Compass Cloud
2013
Compass Cloud is an interactive “infographic” installation for Venice’s international airport, Marco Polo.
Hanging from the ceiling is a large cloud of “paper planes” which rotate towards the direction of the cities where the real planes are flying.
Passing through security, passengers show their electronic boarding passes on their smartphones. The system records each destination and calculates the proportion of all passengers currently in Departures heading for each destination.
A corresponding proportion of the cloud’s paper planes then rotates in that direction.
Passengers can also check the geographic direction of their destination by standing under the cloud and presenting their boarding pass to the scanner. All the cloud’s planes turn momentarily in that direction, then return to their original position.
Our installation aims to create a relation between this place and the rest of the world by letting people know the real direction in space of the destinations of their flights. The system collects data about passengers entering Departures and assigns in proportion a number of planes in the cloud for the different destinations.
Our system interaction is divided into two steps. The first provides the authentication to the system by showing the QR code of the boarding pass to a webcam; the system also saves the data for each flight into a database, updating it every 15 minutes before the gate closes. In the second step the scanner placed under the installation reads the QR code on the boarding pass through a webcam. An Arduino board gives a light and sound output as feedback. In both cases the information is sent to an Arduino board which controls the movement of the planes via servomotors.
Teamwork with: Loris Bottello, Andrea Micco.