By 2050 85% of the world’s population will live in cities, quite a startling fact! Populations are growing at a startling rate and migration to urban centres is on the increase as people go in search of better lives, employment and opportunity. For cities such as Beijing, that is rapidly changing daily in terms of cars on the road and new apartment buildings going up, and so on. It is overwhelming and confusing for anyone to keep up with the transformation be it new arrivals or long term residents.
GeoPulse Beijing is an exciting new project developed by our very own Michael Badics and Yang Lei at the Ars Electronica Futurelab and at Tsinghua University together with cMoDA (Beijing) in response to this 21st century dilemma. This innovative new technology is easy to use and at the heart of the concept is making the city transparent in a way that is accessible to everyone. Essentially GeoPulse aims to tell stories about the city of Beijing and visualize them via different media: (real time) data visualization, maps, statistics, simulations, videos, pictures, etc in a way that is engaging and user friendly. The purpose is to enable citizens and visitors to a city to obtain an interactive possibility and opportunity to learn, explore and find out about interesting and unusual insights into the city, its functions, and to get a feeling of the region as a living, creative and innovative object. The beauty of GeoPulse is that as well as providing pictures of the city today, in a format chosen by the user, a key feature is to be able to look at the past and the future.
This technology is an exciting development and provides much scope as a platform to inform and transport the public primarily looking at the theme of Urban Mobility as well as other key topics. For more information and detail on the functionality of GeoPulse Beijing come to the BIG PICTURE festival 30 August – 3 September and visit the exhibitions at the Brucknerhaus.