In spring 2023, Till Nagel invited me to join the AR DXP project at HDILab, HS Mannheim, the aim of which was to find novel approaches to visualise smart city data in a geospatial AR context.

My main contribution was to turn the project’s design space into a location-based AR experience on site. I laid the georeferential groundwork in Unity: placing the data experience point at its source location, two lanes of a central junction in Mannheim, anchoring embedded views to the lane geometry, and keeping charts aligned with the street as users move at pedestrian scale.

Live vehicle counts from on-site computer-vision tracking (Smart City Mannheim), provided by an API, fed the temporal views.

On that foundation, I implemented a selection of spatial visualisation idioms of the same traffic stream, so we could compare how embedding, temporal granularity, and spatial proportions read in the real environment rather than only in design sketches.

I also explored various interaction paradigms for these situated views, like manipulating the timeline directly by scrubbing the 3D objects, or a labeling system that stays oriented toward the viewer by billboarding and switching positions.