Toronto is the poverty capital of Canada with more than 116,000 families struggling to put a roof over their head. However, this problem goes unnoticed because on the surface, Toronto appears to be a prosperous and thriving city with its ever-growing skyline. Many residents do not realise the magnitude of the problem as poverty tends to take many forms. And while people using shelters or living on the street are more visible signs of poverty, those who are on the waitlist for affordable housing are not so visible.

United Way works to fund and support organizations that address local issues like this and wanted to bring attention to this hidden issue through a targeted campaign to educate politicians and residents on the scale of the problem and inspire action – urging people to donate.

As stats often get lost on people, we wanted to represent this problem in a way everyone could understand, so we created the #UNIGNORABLE Tower – a targeted mobile AR experience that imagines the tower we would need to visualize every Toronto family that can’t afford a place to live. We gathered data from Toronto’s open data project to determine the number of families on the affordable housing waitlist, as well as individuals using shelters. The tower itself was designed in collaboration with world renowned architecture firm KPMB and internationally recognized render studio Norm Li, and takes a functional, minimalist form with more than 116,000 units at an average square footage of 700 ft2.

Poverty is an issue that’s hard to see. While the more visible forms can be seen every day, with people using shelters or living on the street, those who are on the waitlist for affordable housing are not so visible. Using Toronto’s open data project, we gathered data on every family currently on the waitlist for affordable housing, as well as those using shelters.

United Way works to fund and support local organizations that address local issues like this and wanted to bring attention to this hidden issue to both educate people on the scale of the problem and inspire action – urging people to donate. This campaign was specifically targeted towards politicians and residents of the Greater Toronto Area, transforming popular vantage points of the skyline into AR activation sites, and placing the tower itself amidst the Toronto skyline.

The tower wasn’t real. But the problem it represented was.

People in Toronto accessed the digital experience through a mobile app, which used persistent AR technology to render out an accurately scaled model of the tower in a fixed location downtown. This meant that each person’s experience would appear differently based on where they were in the city – while the scale of the problem was always accurately represented.

Mapping a building into an existing skyline at world-scale took a considerable amount of trial and error using compass data, location service providers and landmark-based orientations to determine what was possible with today’s technology. We ended up with a hybrid approach, leveraging the MapBox API, and a custom bearing calibration system.

The AR model of the tower rose to a real-world height of 485 storeys, or 1478 metres, and the real-world time-of-day determined the colour and lighting of the tower – dynamically matching its environment.

The world’s tallest buildings always get attention, and this tower was no different. While our campaign was targeted directly at people in the Greater Toronto Area, we garnered over 141 million impressions worldwide, and United Way’s donation traffic increased by approximately 10,000% - many of which came from clickthrough on social. The tower gave a voice to thousands of families in need, and sparked conversation on many notable social channels about the housing crisis and the growing issue of poverty across the city.