Interactive ‘Crazy Wall’

The crazy wall was an idea conceived and executed by our design studio to combine research from multiple reporters and help visualize the flow of how a Mexican cartel infiltrated the US. The wall was a physical 12x8 foot display that had a special rig constructed in order to scan it in with a DSLR camera and stitch the pieces back together.

The problem is that the digital version is so large and so detailed that it simply cannot be shared online in it’s full size. I wrote the processing script that slices this massive gigapixel image into a series of tiles so that in can be loaded into LeafletJS so the user can zoom and pan just like a geographic map.

As part of the develpment process, I created a special “collaboration mode” that previewed the final result while also allowing reporters to add, edit, and delete annotations on top of it. These annotations show as markers and help give some context behind particular parts of the map.