Global Challenges

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Global Challenges is the centerpiece of the Gates Foundation Discovery Center in downtown Seattle. Through the lens of the foundation's six biggest areas of focus, visitors explore issues like poverty, sanitation, and malaria, and see how they connect. The animated floor map on a large six-screen display engages both active and passive visitors, while two interactive stations let people use physical pucks to explore key issues and share their findings up to the larger display.

The project had some interesting technical challenges. The experience ran across three synchronized machines: one driving the six-screen display, and one for each puck station, all kept in sync so interactions could pass between them in real time.

I owned the data visualization for the large map, processing the foundation's raw datasets, extracting and formatting the data, and applying the visual effects to the map's SVG artwork to bring each global challenge to life across the six-screen display.

I also worked closely on how the experience felt in motion, building the take-over and timer animations that made control passing between stations feel smooth and clear. Alongside the other engineers and designers, I helped define the take-over rules themselves: one station is offered the display, and if it isn't claimed the offer passes to the other, while making sure both visitors are never prompted at once. On the puck stations, I developed several of the interactions and the animated views that surface deeper information about each topic, using Ideum's GestureWorks SDK.

Integrating the fiducial puck technology into our familiar Cinder development process was one of my favorite challenges of the build, and my first time working with tangible input of this kind.

Built in Cinder and C++. Created at Bluecadet.