Unesco

»Ocean Literacy in Action« is an interactive touchscreen totem built for »Beyond Borders«, the Ocean Literacy pavilion of UNESCO-IOC at the third UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3) in Nice. Standing in the conference's Green Zone — »La Baleine« at the Palais des Expositions, visited by more than 100,000 people over ten days — the piece invites the public to spin a photographic globe (NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio) and pull up ocean-literacy projects from around the world, filtered by category and by organisation: UNESCO-IOC, OFB and CNR-ISMAR. The application was designed and developed in TouchDesigner by Davide Santini / Deltacut; Simone handled the on-site installation, the deployment and part of the last-minute changes the direction asked for as the show opened.

Touch the planet and it responds: glowing dots scattered across the oceans each open a real initiative — blue education, marine conservation, ocean culture, governance — turning a wall-mounted screen into a way to browse the whole programme of the pavilion by hand.

Under the hood, the whole experience runs as a single TouchDesigner project — the real-time globe, the project database and the touch UI in one pipeline — installed on the pavilion machine and tuned on site while the public was already coming through.