SXSW 2017: Community Emerges

For the Capital One House at SXSW, we built an interactive installation in which guests vote on personal values that made them Beta Brave (the 2017 theme for Capital One House).

These votes appear in a real-time data visualization projection and simultaneously transforming the hanging light sculptures to the color of their vote.

responsiblities

Built the entire interactive data visualization on a webpage. Seamlessly blended the physical and the digital.
On-site adjustment of color and positioning.
Monitored the program live from back stage.
Hired and managed a team of two creative technologist: Michael Koehle, Michael Weller. Became a Mich-ro manager.

TOOLS

Arduino, HTML, D3, THREE JS

On the hardware side, Teensy constantly reads touch sensor data. Once touched (voted), a message is sent via ethernet router to the local server. This message includes the physical location and keyword(Open-minded, Disruptive, etc… )

On the software side, the server receives the data entry and adds it to the D3 data base. Each data entry is visually represented as a dot. Using D3-force algorithm, the dots that belong to the same keywords move towards each other, forming a ‘cloud’.

To make this cloud more visually interesting, instead of rendering the dots in D3, I assigned them depths and give them a fancy 3D look. (D3 in 3D yay!)