Cloud Osaka
Envisioned as a high-resolution urban interchange, Cloud Osaka embodies Biothing’s approach to complex design synthesis across multiple orders of scale. Due to its central position in the city, a high convergence of users and one of Asia’s densest transportation nodes found in the adjacent JR Osaka Station, the key driver for the project was to understand 2.5 million people traversing the site every day. This is nearly 10 times the number of daily passengers at the busiest airports in the world. Such an extreme volume of pedestrian traffic, compounded by other forms of traffic in the area, warranted choosing computational physics simulation ordinarily used to simulate systems like river flows; indeed, a key driver for the project became the concept of a “river of people”.

rotary tumble
File Festival
“Rotary Tumble” is an experiment in projection mapping onto a moving tangible object. We start with a freely spinning disc that viewers can touch and spin by hand. With an optical rotary encoder the system detects the exact speed, direction, and position of the spinning disc in real-time. This feedback data is used to drive a physics simulation of tumbling shapes which is then projection mapped back onto the spinning disc itself.

The weight of light
Light, as we usually interpret it, is an element without mass and gravity. For “the weight of light” a physics engine simulates the kinetic forces of a moving object. This mass is projected on a wave shaped structure in virtual space. The moving object is represented as a light particle in physical space. Gravity, mass, density and friction affect velocity and acceleration of these light particles. As the particles movement is based on a simulation, it does not have to adhere to the physical realities we know from everyday life. Therefore the installation goes beyond expected behaviour. Thus the matter of light traverses a reinterpretation of our known reality.