EARTH SPEAKR
OLAFUR ELIASSON - AKQA

A global participatory artwork by Olafur Eliasson, giving children a voice on the future of the planet through AR-animated characters and a shared world map. Eduardo led the technical architecture and delivery across iOS, Android, and web — including a custom content moderation system and a real-time AR facial tracking pipeline. Over its lifespan, the project reached 500,000+ downloads across 120+ countries, with messages recorded in more than 70 languages and listened to over 3 million times.

Official site

OVERVIEW _

Earth Speakr invited children around the world to record messages about the future — their faces mapped in real time to expressive AR characters that appear on a shared, interactive globe. The project was commissioned by Studio Olafur Eliasson, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office for Germany's Presidency of the EU Council, and built by AKQA.

The technical scope was substantial: two native mobile apps (iOS and Android), a public-facing website, and a purpose-built content moderation backend — all running in parallel at global scale. AR character generation used Banuba for facial expression tracking and Unity for rigging and animation. Media processing ran through a Pub/Sub pipeline between Cloudinary and Firebase, with geo-hashing powering the interactive world map and a location-weighted relevance algorithm driving the content feed.

Eduardo led across the full technical surface — architecture, proof of concept, AR integration, backend systems, and coordinated release across the Apple App Store and Google Play. He also designed the GDPR-compliant data anonymisation workflows and the automated archival pipeline that kept the system clean over a two-year lifespan.

IMPACT _

RECOGNITION _

D&AD Awards 2021 — Shortlist, Immersive Experiences
Press coverage: Creative Review, Fast Company, Wallpaper, WPP Featured Work

TECHNOLOGY _

Mobile

Native iOS & Android
Unity
Banuba
Firebase Auth, Firestore, Functions
Mapbox
Cloudinary

Website

React / Gatsby
Firebase
DatoCMS / GraphQL
Mapbox
Cloudinary

Backend & Admin

Node.js / Express,
React / Tailwind,
Firebase,
Cloudinary

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