Baseball Stats Are Converted Into An Interactive iPad Sculpture

We're all familiar with iPads and iPad covers and probably data sculptures too, but Teehan+Lax Labs—who previously made a tool for creating supersonic animations from Google Street View—have merged all three of those in their latest project Season in Review. As massive baseball fans they decided to use the stat-heavy sport as the basis to create both an iPad app displaying the stats from the 2012 season and an accompanying acrylic sculpture that shows graphs representing the data in the app.

"We wrote a script that pulled down daily snapshots from the 2012 season and logged games back per team over time." they explain. "The script also generated a PDF with a graph per team that we could easily send to the laser cutter."

After creating the stacked graphs as slides representing each team they added an element of interactivity, using the iPad as a light source to illuminate the transparent graphs, as well as act as a control panel. The graphs were attached to the iPad with a cover and a window cut out so you can interface with the slides.

The lab call the product "part data visualization experiment, part non-electronic digital product, and part tablet accessory."  They go one to say they see it as a physical token of a year in baseball a "combination of dynamically generated physical form, and taking advantage of pre-existing digital device characteristics [to] offer an interesting alternative to crafting experiences. Ultimately, we feel we’ve built an object that helps tell the story of a year in baseball—a memento built from numbers."

The end result looks stunning and it's a similar concept to the emoto project from last year, which created a graph-style sculpture using data culled from Twitter during the London Olympics.

Images and GIFs courtesy of Teehan+Lax Labs

[via Creative Applications]

@stewart23rd