My original inspiration of the news articles I had seen surrounding COP26 led me to this project where I struggled a lot because it was difficult to convey a message so literal and objective in an abstract and artful way. For the final, I tried to do that by disembodying elements from what one might normally expect. The floating orbs contain snippets of the speech the Tuvalu Foreign Minister delivered while standing in the middle of the sea. The order of the rhetorical lines is tangled and confusing depending on how the user navigates the scene. Instead of a linear progression with a slider as common in data visualizations, how the water is rising is not immedietely clear to the user as to how their actions are causing it. The point cloud particles constructing the scene flicker in and out from a near solid imagery to disappearing as the waters get taller. I used a point cloud I had created of a moss temple garden video I recorded to show the serenity that is contrasted by the ominous music that gets higher pitched as the water rises and the flickering dots. The audio gets muffled and all that is left are baleful orbs glowing from beneath the sea.
To explore the audiovisual experience, users can use the right mouse button to look around the scene and the WASD keys to zoom in/out and go left/right and up/down. The glowing orbs contain spatialized snippets of audio that become clearer as they explore closer. However, the rising water is caused by accidental clicking of the left mouse button (perhaps when they are struggling with navigating with the mouse) and muffles the audio.
Built for Windows 64 bit on Unity 2021.2.0f1
I saw this tweet today and strongly identified with it. It said "people don’t realize that 33% of the creative process is sitting around doing nothing while thinking about nothing", and that felt like 70% of my time during the break, just trying to birth something in my mind. For this milestone, I was inspired by some exhibits at the Renwick and Hirshhorn I was able to visit over Thanksgiving break. I enjoyed the abstract, worldbuilding aspects of several of them and that elements various exhibits that were roughly symbolic of real life events/stories without explicitly linking to it.
For this milestone I decided to try out what degree of interactions might be available for my first idea on sea level rise. I prototyped a simplified version of what the core functionality might look like and sound like with what input might be available, abstracted from specific data. My takeaway was that there was not enough playability/degrees of freedom afforded to the user to explore the experience. I think I'll have to add other related data points of interest or pivot my idea a bit.
I was inspired by news articles I've seen on the current COP26, specifically the imagery of Tuvalu's Foreign Minister delivering his speech amid rising sea waters. In this project, I want to create 3D models of either island nations or major cities along the coast in the US and depict rising sea water levels over time. The audio component comes in when users interact with a time slider which will progressively degrade and muffle the voices of the people from these areas until they cannot be heard.
My second idea is based on data visualization I've seen from The Refugee Project. I think audio in addition to visualizations to the concept could make for a more compelling and visceral piece. I want to map the number of migrants to specific variables in the audio stream and intermix the audio streams of various countries refugees are migrating from and to.
The last idea was inspired by my roommate's recent trip to the Amazon Rainforest and my passion for birds. It could either take the form of an abstract point cloud visualization of a forest or a constructed one with orbiting spheres in Unity with trail renderers. The user would collide with various objects in the forest that emit sound ex. bird species, leaf litter, chainsaw etc. whose composition would change with the passage of time and the effects of climate change.