'Environmental Impact' - The 48-Foot Virtual Waterfall

"Environmental impact." It’s one of those terms that you’ve heard so often that it’s grown more or less meaningless. Yet the cause and effect relationships between what we do, and how it affects our environment, are extremely important!

Connected Worlds, by interactive design studio Design I/O, is a gigantic installation that trades esoteric terminology for a sea of pixels. Installed at the New York Hall of Science, the room-sized exhibit revolves around a 48-foot digital waterfall that "pours" onto the floor. Kids can aim the resulting streams by damming around the space with logs. And ultimately, the water will flow to one of various environments that live on the walls—from deserts to jungle—where it will allow children to grow plant life and interact with animals.

There’s something to be said for its sheer power of scale. Whereas most digital experiences span a four-inch screen, or at max a small living room of flailing around with the Wii, Connected Worlds is over 5,000 square feet of interactive projections.

"Normally our ideas are limited by the physical dimensions of the space we have to work with," explains Partner Theodore Watson. "But the Great Hall is so big—80 ft tall and over 110 ft long—that we knew we could make something really wild and at the limit of what is possible in this field,"

Via : Creative Applications

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