10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, AR (Augmented Reality)

Mobile App, AR Multiplayer Game

Moving Cities Augmented Reality App, Herz, Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart — City Library, Stuttgart

Moving Cities Augmented Reality App, ISEA, Asia Culture Center (ACC), Gwangju — ISEA, Gwangju

Moving Cities Augmented Reality App, Lodhi Art District, Delhi — Lodhi Art District, Delhi

Moving Cities Augmented Reality App, Government College of Arts, Chandigarh — College of Arts, Chandigarh

High towers rise into the sky, every place becomes a city.
With the Augmented Reality App 10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different one moves between the imaginary buildings via smartphone and tablet and participates in the digital communication streams and social movements of our time by means of inserted Social Media Posts. The buildings can be destroyed and rebuilt by the users. But beware! Everyone sees what the other is doing from different perspectives. The more buildings disappear, the more creatures appear.

10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, AR focuses on how places are constantly changing, language diversity, plant and animal species are diminishing and buildings, shopping malls and cities are becoming more and more similar. Places are emerging, which could be anywhere in the world without a real local identity. This process is accelerated by technological progress, fast means of transport and communication, the Internet and Augmented Reality itself.

Multiplayer Version – Moving Cities AR+, Version 1.0.1
Stadtbibliothek, Stuttgart, Germany

Singleplayer Version – Moving Cities AR, Version 1.0.6
Chandigarh, India

Application
With the AR application, multiple users can simultaneously experience an identical virtual city consisting of posts from social media networks. Interactions in the virtual city, such as the destroying of building blocks, are also visible on all connected devices simultaneously. The posts on the building blocks are included in real time, which are sent within a radius of 5 km on Twitter. Or alternatively, hashtags can be predefined together with the curator.
The application works on both Android and iOS. ARCore (SDK from Google for Android devices) and ARKit (SDK from Apples for iOS devices) were used for motion tracking of the Augmented Reality application. This allows the orientation and position of the device to be detected.
In the application, restrictions of the real space, such as the size dimensions or any existing real obstacles can be taken into account and the space into which the virtual world is projected can be defined. (Figure below). In addition, it is possible to define several areas (Chunks) in a room and to set for each of these areas how small the minimum and maximum areas to be projected may be. The actual size, i.e. the number of building blocks of a building and the size of the individual building blocks, is determined randomly. If a configuration has been created in this way, the random seed parameter can also be used to change all random parameters. In addition, this ensures that the same random seed always builds the same city. Thus, an optimized configuration of a projected city can be created and reused. This makes it possible for a host to initialize the previously configured city and make it available via the network. Clients in the same network can then connect to the host. The city is replicated and can therefore be seen and experienced equally on all connected devices.

AR Calibration Point

Configuration example with two chunks in which building blocks are created

Credits
Marc Lee in collaboration with the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratoy (ISAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Install the App
https://marclee.io/en/ar

QR Codes in Public Spaces