Interactive Installation and Data Performance

The project for the FestTech technology festival was designed to showcase the technological and design capabilities of the data visualization studio AkademiaDev while strengthening its reputation as a leader in interactive visual solutions for businesses and public-sector organizations. Rather than presenting a conventional story about data visualization, we invited festival visitors to become active participants in it.

The concept was built around the idea that everything around us – from the night sky and music to cities and human beings – can be represented as data.

An interactive installation, Digital Reflection, was placed in the festival foyer. Visitors created their own digital twins in real time: a YOLOv11 neural network detected their smiles, an Azure Kinect DK generated a point cloud and depth map, and custom algorithms produced an animated 3D avatar that mirrored each person's movements. The resulting video could then be downloaded via a QR code.

The data collected throughout the day became part of an evening 3D data performance featuring a Naked Eye effect. On a 4800 × 2160 LED display, familiar objects transformed into immersive three-dimensional data visualizations, while a presentation explaining the principles of working with data was accompanied by an interactive dashboard displaying real-time, anonymized festival visitor data, including geographic distribution, age, venue occupancy, and other aggregated metrics. The finale was an audiovisual performance in which the stream of photographs captured by the installation responded to the music in real time, gradually forming the image of a DNA strand.

More than 17,000 people from 70 regions of Russia attended the festival, and the evening performance attracted over 300 spectators. FestTech received coverage in leading national and industry media outlets, including TASS, Forbes, ComNews, and IT Channel News.

The project demonstrated how engaging and inspiring data can be while highlighting the studio's expertise in transforming complex information into compelling visual experiences.