"Traffic", augmented reality in an exhibition

"Traffic" is an augmented reality installation that the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media created for the exhibition "Car Culture. Media of Mobility" for the exhibition "Car Culture. The exhibition showed for the first time the parallel development of physical and virtual mobility: from the automobile to mobile telephony, through which people have become mobile without limits. The AR app Traffic takes up these thematic focuses and makes them physically tangible in the exhibition space.

Visitors receive a prepared tablet through which a virtual dynamic installation can be seen in the vacuum above the exhibits. If the tablet points upwards, a pulsating sculpture appears to float under the ceiling of the atrium, representing the current traffic flow in the road network of Baden-Württemberg. The road network appears as a kind of metabolic organism in which the traffic volume can be intuitively grasped through the dynamic representation. The traffic data, which - graded in five states from "flowing" to "standing" - influence the behaviour of the sculpture, were updated every minute via the Internet.

At certain points on the map, which has been compressed for the exhibition space, cylinders hang from virtual threads, which at irregular intervals from the ceiling are lowered to the height of the viewer's body. The cylinders show photographic panoramic shots of institutions, objects and places that have a connection to the automobile and its history. They were taken where they appear as anchor points on the map: For example, the Mercedes-Benz plant in Rastatt, the Michelin plant in Karlsruhe, the birthplace of Felix Wankel in Lahr or a place near Lorsch where the ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of a motorway was held on 23 September 1933. If the visitor enters a cylinder, the position of the camera is taken during the photographing. One can view the photographic panorama by turning one's own body through the tablet. Formally, the work here refers to the interactive panoramic installation "Place - a user's manual" by Jeffrey Shaw (1995), in which Shaw first developed the principle of disposition via panoramic photography in a virtual environment. The installation unfolds as a walk-in map of a place that can be physically experienced and by means of which one can be visually transported to a selected location.

Production:
Concept: Bernd Lintermann, Jan Gerigk, Martin Schmidt, Matthias Wölfel, Nikolaus Völzow, Manfred Hauffen, Julia Jochem, Dominika Szope
Project management: Bernd Lintermann
Production management: Jan Gerigk
iPad application software: Johannes Degenhart, Bernd Lintermann
Prototype development: Martin Schmidt
Motive research: Jan Gerigk, Julia Jochem
Panorama photography: Felix Gross
iPad case design: Matthias Gommel
Technology: Manfred Hauffen, Nikolaus Völzow
Localization and dead reckoning: FZI Karlsruhe, FZI Living Lab mobileIT/SatNav Karlsruhe
Real-time positioning system: Ubisense - The Location Solutions Company
Traffic data provider: DDG Society for Traffic Data, NAVTEQ
Production: ZKM | Institute for Visual Media and ZKM | Media Museum