Building the holograms
To start building a base of resources I can reference when building the actual project, I started out researching a couple tutorials on how to make holograms.
There were a couple different methods to create the actual videos to be projected, but they all seem to have the basic idea.
https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-hologram-video-for-DIY-3D-Hologram-P/
Sustainability/data research
Again, I put the UN sustainable development goals site into my bank of resources (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300). Since I wanted to focus on environmental sustainability, I decided to look into statistics and facts within this area. Here are a couple sites I found:
https://ourworldindata.org/forests
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/envstats/qindicators.cshtml
Professor Ault lent me a couple of books about designing for social impact that I’ve been reading for inspiration, and there are some parts in it related to sustainability. I also found this article on how data visualization can help the environment: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/dust-in-the-wind-how-data-visualization-can-help-the-environment/
Whiiiiich brings me to my next point:
Narrative
My main objective, and perhaps most challenging, is developing a narrative that will be provocative, as well as take advantage of the holographic technology I plan to utilize. It can be argued that the keystone of storytelling is emotional evocation. But with the rise of social media, the internet, and readily available multimedia, creating narratives (whether it be data vis or an actual storyline) with significant emotional impact that doesn’t wear off after the story is over becomes harder. There was one study done where virtual reality was used to demonstrate the impact of pollution on coral reefs, amongst other environmental issues (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/how-virtual-reality-tech-will-help-the-environment_uk_59a7f038e4b010ca289a8578?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=SBZq0XkjgZ3oS5dW39gLVQ). These experiences were shown to induce a more empathetic mindset in subjects, and I hope to employ a similar concept with my project.
There is also a kind of disassociation that happens when we’re bombarded with data and statistics and “end of the world!!” messages all the time. This is why I’d like to use real time data, if possible. I was having a bit of a difficult time finding useable data on global deforestation data that I can attain in real time, but after some brainstorming I realized it would perhaps be more significant if I used data a little closer to home–perhaps TCNJ. If I can get data from TCNJ, whether it be electricity use or something else, I might be able to use something like WebGL to generate graphics for data vis on the fly. Definitely something I’d like to look more into!