the story of earth
ROLE: INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
TIME: 2 WEEKS
This project explores how voice recognition can trigger storytelling in a data visualization. It’s based on the idea that every dataset has a story to tell. Here, the goal is to present that story in a way that feels impactful and seamless for the audience. This approach aims to remove obstacles and create a smoother experience when presenting data.
What is this project?
Telling a story about how everyone on earth came together to solve the Ozone crisis using original ozone depletion data and storytelling techniques.
Why should you consider scrolling through this page?
You can learn how to make data presentations feel more natural, removing traditional limitations of static, slide-based presentations.
INTRODUCTION
THE THEME
The theme selection process focused on integrating numerous interests to explore, talents, and opportunities to learn new things. It includes three primary interest areas: voice-enabled trigger, data visualization, and 3D display. It was very interesting to have anything controlled by voice, resulting in a seamless and intuitive interaction. Additionally, creating a 3D VOLUMETRIC DISPLAY was of great interest.
SYSTEM DIAGRAM
While presenting this data, there is a projector screen, a secondary screen and a PC involved. The projector screen projects the Blender window with the Earth and Ozone layer. The secondary screen displays slides (if necessary) that help make the story more impactful. The PC acts like the control unit as it takes in speaker voice and manipulates the Ozone layer
KEY INGREDIENTS
THE DATASET
CHOSEN DATASET:
Ozone Layer Depletion
The ozone layer was rebuilt by humans which is an inspiring example by how countries can solve critical global issues with peace. NASA provides a huge amount of data in terms of the status of ozone layer on a day-to-day basis in the form of images, videos, and table format csv files.
CHARACTERISTICS:
Large amount of data over a period to show the transformation.
Open-source data that allows for seamless integration into the system.
A dataset that tells an interesting story and engages the audience.
A dataset with simple dynamics (something which can be represented on a two/three axes line graph) which has a linear progression.
THE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
The changes in ozone layer had to be portrayed to the audience in a way that is compelling and understandable. To achieve this, the ozone layer could be shown as a literal layer over the earth with changing properties that depict the changes over the years. Hence, the environment started with building a virtual earth in blender.
The ozone was created as a separate translucent layer over the earth. The transparency of this Ozone layer corresponded to the actual ozone layer condition in a particular period of time.
NARRATIVE STORYTELLING
THE STORY:
This is a story of the EARTH.
A few years ago, people were extremely satisfied due to the inventions of safe refrigerators and air conditioners Little did we knew, these friendly appliances would prove to be a factor for wiping out the humanity! The chlorofluorocarbons released by these appliances started depleting one of the most important things that protected our earth - The OZONE layer - the natural sunscreen of the earth.
This is how the ozone layer looked like in 1965, our earth enclosed inside like a protected baby. But only 3 decades after that, in 1990, this is how the ozone looked like - almost negligible! And, due to this, humans suffered with skin allergies killing 66000 people every year. Even the animals and birds were affected on a huge scale.
To solve this, all the countries on the earth came together and signed the MONTREAL protocol and pledged to reduce the emission of these chlorofluorocarbon molecules to remake this layer and save humanity. Well, the result? Within again just 3 decades, the layer looked like this! Much better than before.
The Montreal Protocol proves to be the most successful environmental agreements of all time contributing to 9 sustainable development goals. This is an inspiring example of what happens when countries all over the world can achieve with peace and collaboration.
Further, according to NASA’s forecasting, by the end of this century, that is by 2100, the layer would be even better than what it started with.
SECONDARY SCREEN VISUALS
While narrating the selected story, a visual slide presentation was made for the audience to gain context. These are the images of the slide presentation. All of these were hand drawn using procreate on an iPad
assembling the ingredients
USING HUMAN SPEECH AS A TRIGGER TO SHOW DATA
VOICE CONTROL
Voice (which is derived from speech) is universal to a majority of presentations. Leveraging this, the keywords from the story were coded to reflect changes in the ozone layer. Saying, "This is how the ozone layer looked like in 1965" will adjust the Ozone layer according to how it looked in 1965.
Voice input -> Speech recognition -> Data sent to Blender -> Identification of keyword -> Output controlling transparency feature.
PLANNING THE PRESENTATION
DATASET INFORMS THE STORY
The CSV TABLE format data was used that has two columns, Year and the Concentration of Ozone globally in that year. After a careful look at the values, it can be inferred that the ozone concentration was at its peak during 1965 which had an extreme fall in the year of 2000, and it rose back up again by the year 2020. This extreme dip and rise make this dataset an interesting story to tell and becomes a leverage point.
FINAL PRESENTATION
This is a story of the EARTH
A few years ago, people were extremely satisfied due to the inventions of safe refrigerators and air conditioners Little did we knew, these friendly appliances would prove to be a factor for wiping out the humanity!
The chlorofluorocarbons released by these appliances started depleting one of the most important things that protected our earth - The OZONE layer - the natural sunscreen of the earth.
This is how the ozone layer looked like in 1965, our earth enclosed inside like a protected baby.
But only 3 decades after that, in 2000, this is how the ozone looked like - almost negligible!
And, due to this, humans suffered with skin allergies killing 66000 people every year. Even the animals and birds were affected on a huge scale.
To solve this, all the countries on the earth came together and signed the MONTREAL protocol and pledged to reduce the emission of these chlorofluorocarbon molecules to remake this layer and save humanity.
Well, the result? Within again just 3 decades in 2020, the layer looked like this! Much better than before.
The Montreal Protocol proves to be the most successful environmental agreements of all time contributing to 9 sustainable development goals. This is an inspiring example of what happens when countries all over the world can achieve with peace and collaboration.
Further, according to NASA’s forecasting, by the end of this century, that is by 2050, the layer would be even better than what it started with.
The final delivered presentation was planned in a way such that the story was tied to the produced visuals. Every line was pre planned which would either contain a trigger word or a sentence that relates to the slides in the presentation.
