BMW’s Hofmeister Kink design is part of a marketing campaign
“The Hofmeister Kink represents an important part of BMW’s design heritage, insider information for BMW owners and enthusiasts,” Kevin Campbell, head of CRM for BMW North America, said in a statement. “The 60th anniversary provides a timely opportunity to celebrate this iconic feature by giving consumers an engaging platform to drive their very own Hofmeister Kink and experience BMW’s performance design philosophy on everyday roads close by.”
Performance Art used images of every BMW model produced since 1962 to create “vectorized versions of each model’s individual ‘kink’ shape,” according to a campaign press release.
“Our goal is to help the world rediscover this incredible and iconic brand asset by seeing it with fresh eyes and then literally riding it,” said Ian Mackenzie, Creative Director of Performance Art. He added that “using AI to detect and map Hofmeister Kink-shaped curves on a U.S. roadmap was not a needle-in-a-haystack task – it was a kind of needle in 10,000 haystacks Herculean feat.”
The computational process involved the use of Google technology and an open-source neural framework called Darknet. The resulting model then analyzed more than 3.9 million kilometers of roads looking for matches. The agency then used the AI results to create more than 55,000 geographic coordinates to power the user interface, which uses aerial photography and satellite imagery to locate nodes in the road.
