Waiting With Nature is an interactive installation designed to entertain and inform waiting passengers at an underground train station. It brings nature inside by illustrating the weather and season outside using projections of animated trees and plants that react to movements on the platforms.
The goal of the project was to create an interesting distraction using light that lets time otherwise spent “just waiting” to become an engaging and meaningful activity. “Station Korsvägen” was the chosen location. It is currently being built as an expansion of Gothenburgs railway system. I contacted the agency hired to design the station i.e. WHITE Architects and started a collaboration with them.
Studying activities in the area surrounding the station to identify what user groups there are and how these vary throughout the day, week, month or year. Developed personas, visualizing scenarios of users visiting the station as well as creating User Journey Maps.
Deciding on using projectors to display an installation. The optimal area to use for this within the station was to project onto the glass barriers that are set up between platforms. This would utilize an area that is not being used.
The concept “Nature” was chosen, it brings plants and trees to the user in an environment where natures presence is missing. The idea is to projected illustrations of nature that connects to motion tracking sensors on the platform which lets users interact with the projections.
I developed a the installation in Unity3D and scripted the required code in C#. The demo was limited to a few actions: making the leaves grow, moving the stem and branches individually, changing colors of the leaves, and shaking branches to make leaves fall off.
Next the installation was tested on a variety of user groups to observe and evaluate their intuitive understanding of it, this was followed by questionaires and interviews discussing their experience. The dicovered patterns and actions were used to improve the installation.
The result is an entertaining interactive installation that invites people to explore and control nature. With the illustrations changing throughout the year it remains an interesting piece. Even for those who visit it regularly there are new experiences waiting to be found in the fictional nature.
Actions are triggered by movements on the platform using motion cameras. Examples of actions are to make plants grow, flowers bloom, colour leaves or shaking them down. Temporary actions will appear and vary depending on the time of year, these could for example be to grow fruits or shake of snow from the branches.
