Airbnb

The Airbnb “A World of Belonging” website featured a WebGL 3D globe that served as a fun data visualization of Airbnb guest stays throughout the world.

Using modern technologies like HTML5, WebGL, CSS3, and JavaScript, the team created an experience that invited the audience to explore Airbnb destination countries and the social posts left behind by guests (tagged with a hashtag) in the form of postcards plotted around the world.

For this project, I created the development and staging environments to support our frontend and backend.

For the webserver, I installed Nginx with the extras package for advanced headers support. Ruby (compiled and installed from source) was used for the backend API.

The frontend consumed custom RESTful API endpoints, which returned the data model as JSON. Deployment hooks were created in Git to handle branch-specific deployment requirements.

Along with the featured video, take a moment to watch the behind-the-scenes case video below. It details the intention of the campaign, speaks to the sound engine, showcases our illustrations, and talks about the work performed to aggregate social media data from around the world to create the final data visualization.