Workshops, talks, maker spaces, an interactive escape room game: Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta Moon initiative has plenty to explore for everyone. At the heart of it all is the event’s dazzling and immersive Magenta Moon Garden. Designed to spark conversation around sustainability, tech and media skills in a playful and intuitive way, this interactive, walkthrough video installation by flora&faunavisions comprises three distinct visual environments (Sunrise Garden, Moon Garden and Magenta Moon) enriched with intuitive, interactive real-time elements.
The immersive environment and experience are flanked by online content and events that tackle topics from hate speech to climate change, accompanied by a wide spectrum of online content, talks and onsite workshops.
Designed to be immersive, but safe
The large-scale interactive media installation blends natural garden elements with zeitgeisty architecture to highlight vital issues and trending topics. The enchanting Moon Garden reveals its magic by moonlight blooms that open and glow, accompanied by soothing fragrances. The shifting, yet predictable, patterns of interactive sculptures and objects satisfy both mind and eye, making the Moon Garden a great refuge from the everyday bustle – a place for regaining strength and feeling safe and in control.
Reflecting the move towards hybrid education concepts that mesh digital teaching with real encounters, the hybrid design combines digital and analogue facets in a seamless way. Here, visitors can raise virtual gardens – while smelling, tasting or picking the actual plants on display, experiencing them with all their senses.
No touch, all vision
Meanwhile, flora&faunavisions’ no-touch concept and thoughtfully choreographed user journey ensure that visitors automatically keep the right distance while playing, learning or lounging, making the design studio’s approach a great example of how immersive events and installations can be staged safely in times of COVID-19. Such ‘phygital’ (physical meets digital) approaches are the future, because, “there’s no alternative to real-life encounters. But hybrid concepts that blend digital aspects with safe live experiences can offer new scope and space for such moments. And serve as hopeful symbols of how to create a sense of normalcy in uncertain times,” says Leigh Sachwitz from flora&faunavisions.
The tech behind it all
On location, huge wall and floor projections fill the entire space with poetic video content that reacts to visitor movements in real-time using radarTOUCH laser scanners. The team’s biggest challenge: translating this high-resolution experience to an up to 7m-high and 36m-long curved space with surround sound 5.1 to give guests a real sense of being part of a living digital canvas.
Working together for a liveable future
For school classes and anyone who loves to play, the media installation transforms into an outsized interactive game on digitisation, media literacy and sustainability every half hour. As part of this exciting escape room game, anyone with reading skills can learn to separate fake news from real facts while gaining plenty of valuable insights on diversity, climate change, new technologies or the future of education – and what they themselves can do to make a difference for our shared future.
Using sounds and harmonies, they compose their own, downloadable soundtrack for their journey to the enchanted Magenta Moon. And they leave the experience with a sense of excitement and self-assurance that flora&faunavisions’ Founder, Leigh Sachwitz, wholeheartedly supports: “The interactive moments highlight a sense of autonomy – ‘It’s up to me what happens – I can do something to shape my own future’.”