What is autonomy in a world of mechanized mobility?
Navigating an Autonomous World
Driver Less Vision is the immersive experience of becoming an autonomous, self-driving vehicle—a 360° dome work that explores the tension between artificial intelligence and humans as they negotiate Seoul’s changing urban landscape with the arrival of autonomous vehicles, and the untapped conflicts and disruptive effects on the built environment caused by the deployment of technologies for autonomous mobility. It positions the audience as the autonomous vehicle, imagining a future where, after the event, humans are imperceptible or gone.
Autonomy and the City
Currently, the visual stimuli that organizes traffic is designed for human perception. The arrival of driverless cars entails the emergence of a new type of gaze that is required to negotiate existing visual codes—omnidirectional yet untrained. To assume that driverless cars will fully adapt to future conditions of the city neglects the history of transformation of urban streetscapes associated with changes in vehicular technologies.
What the Machine Sees
Driver Less Vision is an attempt to understand how driverless cars will change the city by immersing the audience in an urban journey through the car’s point of view, seeing the streets of Seoul through overlapping and dissonant perceptions.
Open on YouTube for full 360 playback.
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism
Commissioned for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism within the thematic exhibition Imminent Commons: Moving. Driver Less Vision examines the tension and reality of AI and humans merging and diverging as they negotiate Seoul’s unique urban landscape—challenging us to consider how we can design cities for the future of intelligent vehicles.
The installation went on to tour the United States in Designs for Different Futures (2019–2020), organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and Art Institute of Chicago. See the USA presentation.
Eight-Meter Dome
The project was produced for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017, utilizing a custom-fabricated eight-meter-diameter dome with 360° visuals developed with the generous support of Ocular Robotics, University of Technology Sydney, and Rice University.
My Role
My work spanned production, technical direction, CG lead, compositing, projection mapping, and installation. I produced the virtual experience with 360° video and 3D data scanned in Seoul, designed and implemented the playback system software and hardware, built and installed the dome, and mapped the video projection for the inaugural presentation at the Seoul Biennale.
Project Credits & Information
- Project type
- Exhibition
- Partner
- Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism
- Agency
- Make Good
- Role
- Production, Technical Direction, CG Lead, Projection Mapping, Installation
- Credits
- Concept and Design: Urtzi Grau, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Daniel Perlin, Maximilian Lauter. Visual / Sound Design + Production: Perlin Studios: Daniel Perlin, Principal and Creative Director; Maximilian Lauter, Creative Producer and Designer; Robert Crabtree, 3D Design; Dan Taeyoung, Code and 3D Design; Gary Breslin, Motion Graphics and Animation.
- Press
- Arch Daily, designboom, Urban Next, PSFK, Trend Hunter
- Date
- 2017
