A futuristic city scape showing different modes of transport and high rise buildings.

The World of Future Mobility

Framestore is proud to have created three key elements for FordHub, Ford’s interactive brand space within the Westfield World Trade Center in New York City. The three activations - ‘The World’, ‘Share Your Style’ and ‘Mobility Map’ - inspire visitors to explore smarter ways to move.

exterior of a ford hub mobility store

The World

‘The World’ is a futuristic real-time cityscape, built using the Unreal game engine. Powered by three computers, each enabled with a top-of-the-range gaming graphics card, the panorama spans a twelve-screen display to create one uninterrupted view of an imagined future urban environment. Features such as autonomous cars, and smart intersections are highlighted, to educate visitors about the transportation of tomorrow.

‘The World’ was Framestore's Digital Signage team's first opportunity to utilize Unreal within a large-scale installation. ‘Creating a really wide panoramic view was technically very challenging, as you can't use standard cameras without creating a compromised telephotoview which would make the world feel distant and remote’, explains Robin Carlisle, Global Head of Creative, Digital Signage.  ‘Our solution was to divide the world into three “ideal views”, and combine those views seamlessly.’

The solution called for some ‘unorthodox mathematical wizardry, as well as creatively building the world around these ideal views to give the illusion of one perfect panorama’, adds Robin. ‘To make things even trickier, a stand-alone computer did not have the power to render the entire world, so we had to split the work between three computers and synchronize their outputs.’

The real-time environment of Unreal saw Framestore use AI algorithms to allow cars to drive and people to walk around ‘The World’ autonomously. The creative design drew on traditional VFX trickery - a subject in which Framestore is well versed - to hide the seams between the individual real-time inputs, using carefully placed lampposts and trees.

animation of a futuristic city that is built for mobility and accessibility

Share Your Style

‘Share Your Style’, FordHubs’ digital car configurator, was a creative collaboration between agency VML and Framestore. The installation invites visitors to digitally customize a Ford vehicle, displayed onto a 42” UHD screen within the Hub. An interface designed by VML was implemented into Unreal by Framestore, who imported the 3D car geometry data.

a large vertical screen covering a wall in a ford mobility store

To create such a wide panoramic view involved unorthodox mathematical wizardry in conjunction with building the world around three ideal viewpoints to give the illusion of one perfect panorama.
Robin Carlisle
Global Head of Creative, Digital Signage
interior of a ford mobility store
interior of a ford mobility store

Mobility Map

At the entrance to the FordHub, a ‘Mobility Map’ welcoming visitors with a 9ft tall display of LED and touch-screens. The Mobility Map provides visitors with journey data drawn from the city’s transportational APIs, as well as the chance to ‘fly-through’ Manhattan’s streets to key points of interest. The smart mapping offers further suggestions of stops en route, enhanced with additional useful real-time visitor information.

back view of a man looking up at a screen that covers a wall. the screen has information of the ford mobility world
a large screen that covers the wall in the ford mobility hub store
a blue map of new york chinatown
a blue map of new york city

Credits

Global Head of Production, Digital Signage
Jonny Dixon
Line Producer
Grace Diggens
Creative Director
Mike Best
UX Designer
Ian Sutton
3D Environments Artist
Javier Cadenas
Character Animator
Friska Bako
Engineer
Devin Cantor Sternin
Global Head of Creative, Digital Signage
Robin Carlisle
Production Assistant
Viola Asztalos
Art Director
Jorge Sanchez Magdaleno
Developers
Ray Ion, Fabio Polimeni, Anton Andersson, Tom Schwarz, Tuomo Rinne, Stuart Bachelor, Ellie Ansell, Casper Jelly
3D Artist
Samuel Thomson
Lead Engineer
Paul Martin
Junior Engineer
Ryan Tanaka
Senior Producer
Lauren Matthews
Lead Developer
Greg Knight
Pipeline Technical Artist
Dan Chapman
Quality Control and Testing
Pelin Santos
Technical Artist
Ben Merrick
Senior Engineer
Liam Naerger
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