Visualization of all COVID-19 Papers in the Deep Space at Ars Electronica Festival

Ars Electronica 2021 – the annual festival of art, technology and society – took place from 8 to 12 September 2021. The festival was designed as a dual online/offline event. It took place in Linz, Austria, and 86 other locations around the world.

As every year, we at Garamantis were involved in several of our partners’ projects. The subject matter couldn’t be more topical, nor the visualisation more poignant and sophisticated: at the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space, we present a dynamic real-time 3D application that visualises all 600,000 scientific papers on the SARS-CoV 2 virus that have been published to date. All this in a 16 x 9 m Deep Space 8K wall projection.

Immersive space projection for science communication

Placed at the centre of this immersive projection, groups of visitors were able to experience the chronological, geographical and content evolution of scientific knowledge about COVID 19 over time. This Garamantis application was controlled by a presenter via a control panel, who was able to respond spontaneously to questions or concerns from the audience and adjust the visualisation accordingly. From an overview of entire cohorts of COVID 19 research to details of the author of a particular study, anything is possible in this deep space application. All data used comes from the Cord 19 open data set provided by the Allen Institute of AI. It has been analysed and processed by a data scientist at Garamantis using unsupervised learning.

For the amazing collaboration, our thanks go out to:
• Dario Rodighiero (https://twitter.com/dariorodighiero) of metaLAB at Harvard
• Eveline Wandl Vogt (https://twitter.com/caissarl) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Elian Carsenat (https://twitter.com/ElianCarsenat), founder of NamSor SAS
• and the entire Ars Electronica Solutions team.

Der Deep Space 8K

Images: Ars Electronica Solutions / My Trinh Müller Gardiner