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2026 ZER01NE LAB 〈ROOM NO. ECHO〉 12–30 October 2026 · Hyundai Motor Company · Kia Yangjae Building, Seoul
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At ZER01NE LAB we have long explored the potential of the car as a medium for new experience. In 2023 we presented 〈Timescaper〉, which imagined an operating system for a future car in which driving has disappeared. It laid the time a place had passed through over the landscape beyond the window — an attempt to form a relation between places slipping by and the people passing them. The following year, 〈Future Garage〉 turned the car's controls into the interface of a game, and redefined the charging station and the car waiting to charge there as spaces for lingering and play.
Both projects came, in the end, to a single question. What can fill the time that passes inside a car?
Before asking what might fill that time, we looked at how people actually spend it inside a car. A car is a means of reaching a destination, but before that it is a private room, a place to be alone and out of the world's sight. It is where one gazes idly out of the window, murmurs what one has told no one, and at times, at last, breaks the silence with the person beside them.
Begun in 2025, the 'Room No.' series asks what is possible in this room. Its first project, 〈Room No. Alpha〉, gave a space long thought to belong to adults over to children, as a room of curiosity. An AI that read the child's gaze spoke to them and spread before their eyes the memory of a seaside the child had visited last summer, letting the child widen their own world.
This year's second project, 〈Room No. Echo〉, now gives that room to adults. A moving car is one of the few places where a person can set aside social roles and busy days for a while, and meet themselves.
This project takes its name from the echo. An echo never returns exactly as the sound that left; marked by the places it has struck and passed through, it comes back a little different. We believed such an echo could arise inside a car too. On a congested commute, or driving a road for the first time, we murmur something to ourselves and let some feeling slip by. The car can hold on to it and, after time has passed, return it as a new resonance. 〈Room No. Echo〉 began with this resonance.
To pursue it, vehicle engineers, AI researchers, designers and developers, and a composer worked together. It was something no single field's way of working could have reached.
What can a car, and the technology within it, become to a person?
The technology already riding with us
The moment we get into a car, advanced technology is riding with us: technology that reads the lanes and measures the distance to the car ahead, travelling the same road as the person driving. When we hear the term physical AI, we tend to picture a humanoid robot first. Yet the car we ride in each day is the physical intelligence that has already entered our lives.