Black Lives Matter Visualization

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  Housing Inequality

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  Candidate Funding

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  Injustice

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  patch editor

Inspiration

We rewatched a TED talk _ Beauty of Data Visualization _ highlighting how turning complex data sets into simple diagrams tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, the speaker suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut – and may just change the way we see the world. This inspired us to take a stab in showcasing inequality data with immersive visuals that help people perceive how big the discrepancy really is. Since we've been exploring AR recently, this seemed like a good place to start.

What It Does

This AR world effect visually demonstrates how black people face extreme inequality in multiple areas of life. We specifically focused on housing, police violence, and politics.

How I built it

We built this AR effect with the 3D sticker template provided by Spark AR. We also downloaded some free 3d assets from Sketchfab and designed the written pieces using photoshop. The template already provided a helpful JavaScript portion, but we added extra interactivity through the patch editor. We specifically used the animation patch to create transitions that help make the visuals more immersive and communicate the inequality data more vividly.

Challenges I ran into

A big challenge was visually depicting a 1000% difference on screen. We purposefully decided to move away from traditional best practices and leave it as is (users can still manipulate size by pinching) so people can truly visualize how ridiculous this difference is.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Being able to contribute to a powerful discussion during quarantine. I was very pleased to have the filter featured in some blogs and articles.

What I learned

During our research we learned about some shocking data points. During the process of creating the visuals, we were able to learn many things about creating AR effects in Spark AR Studio.

What's next for Black Lives Matter Visualization

Moving forward, we plan to keep updating the visuals with more data that highlights inequality and moves us to act from changing our behaviors and speaking up to donating and contributing to minority owned businesses.

Built With

• animationpatch
• blocks
• javascript
• patch-editor
• photoshop
• plane-tracker
• sketchfab
• sparkar