The tour leads to the centre of the space which is illuminated by an atmospheric digital sky. Five car exhibits support the theme ‘future needs origin’ and complement the timeline. 125 years of development in the area of automotive manufacture.

The space concludes with interactive information at your fingertips. The toy race course allows to experience the relationship between energy expense and range of an electric car. The more steady you wind the crank, the longer the little toy car drives. Not less playful is the unconventional drive configurator. Here you can simulate countless situations of car sizes, ranges, places and the exhibit suggest the most efficient drive.

wirmachenbunt was involved in the concept phase of the timeline wall and we supplied design and software of the three exhibits.

Number seven in the row is the E-Tron exhibit. To cut the interaction story short, plugin the plug, get hit by a funky discharge and see the corresponding information.
The whole project was a lot of fun, thanks to our great partners at Mutabor Design. A hug goes to Maxie & Patrick. We miss you !
Trailer produced by our great new member, Thomas.

Navigating with the exhibit, you are able to look inside the car, experiencing the unique interior design and details of technology, such as the hybrid engine.You might wonder about the quality and look of the software. Yes , it’s realtime, it runs at 60 frames per second. It doesn’t even need a highend graphics card. We hope you enjoy the documentation of the design process at our studio and pictures of the final product.

This Multitouch Table offers access to a vast database of knowledge. The content stretches from traditional ocean research to less public topics such as ‘who owns the oceans?’.
Our aim with the Future Ocean Explorer (FOE) was a mobile, multi-user information system with a simple interaction model hence content rules over technology.
we are simply tired of picture-scale-rotate-interfaces without meaning. Let’s look at the interaction dramaturgy of the FOE. Topics swim as typgraphical swarms along the table. The visitor can catch them and they consequently arrange in a hierarchical structure, instantly visualizing direct and indirect relationships between keywords. From here you can access information in form of texts and attached media (movies, animation etc.). We add more modules each time the table is shown. The latest one is a database of scientists and related research departments.

We used the term MMT (massive multitouch) as a working title because first of all : it is big and heavy. Who says size doesn’t matter ? In case of developing such a sturdy and mobile monolith, size is definetely a matter. the table consists of three modules, three 200 kg glastops and 6 projectors and is custom-made, from 3-axis projector mounts to the headphone system. We gathered quite some know-how in terms of construction.

On the software side the FOE runs a MySQL Database which allows everyone to change the content on the fly, not just the programmers. We made our own plugins for the touch technology and contributed them to the vvvv community.

Design: Michel Magens, Tom Duscher, Chris Engler
Software: Chris Engler, Jan Kieksee, Jens Ewald, Heinrich Löwe
Hardware: Chris Engler, Julia Fuchs, Manfred Schulz, Erik Neubert, Fa.Muhlack

Ozean der Zukunft // Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts

Initially we made 4 exhibits for Mercedes communicating their new Driver Assist Systems such as Lane Assist, an aid helping you to stay on track while being totally messed up. just kidding ! Furthermore we have the Distronic feature, Nightview/Adaptive Light and Attention Assist. For each new technology we developed different interaction models and storytelling. Let’s take Distronic for example, we thought driving the new E-Class / S-Class would be fun and gets the visitor involved. Using a gameworld to create situations where the new car feature comes into play works quite well. learning by playing isn’t a new concept. naturally the exhibits attracted lot’s of kids, the mercedes customers of the future.

this is the right place to say hello and thank you to our friends at ‘Atelier Markgraph’ who got us involved in this project. Especially Ralf, Alex and Herr Garten who trusted our little Production Studio to manage the challenging project. But there is more to come, right now (August 2009) we work on two more exhibits joining the old bunch for the IAA in Frankfurt this year.

The globe is a spherical projection surface, showing various information of earth such as historical earhquakes, tsunamis, active vulcans, el nino and less fish on earth. one could call it the globe of doom. Well anyway, the visitor is able to switch between visualizations via a touchscreen interface.

The hardware was developed by Global Imagination, thanks to Adam Corrie for support. We developed the design, interface, the 3D rendering and pimped the data.