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Google, M.I.T teams to build Digital Cloud for Olympics
By siliconindia
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Friday, 04 December 2009, 21:42 IST
London: A team of leading architects and engineers has just unveiled designs for the Cloud - a landmark structure to celebrate London's role as host of the 2012 Olympics. The lightweight transparent tower, composed of a "cloud" of inflatable, light emitting spheres, would create a spatial, three-dimensional display in the skies over London, fed by real time information from all over the world using the Web.
The project comes from M.I.T.'s Senseable City Lab and is now looking to secure funding, with micro-payments from the public, and sorting out other small details like building permits. "The lightweight transparent tower, composed of a "cloud" of inflatable, light-emitting spheres, would create a spatial, three-dimensional display in the skies of London, fed by real time information from all over the world," a statement issued by the project reads.
"The size of the Cloud will not be set in advance, but it will evolve based on the level of contributions received. The global "cloudraising" effort will be supported by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter; Google will provide advertising on YouTube and in search results," it continues.
The structure is "a new form of collective expression and experience and an updated symbol of our dawning age: code rather than carbon," said Carlo Ratti, head of the MIT SENSEable Cities Laboratory and one of the project leaders.
Other members of the design team include artist Tomas Saraceno; digital designer Alex Haw; lightweight-structures expert Joerg Schleich; and the companies Arup, Agence Ter and Google.
"Our main idea is to apply to architecture some of the distributed processes that are currently revolutionising the digital world," said Ratti.
"People can choose to ascend the Cloud on foot or bicycle; the energy that it would take to descend the Cloud is converted, on the way down, into electricity through elevators with regenerative braking, similar to those that are present in hybrid cars.
"The people's energy, coupled with solar energy collected through on-site and off-site photovoltaic cells and various energy saving strategies will allow us to reach carbon neutrality, whereby all the energy it produces it uses."
The structure of the Cloud is an innovation in and of itself. "Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the sphere - all on exceedingly slender columns, stabilised by a cable net," says Joerg Schleich.
The LEDs in the Cloud, fed by real time information, will be viewable from all over London, displaying information to the city and beyond. Moving inside the Cloud "will be like floating inside a 3D display animated by information feeds that could include energy use, spectator numbers, decibel levels, medal updates, transport patterns, mobile phone activity, Internet traffic," says Ratti.
Initially, the cloud was designed for the 2012 Olympic Park, although other sites in London are also currently being explored. The team states the project will cost governments nothing, "We can build our Cloud with 5 million pounds or 50 million," says team member Walter Nicolino.
