As an entry to the Eyebeam DataVizChallenge to visualize your taxes, Budget Climb by Frankie Cheung, Zach Schwartz, and Fred Truman places you in a virtual environment where you can climb and stand on top of tax data.
Created using openframeworks, the Microsoft Kinect and OpenNI Budget Climb is a physically interactive data environment where we can explore 26 years of federal spending – giving us a unique perspective on how our government spends our money. In order to explore the data we must exert physical effort, revealing how the budget is distributed in a novel and tangible way.
Maybe not the best way to learn about the data, but I like the idea of data exploration as a game. See it in action below. It reminds me of Irad Lee’s Spamology.
[Budget Climb | Thanks, Fred]
for some reason there is no public gallery of entries to datavizchallenge. I’ve entered, not so much to win but to see how others tackle this problem. I assume all contestants are readers of flowing data, so why not post a link to your entry?
mine is here: http://bit.ly/eWX7J9
the ones I found so far –
http://j.mp/gPyk2m
http://labsmb.com/datavizchallenge
http://meghantosh.com/datavizchallenge/index.html
http://dev.humblesoftware.com/dvc/
@jerome My entry is at http://lodes.nu/words_of_the_budget
We’re getting closer to the cyberworld William Gibson described in Neuromancer! Apart from the cool concept, this screen shot shows the limitations of 3-D data visualization: extraneous lines and surfaces. Our little Uncle Sam avatar is going to have a very hard time using the data in the visualization because of all the clutter from unnecessary sides and tops on the cubes.