Uniting The Physical & Digital
Users can customize their own AI-powered avatar and connect with others in real-time across the physical and digital divide. Standing on the Expo site, a visitor may see a friend from the other side of the world (viewed through the lens of their phone) as an avatar they can share experiences with, and communicate with via group creation and messaging.
On-site hardware will also link the physical and digital worlds. Smart screens called “Digital World Viewers” show views of digital content to enhance the physical landscape for visitors. The desktop application is designed to mimic the capabilities of the mobile applications by connecting to the same cloud services for local content and avatar display.
Augmented Reality Aligned To Real World Locations
By using ARCore Cloud Anchors by Google for hundreds of location-specific activations around the site, visitors will experience entertaining and educational AR content relevant to wherever they are at Expo 2020 Dubai. AR activations including mysterious portals to far-off places, treasure hunts through history, and magical creature encounters are all aligned to real world
locations with centimeter accuracy. This is currently one of the largest deployments of ARCore Cloud Anchors in the world.
Geospatial authoring interfaces and global content delivery networks for updating and publishing new content in real-time enable designers to release new interactive AR experiences anywhere on the site during the run of Expo 2020 Dubai. Powered by a set of cloud-hosted services, content is automatically streamed down to the user's device when they approach a location or interact with an experience, without impacting the application’s install size. This enables users to experience any number of magical AR moments, all from a relatively small application on their device, and new or updated experiences can be pushed while the visitor is still in the app.
Remote visitors can access the same AR content and experiences, over a connected digital twin of the site, via an interface similar to popular mobile games like Fortnite or Roblox.
A Live, Social Digital Twin
The digital twin of the Expo site covers more than 200 buildings from the world’s leading architects across a huge 4.38km2 site, including 192 unique country pavilions. Hundreds of artists working around the world spent more than two years creating the living digital replica, enhancing it with dynamic lighting, art installations, animated experiences, and stunning spectacles. Virtual reality was used to collaboratively develop the designs and experiences so they could be tested before the physical site was even built.
The visitor experience geolocates content on the site in real-time, so the digital twin has been built to a high degree of accuracy, at 1:1 scale from the architect’s CAD files, and confirmed with “as-builts”. Due to the size and detail of the site, it can’t be stored on visitor’s devices in its entirety and is streamed to visitors based on their location and proximity. The system also accounts for the performance capabilities of the visitor’s device to deliver the highest quality representation possible.
Ben Grossmann, CEO of Magnopus, says, “This is the biggest space to date, connected across the physical and digital worlds. These ‘connected spaces’ are the building blocks of the new immersive web, or Metaverse. We’ve been working on these kinds of experiences and technologies for many years, and it was thrilling to take things to the next level to bring this grand vision to life with the Innovation and Future Technologies team at Expo 2020 Dubai."
