An interactive simulation environment visualized technological approaches that city planners and architects of the future would be working with. This installation was an expanded spin-off of “Gulliver’s World,” the Ars Electronica Center’s mixed reality environment, and used a simple urban planning model as an example illustrating concrete application possibilities. Visitors could manipulate the various scenarios with haptic tools.

The installation’s central table made several different worlds available. With Magic Boxes, a city could be created out of various urban architectural elements (buildings of different types and for different uses). The individually laid-out city blocks reacted to one another, so it didn’t take long for ill-conceived ensembles—areas that were too densely developed, for instance—to make their presence felt. A network of streets took shape among the city blocks; the flow of traffic reacted to the architectural facts and circumstances, and simulated the way modern, real-time traffic management systems function.