From line charts to 3D worlds

September 2020

This piece completely failed to land in the viz community but it was the most creative fun I've had in a while.

Having played with Aerialod before I had this idea in my mind that we could create solid forms from numbers using nothing more than black and white tones.

The image below outlines the process of converting a simple line chart into a black and white heatmap that was then imported to Aerialod to render a 3D representation of the chart.

The dataset I used was the UK Construction Index so it felt right bring in a city theme. I composited Lidar data for Manchester around the heatmap and when imported to Aerilod, the result is the 3D world above.

A little more polish in Photoshop resulted in the final image you see below.