Google I/Odata art made from billion datapoints representing Android users

I collaborated with Variable studio to create visualisation showing all Android device users, for the opening I/O keynote delivered by Sundar Pichai on 2015 Google I/O.

The visualisation was seen by 6000 attendees, and over 1.8M viewers online, and was displayed on 27k curved display, with over 17 million pixels covering 5m x 162m long canvas.

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We started by exploring the dataset, using variable in-house pex library, writing a lot of small exploratory apps to test the ideas and see what we are dealing with. We were also researching ways of rendering on such a huge display, in order to keep artifacts away.

Globe screenshot

We created a lot of custom tools for this project, most important ones being a timeline which helped us to time things properly and multiple views into the final screen, so we could test if element sizes and speeds are working.

Debug preview screenshot

We were able to run the final code with smaller sample dataset in Google Chrome. Final rendering was done in Plask in less than 4 hours, thanks to JavaScript and WebGL we could quickly iterate and simply share preview visualisation with Google Data Arts team. Almost all of heavy-lifting was done with pixel shaders - including particle movement, using heavily modified flow-field, particles landing on the globe, and final globe unfolding.