American Society of Civil Engineers

ASCE

2018-2022
What if game technologies could change the future of civil engineering?

This question fuels Experimental’s partnership with the American Society of Civil Engineers. ASCE designs, constructs, and operates our society’s economic and social engine — the built environment of a city — while also preserving and restoring its natural environment.

But with those environments now threatened by climate change, we are turning the gaming engine into a story engine to create a Future World Vision. Our interactive tool empowers ASCE members to build smarter cities by simulating the challenges facing civil engineers today — and generating new strategies for tomorrow.

The American Society of Civil Engineers plans, constructs, and operates our main economic and social engine, the built environment of a city, while preserving its natural environment. But with those environments disrupted by massive change in climate and population, Experimental supports ASCE by combining engineering and storytelling into a radical new initiative — Future World Vision.

We design cities 50 years from now by using real-time 3D creation as a story engine. Our interactive tool lets civil engineers experience virtual cities from the point-of-view of a person on the street, adding human narrative to the Future World Vision. By keeping emotion at the forefront, story empowers ASCE to address the unpredictability of change, build the adaptive shelters of tomorrow, and kickstart a new leap in engineering.

Re-engineer the Future of Engineering

Mega City

Reimagine Urban Space

The year is 2070. Your neighborhood is always changing. Your city is ever growing. Resources are limited, the climate is stressed. Yet innovation and automation create synergies between infrastructure and environment.

Living materials. Personal transport pods. Drone deliveries. The lines between AR and IRL are blurred. The world is transformed.

Download the desktop app to visit the Mega City (Windows or Mac)

Residential
Mixed-use
Commercial
Mid-rise structure

  • Global View

    Mega City explores how current cities will grow in density over time via various viewpoints, scales, and data layers. As structures and materials adapt, circular economies develop while still preserving historic character.

  • City View

    By entering a city brought to life with real-time gaming technology, engineers inhabit a spatial narrative and develop disruptive approaches to infrastructure innovation. If you can see it, you can make it.

  • District View

    Get to know your new neighborhood. The District View details the relational proximity of core samples, services, and street corners throughout Mega City.

  • Street Corner View

    The Street Corner is populated and bustling with life. A diverse community of users engage with each other — and the virtual inhabitants — by contributing rich-media assents via an in-game social forum.

    Developed from extensive research and expert interviews, the experience becomes an evolving exchange of ideas and action towards aspirational futures.

Callouts and Comments foster a deeper engagement with Mega City. Developed from extensive research and expert interviews they prompt an exchange of ideas that encourage taking action today to develop a future in which we all want to live.
A disrupted future, in 50 years
The Floating City imagines a flooded Miami in 2030, when a sector of the declining population migrates to a chaotic assembly of floating structures that over 50 years evolves into an organized and sustainable city, above and below the water.

When rising sea levels flood Miami, the displaced population migrates to a chaotic assembly of floating structures. Over 50 years, this flotilla develops into an organized and sustainable metropolis, above and below the water.

But this isn’t science fiction. Experiencing the evolution of a floating city provokes new thinking around climate change, sustainability, and urban planning in an unpredictable future.