MobiGlobe

The MobiGlobe project won the RedDot: Grand Prix award for Communication Design in Berlin, 2013.

The MobiGlobe installations in Autostadt looks at global (auto-)mobility phenomenas and how mobility has affected landscape of cities, resources and our lifestyle. Across 48 different topics, spanning as vast as the vehicle’s development over the past 3000 years to energi requirements on a global scale, MobiGlobe researches questions and proposes solutions on how to keep people and goods mobile in the future by a combination of innovation and responsible development.
As part of the latest update of the project, Unity Studios was contracted by Hosoya Schaefer Architects to create a flexible software architecture for these 48 different visualizations, which would be used in future MobiGlobe incarnations. The visualizations are divided into 4 categories:

• Cars are animations that show the development over time of topics concerning mobility. The topics are centered on the evolution of the car itself, hence the hame.
• Maps show how mobility affects us on a geographical scale.
• Globes show resources connected with mobility are allocated on a global scale and visualizes the ratio of those numbers between countries through a morphing and extruding globe.
• Graphs highlight data for the development of mobility over time such as when different vehicles where developed or the amount of fuel consumed by nations pr. year.

With MobiGlobe Islands MobiGlobe moved out of Autostadt’s ‘MobiTheater’ and into the Autostadt proper with several MobiGlobe Islands setups, as seen below. The application was moved to a now traditional touchscreen, where the user is taken on a trip through a universe of information by interacting with the stars.

MobiGlobe Kinect uses full body interaction to engage the user and navigating the MobiUniverse of facts. From a programming standpoint the most challenging and interesting part of MobiGlobe Kinect was supporting multiple interactions at the same time, such as pointing and clicking, swiping and dragging objects around, all in the same scene. The hardest part was avoiding overlapping interactions and misinterpretting gestures. This was accomplished by applying soft logic to interpreting the users intentions. Another fun feature is that the user can point on items on the screen to select them, which was done by applying an affine transformation to the direction from a users shoulder through the hand and onto the screen.