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TA(L)KING DOWN THE INVISIBLE WALL

An AR experience to overcome the new divide in German society.

30 years after the fall of the Wall, Germany is more divided than ever before on political, social and ecological issues. Prejudices are being reinforced within filter bubbles and new “walls in people's heads” are being erected.

In order to get people talking to each other again instead of about each other, we launched a digital initiative for the online dialogue platform “Diskutier Mit mir” (Discuss With Me) to make these invisible walls of opinion visible – in order to overcome them.

Via social listening we collected numererous authentic hate comments on the web and used them to set up life-size Augemented Reality installations as 3m high and up to 60m long border walls in Berlin: exactly where it is divided today based on attitudes and income. By tapping, parts of the wall could be overturned, thus starting anonymous 1:1 chats with people with starkly opposing views.

Since the end of 2019, the “Invisible Wall” can now even be made visible and "talked through" with any smartphone anywhere in Germany, e.g. to let the other side have its say on relevant issues before elections or even on a very personal level.

Two Sides, Three Topics, Hundres of Hateful Comments

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AR-Web App

On application level, technologies and programming techniques were used that have so far been an absolute exception in this form in any mobile browser-based setting. We developed AR experience for low-threshold access as a web app, which for the first time enables full 6 DoF (Degrees of Freedom) tracking in mobile browsers.

Only works on smartphones und tablets.
Best viewed outside on a plain 60x20m area.
App Screen 1 App Screen 2 App Screen 3

Additional technology highlights are:

  • Assets reloaded dynamically: Real-time modification of AR objects during program run.
  • Markerless AR: Locating AR objects completely without using special orientation elements for tracking, the condition for a the virtual walls to be placed at almost any location.
  • Combination of markerless tracking and integration of a physics engine lets virtual objects "interact" with the real environment, e.g. tapping and falling of virtual wall pieces on real ground.
  • Use of WebGL: GLSL shaders enable real-time compositing of high-resolution textures on mobile websites; short loading times, because textures used twice only have to be loaded once; high frame rate due to direct compositing on the GPU.

Campaign Impressions, Execution und Results*

Social Media:

  • Organic reach: 210.000+
  • Engagement rate: 24%

Display Ads:

  • Impressions: 702.000+
  • CTR: 50% above average

Interactions:

  • Website visits: 1400+
  • Chats/Matches: 450+
*For reasons of data protection and confidentiality, Diskutier Mit Mir neither uses classic tracking nor an overview of actual chat dialogues on the platform and all connected web pages. Therefore, the actual occurrence, length and progress of chats cannot be logged.

About the NGO

“Diskutier Mit Mir” (Discuss With Me) is a non-profit online platform and app for smartphones, which has made it its goal to bring people with polarizing points of view into conversation with each other. In protected chat rooms, climate protectors meet climate sceptics, progressives meet conservatives and anti-Europeans meet EU supporters.