Building Hopes by Accurat, MONOGRID, Google News Initiative

Building Hopes is an immersive data-art experience that invites people to materialize their hopes as permanent augmented reality sculptures and to use them as a lens to explore and understand Google Trends data. The fully responsive web application and two native AR iOS and Android apps let people create data sculptures made of balancing rocks that represent ideas, concepts, movements they are hopeful for. 

While experimenting with how data visualization can look like and behave in augmented reality, we are also implicitly letting people create their own frame of reference before letting them look at data. Building Hopes reminds us that working with data doesn’t necessarily mean illustrating the one and only truth on a topic, but most of the times it simply means providing access to information that can be interpreted in many different, maybe also contrasting, ways.