Eschewing directly requesting visitors to give us information about themselves, we decided to quietly collect data and customize their experience throughout the interactive zones. This culminated in a moment when we revealed the beautiful data visualization created by the speech, choices and movements our guests have made.

Deep City is composed of three, interconnected parts:

Part 1: The Passage

Part 2: The City Cave

Part 3: The Skywalk

As input, we rely on Kinect2 depth sensors, a condenser microphone and the Google employees’ own RFID badges paired with multiple readers. This data is consumed, parsed and used to determine metrics such as a unique user ID, speech recognition, body position, orientation, velocity, proximity, number of guests, ambient volume, and more.

The Passage and The City Cave are our "generators." They ingest and utilize data to affect their visualizations, but further analyze and aggregate this data into samples.

Each sample is consumed and recorded by the final installation, The Skywalk, pushing one of eight graphical actuators that displace a capacitive visual “ribbon of light." This ribbon emits waves of color and light based on real-time activity within the entire Deep City experience.

In the final installation, The Skywalk, your personal data story is replayed. The guest’s Google guide activates the RFID reader and the overhead waves "rewind" to replay the guest’s collected data samples, transforming didactic information into a visualization of their own behaviors, actions & inputs.

A custom infographic image is generated from the data and emailed to the guest using his/her Skywalk visualization.

Data enhanced consumer experience

Leveraging a variety of passive data gathering techniques, we were able to create a personalized visitor experience that extended through three distinct experiences that held together as one.

Data driven behaviour change

Without having to manually input any information or read a single explanation, visitors intuitively understand that their actions (data) created a personalized experience unique to them.

Business and marketing impact

By taking potential clients, partners, and recruits through the experience, Google has been able to use this approachable, fun, and playful experience to tangibly demonstrate their ability to harness data with their products and services to make people’s lives better.