Users can “play God” on Tellart’s Terraform Table, a sandpit reimagined as a vast aerial landscape of mountains, valleys, lakes and rivers.
The interactive installation is lit by a relief map projection that responds to changes on the table’s sandy surface. It is programmed with a machine-learning algorithm that reads the relative height of the sand and composes a matching projection accordingly, drawing on a database of satellite imagery of Earth.
That means that if a user sweeps their hand across the table, filling in a depression in the sand, the projection over it shifts from blue water to green forest.
If they build high enough, it eventually transforms into a white cap of snow. The Terraform Table is effectively a way of moving mountains.
Design studio Tellart created the table in response to a commission by London’s V&A museum for its technology-focused exhibition The Future Starts Here. The curators wanted a piece that would address the question “Should we shape the Earth and other planets for human use?”
Read more on Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/?p=1222064
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