Bronze Fine Arts and Art Installation Design · 2021
DC Tower - Top of Austria Permanent Media Installation
- A' Design Award 2021 Bronze Winner in Fine Arts and Art Installation Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: CBRE GmbH
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 16,055
- Verification code B8BCD5794A · Verify this award
About DC Tower - Top of Austria Permanent Media Installation
The DC Tower 1 is Austria's highest building and provides an outstanding welcome gesture. A webcam at the roof continuously collects photos, over time creating an image-pool. These captured moments are arranged in real-time into vivid time-slice montages. It's all about cherishing every single moment. Sensors deliver position tracking, enabling people to influence the layouts. The LED wall in the foyer celebrates both: the location and every moment at it. Additionally it provides dialogue between the people and the building itself through interactivity.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Photos are captured and collected from the tower's roof every 5 minutes, every one representing the location and the uniqueness of every moment alike. 60 floors below a huge LED wall displays time-sliced photo montages in real time.
The application seamlessly switches between different layouts, one time showing slices of the last 24 hours, another time packing moments from the last 12 weeks into one image.
The dialogue between people within the tower is extended by sensors that enable the application to react to presence and motion of them. This way, the tower itself engages in a vivid dialog with them. - Dimensions & Packaging
- 10,5 meter by 5 meter LED Wall, 2x Lidar Laser Range Sensor, 6 mega pixel weatherproof webcam on the roof of the tower.
- Tags
- Responsive Art, Digital Art, Digital Staging, Digital Brand Communication, Media Installation
- Production Technology
- On the roofs antenna a weatherproof high-resolution webcam was mounted that is connected to a media server in the basement of the tower. This server collects a huge pool of images of weeks and months, that are then delivered to the real time application that feeds the 10,5 by 5 meter LED wall in the middle of the foyer.
Two LiDAR laser range sensors were mounted in two corners of the foyer to provide ideal position tracking of people in the relevant space. The collected tracking data is used by the application to make all time-slice montages actively react to the presence of people in several different ways. - Design Challenge
- The uniqueness of the location of the tower needed to be present in the design as well as the uniqueness of the tower itself. Additionally, it was important to emphasize the human aspect of the tower community, the dialog between all people inside the building. The last important aspect was the presence of all special moments, from now till months in the past.
The final appearance of the installation provides familiarity and the feeling of home and on the other hand appears always new and unique. Every five minutes the LED wall shows content in a way that has never been seen before. - Project Duration
- The project launched in August 2020 in Vienna, Austria in the DC Tower 1 and will be a permanent media installation.
- Operation Flow
- The media installation runs fully self controlled and automated, due to automatic shut-down and start-up routines. The interaction or responsiveness of the installation is provided by both laser range sensors, whose combined tracking data is constantly fed into and processed by the digital installation.
- Research
- The technical research for this project/design was based on the speciality and experience of several team members and covered evaluation and long-time testing of both, the webcam as well as the sensors.
Based on the learnings of the research blended into the final technical concept. - Inspiration
- Vienna's DC Tower 1 is Austria's highest building. The business tower provides a work place for many people that enter on the ground floor and never feel the uniqueness of the location.
Tower management wanted to offer an outstanding welcome gesture which fits the brand.
The interactive media installation emphasizes the uniqueness of the tower as well as the power of the moment. Every moment is unique and worth noting. The LED wall in the foyer presents a celebration of both: the location and every moment at it. Additionally it provides dialogue between the people and the building itself through interactivity. - Image Credits
- Photo / Video / Sound: Eyup Kus
Colors of DC Tower - Top of Austria Permanent Media Installation
Grand Interview about DC Tower - Top of Austria Permanent Media Installation
At the very beginning of the creative process there just was the DC Tower. It is the highest building in Austria, a business tower in the capital Vienna. The uniqueness of the tower can not be experienced upon entrance, because it is on the ground floor. Bringing the feeling of the highest building down was the easy part of the idea. But as special as the location is, the everyday visit, the moment itself should also become special. Therefore we needed to find a way to bring the time aspect into the imagery of the view from the roof. The last part was, getting the digital content responsive, because the new tower management wanted to send a strong signal to all vendors and visitors. "We care for you. We want to be and stay in dialogue with you!".
As I said, we needed to find a way to allow the installation to get responsive to people in front of it. We needed anonymous tracking in the public space of the foyer of the tower. 2D-Laser scanners were the ideal solution for that.
Time-slicing in photography is not new. Embedding a time period into one picture has been done before. By digitalizing this approach and by going Real-Time, we hope, we did something innovative. One slice of the picture, that is shown on the LED wall, is always "now". We take pictures from the roof looking down on Vienna every 5 minutes. The most recent picture, we made sure of that, is always shown and always part of the time-sliced collage.
The facade of the tower is simply iconic. We tried to pay homage to it by using it as an extra element in the way we solved the time-slicing for this installation.
We needed a weather-resistant outdoor camera that reliably takes pictures every 300 seconds. We found one, that is normally used for alpine scenarios, an outdoor weather camera for mountain areas. Once we had a camera that delivered constantly photos onto our media server, we could develop an application that utilizes this ever growing pool of photos.
The view of Vienna and the Danube from the roof of the DC Tower is spectacular on its own. We cannot take credit for that. By mixing different times of the day, mixing different days of the month and even mixing different days of the year, it just got more intriguing. And it stays interesting, even to people who pass the installation every day of the year. Simply because it never looks the same.
To us, this installation embodies the essence of makes the DC Tower the DC Tower. Nothing more, but also nothing less. Sometimes being on point, but then being satisfied with just that, is a very good choice. At least to my mind.
The big hardware part of the installation, the LED wall was already in the foyer when we got in contact with the team of the DC Tower for the first time. The stuff that we added was really minor: the weather camera and the Laser scanners.
Honestly, I would not evolve this installation to more than it is right now. We added real-time, of course digital, snow to the installation in winter time. But besides that, we did not change the installation for 5 years now. We did add another installation onto the same LED wall, but this installation does something completely different. Those two installation just switch between each other time-based.
An award recognition is always validation for everybody involved as well. In this case, it especially gave the client of ours confirmation, that going with us and allowing us to think "outside the box" was a good decision ;-)