Life's Lottery

Module 8 “Hybrid Worlds” · team of 14

The idea

Everyone knows the world is unequal, but numbers in a report rarely make you feel it. Life’s Lottery turns ten years of data (2017–2026) on safety, pollution, healthcare and cost of living in 16 cities into something you walk through.

Two visitors spin a papier-mâché globe. LEDs inside light up the city each of them is randomly “born” in. Each picks up a basket with an RFID tag and visits four stations, which play out how their city scores. Good scores earn more buildings, which they place on a city grid. A flip calendar then shows how their city changed over the years.

What I built

• The main computer: the central system that ties the whole installation together. It talks to the globe (spin detected → cities assigned → globe locked), tells each station when a visitor is coming, hears when a basket is lifted, and sends the city grid which colours to light up for the selected year.
• The safety station: a police station with a rotating police light and soundscapes. The worst-scoring cities get sirens, screams and a car crash.
• The pollution station: a 3D-printed factory whose chimney puffs mist to show how polluted the city is, next to a “pond” screen that shows anything from clear blue to dark, green water. A conveyor belt was meant to hand out the buildings, but we couldn’t integrate it in time, so it stayed decoration.
• Both stations run on an ESP32 with an RFID reader under the basket platform, and an LED strip that shows how many buildings the visitor can take.

How the data works

Each index is mapped to five classes (worst → best), and each class gives 0–4 buildings. We first used standard-deviation thresholds, then switched to the 20/40/60/80 steps the data source itself uses. For cost of living we found the source’s cut-offs by testing cities one by one, because the publisher never answered our email.