Beautiful Infringements

Team Name

Null VRiables

Team Members

Project Description

Explosions of colour rip through the night sky, emanating from a single source and branching like lightning during a sultry summer storm. The bright flashes lighting up the sky like a...speed camera?

As a rule, art is the use of technical ability and imagination to express the beauty and emotional power of subjects, that invoke a powerful reaction in the heart of the beholder. Whereas, speed cameras are the use of technology to test the speeds of Canberran’s and invokes a powerful reaction to the hip pocket of careless drivers.

Our mission is to create something that could be considered beautiful from data that is linked to a subject that is perceived to be so ugly and emotionally charged. Like the sight spring blossoms of Floriade, like the sunset over the Brindabella’s. Behold the Beautiful Infringements of Canberra.

We don’t claim to be renaissance artists, but, how hard could it be?

Data Story

Using the 2018 Traffic speed camera locations data from the ACT Government, we loaded the infringement notices for all fixed speed cameras across the ACT into a force directed graph for use within a virtual reality or Augmented reality headset.

A force directed graph allows the use of physics based springs and colliders within Unity3D. The heirarchy then forces the nodes out from the City root node, to each relevant speed camera and finally to all infringements that those cameras issued this year.

Rather than hack these datasets to argue for or against the use of speed cameras, we have used Virtual Reality to turn the infringement data from something that is often perceived to be ugly, into something....beautiful.