Indoor Coronavirus Transmissions

During 2020 we did several projects about the coronavirus. When the weather became colder again, the question of the risk of infection in rooms came up. In order to help people to get an idea of the individual risk, the interactive team of Zeit Online wanted to create a tool for calculating the risk of a transmission indoors. Depending on the number of people, the size of the room, mask types and some other parameters users should be able to configure different situations of their daily lives. More over we wanted to show several common examples like a restaurant or a classroom scenario.

We tested different approaches for the implementation of the room. The first idea was to use THREE.js and create everything in a real 3D space. Since we had to use SVG graphics in a stylized room we decided to work with DOM elements and 3D CSS transformations instead. The particles are drawn on a canvas element with help of PixiJS.