andrew cotter

The Word Cloud at the Milken Center for the Advancement of the American Dream (MCAAD) is an interactive sculptural installation that explores the American Dream through the lens of language and community and creates a space where individual voices come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. Located in the heart of Washington DC, this immersive experience invites visitors to contribute their own words and stories, creating a dynamic, ever-evolving conversation about what the American Dream means today.

MCAAD was a three-year collaboration between the LAB at Rockwell Group and the Milken Center. While working as a Senior Creative Technologist, I led the development of the Word Cloud. I worked closely with spatial, graphic/motion, an UX designers to incorporate client feedback. As we delivered milestone presentations on our progress, I also created a VR simulation of the entire museum to communicate the design to the client. In turn, they were able to show the VR experience of the museum to donors and other stakeholders. When it came time to install, I was able to optimize the software build to run at 4x the required framerate, this allowed us to artifically throttle the software’s performance an leave performance overhead on the server for websocket, Next.js, and other server applications to run on the same hardware, reducing hardware costs.