Liquidata
A tangible tabletop on which your movement through the city becomes a liquid surface to touch, explore, and annotate.
LiquiData is a tangible tabletop visualization of your personal movement profile: your traces through a city rendered as a liquid surface you can touch, explore, and annotate. Adding photos and comments from your smartphone turns it into a social system — a way to share engaging places with others, discover new spots in unfamiliar surroundings, and compare your mental map of a city with where you actually went.
The prototype runs on object-trackable tabletops like the Microsoft Surface, written entirely in Processing: the liquid’s aesthetic and behavior come from GLGraphics and toxiclibs, multitouch gestures from TUIO, and the map stack from OSM data, TileMill tiles, and the Unfolding library.
The project started in a course by Till Nagel at FH Potsdam in 2011, together with Gunnar Friedrich, Pierre La Baume, David Ikuye, and Luis Grass; Gunnar and I then carried the idea to a working prototype. Getting the fluid feeling onto the Surface was its own story — GLSL shaders that ran beautifully on my machine hit an unfixed driver issue on the table’s ATI Radeon, so we ended up building a geo-location-driven particle engine wrapped in an isocontour instead, similar to the SearchGeometry library. Parts of the process are on Flickr.
