Cashocracy

How can we feel like we belong within our political system? How can we ensure our representatives do not belong to the interests of outsiders? The old adage, "follow the money" resonates deeply in today’s political landscape.

The Problem

Campaign finance data lives outside of everyday experience.

Even when visualized online, it:

Requires intentional searching
Feels detached from real-world political moments
Lacks emotional or sensory engagement

At the same time, people encounter campaign messaging constantly—through flyers, mailers, and ads—without ever experiencing the financial forces behind them.

This disconnect creates a deeper issue:
people don’t just lack information, they lack a felt connection to the system.

Our Solution

We built an augmented reality experience that embeds campaign finance directly into the physical world—where political engagement already happens.

Instead of opening a website, users simply scan a campaign flyer.
Instantly, the invisible becomes tangible.

Campaign contributions appear as 3D dollar stacks anchored to the candidate, allowing users to see:

Total funding
Distribution across sources (individuals, PACs, organizations)
Relative scale and imbalance

But more importantly, users don’t just see the data—they experience it.

Why AR?

AR allows us to place campaign finance exactly where political decisions begin—on the materials people already encounter.

This creates three key shifts:

From searching → to discovering
From reading → to experiencing
From abstraction → to intuition

By layering financial data onto real-world campaign messaging, we collapse the gap between what voters are told and what shapes those messages.

How We Built It

We built our experience using Scenery, a 3D and AR framework that allowed us to create interactive, real-time visualizations of campaign finance data.

Using Scenery, we were able to:

Anchor AR content to image targets, such as campaign flyers
Render 3D objects that represent financial contributions
Animate and position elements in real space for a grounded, intuitive experience

We structured our data so that each candidate’s funding sources are mapped to visual elements in the scene. For example, different categories of donors (individuals, PACs, organizations) are represented as distinct 3D objects whose size corresponds to the amount of money contributed.

Scenery’s flexibility allowed us to go beyond static visualization and build a more immersive experience. We incorporated:

Physics-based interactions, including falling and stacking effects for dollar representations
Audio feedback, where each “cash drop” reinforces the feeling of incoming contributions
Spatial layout, so users can physically explore funding as if it exists in the real world

By combining Scenery’s rendering capabilities with interactive elements, we transformed abstract campaign finance data into a tangible, explorable AR experience.

This approach allows users to not only see campaign funding, but to experience its structure and scale in a way that feels immediate and intuitive.