The experience
of Central Park, virtually
Campaign turns the park into an interactive journey
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jun 15, 2010
One of the most inventive alternative media campaigns ever to invade Central Park wasn't visible to the naked eye.
In fact, it looked like just another day in the park unless you happened to be using your mobile device on Arbor Day weekend.
Then everything changed. Central Park became a gigantic interactive board game.
Suddenly your phone enabled you to walk a trail with Sarah Jessica Parker or ride a bike alongside Dustin Hoffman.
Or you could challenge your friends to a trivia contest. Question: What animal has been absent from the park for 30 years? Answer: The rabbit.
Or see the way a bridge in the park looked decades earlier.
Or use an interactive map to find other cool virtual stuff hidden throughout the park.
The whole thing was a tech-heavy event sponsored by New York Parks & Recreation and New York's Central Park Tourism. The World Park, as it was called, took place on April 30 and May 1 as a way to educate people about Central Park.
"We knew that if we used the media young people use the most today—mobile—as a way to add or unlock another layer of the park experience we'd be in a good place," says Michael Ferrare, founder and creative director of Agency Magma, which coordinated the stunt.
"We studied how QR-Code [quick response codes read by camera phones] and other mobile scanning technologies were being used in Japan, Europe and other parts of the world. We saw a huge opportunity to use it here in the U.S. in a much more meaningful and memorable way."
Here's how it worked: Agency Magma set up more than 50 of what it called Parkodes, really signs that sent signals to the mobile devices of passersby. Each Parkode was adorned with a digitized tree.
Parkodes were divided into four categories (pop culture, science and geology, art and music, and history), and through them the visitors could link to more than 200 mobile interfaces in all.
Depending on the person's location in the park, a picture, video, painting or listing of trivia relating to that location might pop up.
At one location visitors could hold up their mobile device in front of an empty amphitheater and experience what that amphitheater looks and sounds like during a concert.
At a pond, visitors were asked who strolled by that very spot with Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City." The answer came via a short video clip from the TV show.
People could even keep score of the trivia answers they got right on their phones, challenging their companions to a game.
During the two days of the exhibition, street teams handed out brochures about the event and showed people how to interact with the Parkodes.
The whole thing took 10 months to plan and execute, including five just for research and another two testing technology.
"We went through seven generations of installation methodologies before settling on our design," says Ferrare. "The one that we went with was the one that seemed the greenest, and made the smallest physical impact on the park as possible. Parkode signage had to be physically placed at each exact location for visitors to scan."
The stunt worked because it was so imaginative and all-encompassing. In being turned into a virtual museum, the park became an entirely new experience, even for people who had been there hundreds or thousands of times before.
"Visitors with smartphones loved the richness of the content, specifically scrolling through views from the 1800s, seeing the Central Park skyline from 1890, streaming videos from famous movies, and quirky park history that they never knew about Central Park," Ferrare says.
It was so successful that another World Park could be on the way, though Ferrare declines to say when or where.
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