I developed one of 4 parts of the ABS’s “Come to Your Census” installation at Cadman’s Cottage for Vivid 2012.

Spinifex was involved in bring Cadman’s Cottage to life for the Vivid Festival 2012 in Sydney. There were 4 components for the installation. Several small touch tables were set-up with an existing website interactive, a video projection was projected onto the building next to Cadman’s Cottage, an interactive projection was projected onto Cadman’s Cottage and finally, the part I developed, a 50″ touchtable that controlled the interactive projection.

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The touchtable was developed in AIR and used a multi-touch touchfoil which then used the native AS3 multitouch features.

The role of the touchtable was to act as a filter for the data being projected on Cadman’s Cottage. The data was the Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Data to be filtered was grouped into 4 categories. “Age & Gender”, “Country of Birth”, “Transport to Work” and “Occupation”. These then had to be filtered down to a given post code – so there was a mountain of data to filter.

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All data was provided in several csv files so I thought this was an opportune time to see how good AIR’s support of SQLite databases could be. And it did well! In a future post I will outline the basics in how to do this.

The postcode data came with latitude and longitude values which then with some additional code, plugged them into the Delaunay triangulation library mentioned in an earlier post. Out popped a very interesting looking map of Australia.

Triangulation of Australian Postcodes… (much bigger on a 50″ screen!)

With how AS3 deals with it’s y co-ordinate’s and how latitude is set, my map of Australia was upside down, but normalising these values did the trick to set it right.

Once again touchfoils were disappointing, not giving the accuracy that was needed. Hopefully all involved learnt their lesson and we can find a better solution for an outdoor touchscreen in the future.

But overall, in the freezing cold, sometimes rain and last second changes, my first Vivid Festival project was very enjoyable.

ABS Come to your Census from Spinifex Group on Vimeo.

JK.