Needs & Goals

Nissan wanted to explain the concepts of

1. No crashes due to intelligent systems
2. Energy shared between city and vehicle
3. An intelligent future that helps humans life happier lives

in an immersive and experiential way.

To execute this, we have created The City and The Life experiences within the Nissan Pavilion in 2020.

Design & Challenges

The pavilion was planned to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics 2020, but due to the covid pandemic, Tokyo Olympics was postponed. The Nissan Pavilion went ahead, but head to deal with capacity restrictions and redesign for streamlined small group experiences.

Furthermore, the abstract concepts are not easily transferred to visual concepts. As such, for topic 1 and 2, an interactive installation was chosen, while for concept 3 the form of a short film was chosen.

I have been involved mostly in the interior design and interactive design, including what kind of interactions make sense, what kind of experience flow is ideal, and optimize these given the new corona conditions.

The City and Life Experience

The City’s first room is dark and has over 200 lasers mounted on it’s ceiling, that combined with a slight mist create a laser show that follows three different patterns. One of a random grid, one of a running line and one of a Nissan logo. In all 3 patterns, the lasers are programmed in a way to evade any person passing through the room, expressing the intelligent sensing mechanism of Nissans NIM, and how it protects drivers and humans from collisions.

In the second room, there are glowing pillars that symbolize the city’s buildings. When hovering your hand over the cars, one of three scenes play out with lights lighting up the pillars in waves. Either the car charges the city, or the city charges the car, or the waves dance from car to car. A fourth scene can be accessed when all three cars are activated at the same time, showing rainbows dancing all over the room.

In the City the challenges were mainly in how to help the visitors orient themselves in the dark space, as well as to actually make them interact with the pieces and understand that there is interactivity. Of course, during the waiting line a simple explanation was integrated into the wall, giving the visitors hints. Furthermore, the lasers were adjusted so that visitors were immediately stepping into them, to make them aware of the lasers moving away from them. In room 2, the corona situation made the situation more difficult. While many users did hover over the cars, few groups had enough time in the room to discover the bonus scene. This problem remained unresolved.

The Life Experience

In The Life, the first room simply served as an entrance that was a prelude to an immersive cinema. The room consisted of abstracted Nissan Logos and mirrors to prepare the visitor for an alternate reality, the future. Inside the cinema, users could enjoy a 5 minute anime movie about how a boy and his family is trying to make it in time to the hospital for his little brother to be born. The Nissan ARIYA responds to his wishes, and the cars open up a lane for his family’s car even in a traffic jam. The cinema room has lights that synchronize in color to the feeling and color of the scene that currently plays, bathing the whole room in fitting cold or warm lights.

The main issue here too was with corona reducing both the groups of people that can be in the room at the same time, and the play length per movie reducing the amount of people that can enjoy this within a single day. While these operational hurdles were overcome, they did minimize the amount of people that could enjoy this experience.