Welcome to the Projection-Mapped 3-D City of the Future

Jabil - The Connected City from Leviathan on Vimeo.

In The Connected City, Leviathan design group use 3D-printing and projection mapping to visualize the city of of the future. What will the interconnected city of the future look like? Will it be a gigantic Internet of Things, and would we even need it? Silicon Valley companies, on a perpetual mission to sell us things that harvest our data, sure think so. The tech giant Jabil Circuits — a company that has its fingers in many different pies — commissioned design studio Leviathan to build an interactive physical diorama of a metropolis called The Connected City.

Leviathan machine-milled the city’s topography, then 3D-printed its buildings. After demoing interactive content via an Oculus Rift, Leviathan set up a projection-mapped installation at Jabil’s Blue Sky Center, which projected the digital media onto the simulated city landscape. The installation also features tablets so that visitors can interact with the city.

Viewers see the sun rise on the future city; which can, like an omniscient electronic god, visualize cars commuting on highways, simulate “emergency management” scenarios with swirling colors, and connect a doctor with a patient on opposite sides of the city. This future metropolis would also know if senior citizens are in need of a move to an assisted living facility, and would be able to re-route vehicles in the event of traffic congestion. Perhaps because Jabil is trying to sell an idea, The Connected City appears sweet and benign. What’s not communicated in this interactive, projection-mapped installation is how Orwellian such a future city could be. If the Internet of Things maps our data, which we would generate at any number of locations, then it will know almost everything about us, from our health to our habits, and many other things in between. Is this the future we want?

See more Leviathan projects here.

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