10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, VR (Virtual Reality)

Interactive Net- and Telepresence-Based Installation

10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different deals with urbanization and globalization in the digital age. The user moves through visual worlds posted publicly by others on social networks such as YouTube, Flickr or Twitter. Here these personal impressions are streamed in real time like windows to our changing world. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a virtual journey into constantly new image and sound collages in which one experiences local, cultural and linguistic differences and similarities. In virtual space, this information is visualized on cubes that rise at different heights to become a kind of skyline. The work deals with how our cities are continuously changing and increasingly resemble one. This results in more and more non-places/places of lost places in the sense of Marc Augé’s book and essay Non-Places, which could exist all over the world without any true local identity (mostly anonymous transition zones such as motorways, hotel rooms or airports).

The work is the digitized version and further development of 10.000 Moving Cities, which was exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (2013/2014) with real cubes.
Text: Tina Sauerländer

10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, VR (Version 2), for HTC Vive

How it works
Using a HTC Vive data google that hangs from the ceiling the user can walk inside a 6x6m space. People standing outside the installation can also see in a projection the user’s perspective. A 5.1 sound system transmit the sound to the exhibit space. Two sensors localize the user’s position and transmit it to the Unreal rendering engine that teleports the user into the cities of its own choice.
The interface of “10.000 moving cities” is controlled solely by moving the head, focusing a target city on a world map. To a chosen city, posts from social networks are searched in real time and visualized on an abstract urban environment.

Credits
Marc Lee in collaboration with the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratoy (ISAS) and the ZAK | Centre for Cultural and General Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The telepresence system used is a result of the interdisciplinary project e-Installation for the virtualization of media art.

Detailed description

10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, VR (Version 1), for Oculus Rift