to life for AUDI at Design Miami/ 2011, running from November 30th to December 4th adjacent to Art Basel Miami Beach.

The 190 m2 three-dimensional LED surface illustrates a glimpse of the future city and possibilities where infrastructure and public space is shared between pedestrians and driverless cars. The installation demonstrates how the city surface continuously gathers information of people's movements allowing for real-time interaction between vehicles and their environment. Kollision developed a real-time graphics engine and the tracking software that gets live input from 11 Xbox Kinect cameras mounted above the visitor’s heads. Hereby 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 future urban mobility, capable of communicating with its environment. The exhibition car continuously emits arrows showing its driving 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. The tracking software is developed on basis of a series of test installations in Germany and Denmark and has resulted in a flexible setup of multiple aligned Kinect camera spaces that are processed and translated by the graphical engine running the visual content on the LED surface. The engine is based on a range of parameters that can output a wide range of visual expression - from a precise vector-like look to a more fluid and playful content. Furthermore the arrow, that illustrates the future movement of the car, is real-time calculated on basis of the tracking information of people's movements.