Introduction
Concéntrico is the Logroño International Festival of Architecture and Design, a reflection on the urban environment and the city. This year’s edition, Concéntrico 04, takes place from 27 April to 1 May 2018.
The Festival invites you to explore the city through installations, exhibitions, discussions, activities and performances, creating a connection between places, squares, streets, terraces and hidden spaces that usually go unnoticed.
Concéntrico is aimed at a wide audience, with multiple different suggested routes for an unconventional look at the city. The architectures, exhibitions, discussions and activities are all elements of reflection and observation, to awaken the desire to reclaim the joy of spaces, of the city.
Context
“Otravisión” is an intervention that aims to celebrate the plaza by providing passers-by with the opportunity to see the space from an entirely new and unpredicted point of view.
The tower-like pavilion will host a virtual reality experience designed and developed by NOUMENA called “Rutas”, which will act as a “virtual periscope” tool, ready to be utilized by a single visitor at a time, encouraging people to personally reflect on the space that they are experiencing. Visitors will access the pavilion by entering a small narrow corridor facing the square, looking through the slits at the space around as they move on in. As one’s personal point of view is artificially elevated by the virtual optical tool, one will begin to develop a unique and deeply personal relationship with Logroño’s collage of old and new. Anything that was above the level of direct sight or in an otherwise obstructed field of vision now will be on display.
Beyond simply providing a new point of view, the tower pavilion recalls notions of Logroño’s history as a fortified city through its form. Openings and decorations in the facade take reference from historic geometries, translating them into a sculptural pattern that modulates the light streaming in, while also letting the visitor look out into the plaza as they are inside.
The intervention ultimately centers on giving visitors a new elevated perspective of the square and sorroundings plus a new personal experience of the history of Logroño.
Rutas
The virtual reality experience is intended as a small game in which people are immersed thanks to the narrative voice and a conceptual tunnel that drives the visitor slowly in the digital world. As soon as the tunnel ends an allegoric rain of colored dots start to fall in the scene until the 3d model of the city materialize under the eyes of the visitor. The robot we used for scanning is embedded in the experience and helps the narrative, driving the attention to the following scene where the pilgrim’s fountain is displayed and thanks to pointcloud aligning, the original cloud fade off into a thermal one expressing another layer of information hidden to the citizen eye.
With this Virtual Reality experience Noumena wants to highlight which are the hidden forces inside our city and which are the technologies that allow now or later to discover perceive and appreciate them.
Data collection & processing
For the data collection and processing Noumena used his proper mapping tool: N.E.RO. It consist in a ground autonomous rover that collect data while it moves on a preprogrammed path. We choose to map emblematic site of the city, we focused mostly the attention on the Cathedral facing the Camino of Santiago. Another interesting site was the pilgrim’s fountain where the reconstruction process achieve a very high level of details. The informative layers that we collect are: RGB, NGB and the thermal data. Thanks to this process we were able to unveil hidden layer of information that are hide but integrated within the city context.
Credits
Year → 27th of April- 1st of May 2018/ WP3 Leader IaaC – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalunya / WP3 CollaboratorsFab Lab Barcelona, Green Fab Lab, Noumena / Period 2018-2022 / Principal Partners EU Commission Horizon 2020 / Financial FEI / Technological SONY CSL, Inria, CNRS / Institutions IaaC, Humboldt University / Farming Community Can Valldaura, Pepinieres Chatelain
