Fi - The Interactive Firm: Pulse of the City

The creative agency the Brooklyn Brothers approached Fi with the goal of creating an amazing visualization of peoples journeys around their cities for the Range Rover Evoque concept - Pulse of the City. The result was a mobile tracking application that ables users to push geo-location data over time to the Pulse of the City website.

The mobile app allows users to create customized wallpapers that visualize their journeys through their cities. Users liked this feature so much that we carried it over into the main site’s journey visualizer.

The iPhone and Android mobile applications are the main way users upload their journeys to the campaign website. We created a fully integrated experience for the mobile application which allows users to track and archive journeys as well as share them on Facebook and Twitter. We engineered a custom API that the applications access to create users, get URLs for sharing and to store journey information. The biggest challenge in this project was to build mobile applications that balanced the need to collect enough journey information while preserving battery life.

In addition to structuring, designing, developing and publishing a high end mobile experience for the global masses we also prepared a range of mobile devices with pre-installed apps which would be sent to brand advocate celebrities around the globe. These celebrities are sharing their journeys around their home cities with the world and calls to inspire the public to do the same.

Since the applications were available world-wide, we spent a lot of time perfecting localization as well. The iPhone application launched supporting eight languages, but due to the success of the campaign we were soon asked to add many more.

Going Tech

The pulse of the city experience makes heavy use of geo-IP data and GPS positioning to show the user relevant geo-location data at all times, both on the website and in the mobile app.

Achieving all this meant digging deep into highly complicated map projections, geometric algorithms and approximated calculations of great-circle distances, bearing, destination points, and proximity of longitude/latitude points on the earth’s surface -- not for the faint of heart.

The Result

This project was a great multi platform experience delivered by Fi where the mobile app played the key part in tying all the information together and made all the amazing visualization work possible.