Physical Computing
Cheonhyun Park, Danielle Yoon, Olivia Greco
Global Reality is to create a 3D way to visualize data about human population growth on the planet earth over time. The globe can serve an educational purpose or installation art as a more interactive, easily visualized way to understand how global warming affected world across the world.
We divided the video into 90 still frames and drilled 128 holes evenly-spaced across the globe. and mapped each hole to coordinates on the flat 2D map from the video. In each of the 90 frames, we recorded the RGB value for each coordinate. This RGB value would correspond to the LED showing through that hole on the 3D globe. We Chose to only map continents because our intent was to show the globe in a dark setting, and when the LED’s light up, we wanted it to be obvious the viewer was looking at a globe.
We soldered 128 neo-pixel LEDs together and fixed the LEDs to the inside of each hole with hot glue and electrical tape. We programmed the LED sequence using an Arduino Mega.
