Interactive Lightspace

Light is a fundamental part of ZKW Group as specialist for automotive lighting systems.
At the IAA 2017, a pure "Lightspace" was center of its exhibition stand. Responsive Spaces designed and developed an interactive experience dedicated to immersive storytelling around light and autonomous mobility. Densely packed with lightning technology, position tracking and highres display surfaces, the "Lightspace" allowed multiple visitors to simultaneously explore and playfully interact with different scenarios.

The challenge:
ZKW Group is a known innovative specialist for automotive lighting systems and one of the wolds leading providers of the automotive sector. Due to the evolution of mobility towards autonomous driving the role of light will change drastically. Therefore ZKW, a more or less unknown brand, is feeling the urgency to appear in public and get seen and understood better. The brand as well as its innovative portfolio and high involvement in research wanted to be shown at the IAA 2017 in Frankfurt. This trade show should mark the first ever appearance of ZKW Group on an international exhibition.

Idea & solution:
The future of automotive mobility will bring plenty of self-driving cars and therefore the importance of known headlights will drastically sink, because there will be now need for them to ensure save travel, in theory. In reality, the role of light itself will just change drastically within the coming decades. The main goal for the trade show was, to explain and solidify the major role the ZKW Group will play in such a future.
Responsive Spaces developed the motto for the IAA "autonomous driving from the perspective of the light manufacturer". The strategy - based on the given topics of the IAA being e-mobility and autonomous driving - focused on telling the whole story, but from a completely unique perspective, the perspective of light. This way we ensured, that the innovative force and future importance of ZKW got presented.
We defined 9 separate short stories, each focussing on a concrete aspect of the future role of light. Utilising two big LED-walls the stories were shown as 3D animations, which we designed for this project. The unique part of the project was a 24 squaremeter large space in front of the main display, which was covered by a lowered roof. It was built with 96 light-panels usually used at rock concerts. We figured out a way to address every single LED light of each panel individually. And since we combined this instance with a especially developed position tracking, we were empowered to create a fully interactive spaces. Pure light was telling its own future in a highly immersive and innovative way, always in synch with the concrete story on the display walls.
Employees from ZKW at the exhibition stand could individually control the whole installation by using a mobile tablet app, also provided by Responsive Spaces. This way, all the core messages and the whole interactive experience could be integrated in direct talks with clients and partners on site.
Based on the extraordinary feedback from ZKW itself as well as its guests at the IAA we consider this installation and its interactive story telling character as a full success.