Liquidata

LiquiData is a tangible visualization to explore your personal movement profile and to share engaging places with others by adding photos and comments with the help of your smartphone. It is a social system that allows people to discover new spots in unknown surroundings e.g. during a city visit. It offers you the possibility to better understand your movements through an urban environment and lets you compare your mental map with the reality.

The prototype was developed for object-trackable tabletops like the Microsoft Surface. The programming environment Processing was used for the entire application. The aesthetic and behavior of the liquid was done with the libraries GLGraphics and toxiclibs. The multitouch gestures are based on TUIO. Map data provided by OSM, tiles generated by TileMill, and the interaction functionality by Unfolding Library.

The Project was initiated in a course by Till Nagel @ University of Applied Science Potsdam back in 2011 in collaboration with Gunnar Friedrich, Pierre La Baume, David Ikuye and Luis Grass. Since then my fellow Gunnar and I taken the idea to an running prototype which could transport the message we had intended. On the one hand there was the problem of performance and on the other hand the troubles with the outdated hard/software of the surface. For instance some GLSL Shader to generate an fluid-like surface were running excellent on my machine but the ATI Radeon of the Surface had an unfixed driver issue. In the end we decided to generate a geo-location driven particle engine wrapped by an isocontour which is similar to the SearchGeometry Library. Check out some parts of the process on flickr.