people.map

The alpine region is one of the biggest tourist hotspots in the world. But due to rising ecotourism, it is getting harder and harder to balance economic profitability and environmental protection. People.map visualizes the environmental effects of mass tourism interactively by using live data from a mobile light barrier. The project is designed as a map, that first measures the amount of people entering a certain area and then shows the environmental consequences in real-time on a dedicated webpage.

The whole project was designed as a group work within my master-graduation at the University of Applied Science Salzburg. Within the group, my task was building out the tech behind the whole system – mainly an off-grid-capable light barrier, which could stream in real-time datasets to an online database. Furthermore creating a simple webpage, which in the end serves as our visualization platform and holds different, open-source elements of the whole project.

Taking the course of interaction design, our main goal was to design an interactive project that could be presented at ARS Electronica. Our baseline concept was to project a heightmap onto a 3d-printed mountain ridge in a room. The more people enter the room, the more ‘destroyed’ the projection should become.

However, due to the hit of Covid-19, the concept had to be modified a few weeks after start. To keep people safe, we decided to set up a mobile light barrier at a dedicated spot near the university, which counts every person passing by outdoors. The more people pass, the faster the visualizations on a website should change to destroyed and industrialized images.

One part of the team, including myself, worked on programming a mobile light barrier and linking it to the visualizations on the website, while the other part worked on the visualizations. To find more information, please visit the FHS Portfolio.