Budget Climb is a physically interactive data environment where users explore 26 years of federal spending by exerting physical effort.
The idea was to give people new perspective on how our government spends our money, and reveal how the budget is distributed in a novel and tangible way.
To use, we must physically use our arms to climb, which gives us a real sense of the scale of each type of spending over. Climbing military spending, especially for the Bush years, for instance, takes a lot of physical effort and may leave you sweaty and exhausted.
Budget Climb was a collaboration with Fred Truman and Frankie Cheung, originally for 3D Sensing and Visualization class at ITP, and was created using openframeworks, the Microsoft Kinect and OpenNI.
Budget Climb was also a finalist in the Google/Eyebeam Data Viz Challenge for which we received a cash prize (which Fred, Frankie and myself spent entirely on BonChon fried chicken).