Visualizing Mobility

Developer Profile: ShiftControl.

ShiftControl is a recently formed visualization studio creating high-end solutions for international clients. ShiftControl used Unity on large project for VW / Autostadt.

Who are you?

I'm Jørgen Skogmo, a 31 year old Norwegian, father of Fria (4) (plus one upcoming) living and working out of Denmark for the 8th year. Mountainbike freerider, snowboarder, bass player, ex-bicycle courier, trained at the University of Oslo and Designskolen Kolding, and Mac user since '95.

What kind of work does ShiftControl do?

ShiftControl, formerly ascii33 and metervara, have been working with a wide range of projects over the last year.

Most notably is our work for Prada through Rem Koolhaas' AMO, realtime identity graphics for Danish national broadcaster TV2 and the soon to be opened data visualization project for VW / Autostadt in collaboration with HHMS and Büro Destruct.

We also do a fair amount of lectures and teaching as far apart as Norway, South-Africa and China. This spring I have been tutoring the BA and MA classes at Designskolen Kolding.

What project are you working on?

Currently, we are working with ex-OMA/AMO architect Marcus Schaefer on a large mapping/visualization project for VW. It is about visualizing mobility, in this case focused around the Car – as Vehicle, as System, as Culture, as Economy. Examined at four scales: Global, Regional, 1:1 and Time.

The core of the project is mobility and we needed a metaphor that could convey this – naturally the large virtual spaces created in games came to our mind.

When deployed it will be left running for 3 years, in VW's Azzurro pavillion in Autostadt, North Germany as part of a massive installation designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, New York.

How do you develop the project?

This is the first major project we deliver as a Unity standalone.

The team has been located mainly in Zurich, Bern and Copenhagen and have been using 43Signal's BaseCamp for files, to-do lists and writeboards, Skype for VoIP, Excel for data deliverables and Maya + Photoshop + Illustrator for artwork creation.

The work on our side has been done with Unity and Flash coupled with TextMate and BBEdit for scripting, plus the usual collection of PHP, PERL, Terminal, iCal, iTunes, Mori and Transmit.

What was the best part of the Unity experience?

We chose Unity mainly for 3 reasons: it's insane capabilities of throwing stuff around in 3D space, JavaScript-like scripting and its extensibility.

In our setup Unity both controls and is controlled by two Flash applications, communicating over a socket connection facilitated by Perl on Mac OSX. We needed to modify the way Unity co-existed with other fullscreen applications. This was done by Unity's Lead Developer Joachim Ante in a matter of hours and resulted in the Player setting "Capture single screen" now available in Unity 1.5.

The flexibility the Unity team delivers is almost unseen in other software of similar maturity.

Rapid prototyping is also a high priority in our environment – with Unity testing whether a new approach is feasible is often a matter of minutes instead of hours. For instance, when Marcus Schaefer at HHSA asked about how a 4-split viewport ("stage") would behave, it was a snap to throw 3 additional cameras into the scene, adjust the Normalized Viewport settings... done.

It's also a joy to be able to ship real Applications instead of the the crusty old Projectors or MOVs.

What obstacles did you run into?

You don't want to know the amount of swearing we have done over the JavaScript syntax ;-)

I guess it's a matter of getting to know the personality of this new beast of ours – it can bite and blow flames but it's a hell of a ride.