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How can the digital world improve community interaction?

Indoor Sports Terrace

The immersive sports terrace will enable people to interact with and occupy a variety of environments while improving their health, skills and social connections. The indoor sports terrace (IST) breaks down the barriers between inside and out by bringing technology out-of-doors. It provides an immersive three-dimensional experience which merges the virtual and the real and challenges isolation and enables people in distant locations to connect and share health and wellness goals. With the IST, we are scaling up digital world so that we can occupy it physically and communally.

The IST enables the integration of exercise and community into daily life and blurs the line between the virtual and real. The IST is first a garden pavilion (or outdoor sports terrace) with embedded, nearly invisible technology, representing the realization of the futuristic dream of seamless technology integrated into daily life. It is an all glass pavilion built in the landscape. Operable glass walls enable the pavilion to be open to the outside or to be fully enclosed. Switchable privacy glass enables the glass to be fully transparent, for the view, or fully opaque, for a full immersion experience, or somewhere in between for a layered experience. Transparent screen technology enables the surround virtual environment on three sides. The technology is nearly invisible, yet completely embedded and ubiquitous. Instead of technology being the focus, it is merely an enabler.

Exciting rapidly developing technologies are moving to a point of synthesis which will transform daily life and architecture. Operable full height glass walls are the screen for a virtual immersive sports environment supported by cameras and high-powered computing. Recent innovations integrated into this design include the latest in glass technology, including oversize glass and switchable glass, screen technology, using transparent screens, and computing, including smart cameras, with supporting high powered analytic software and high speed hardware.

The Immersive Sports Terrace – is a multi-function garden pavilion designed to take digital experience outside. The IST is designed to supplement reality, not supplant it.

The ephemeral nature of the digital environment, while designed for sports, easily lends itself to a variety of functions. The digital nature means that there are few specific physical manifestations of the sports program, making the imagination the only limit to its functionality.

While the prototype might be a custom one-off high-end tech toy, the IST could be developed into a modular system that could be deployed in residential, work and education environments.

IST featured in South China Morning Post

April 3, 2018

Ennead Lab’s Hi-tech Sports Terrace – led by Ennead Associate Principal Kate Mann along with Ennead teammates Stefani Fachini, Ursula Trost and Aidan Kim – is featured in South China Morning Post article titled “This HK$158 million gym merges virtual technology with reality”.

Read full article here.

Team

Ennead

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