Press kit
The Perspective Machine is a free, anonymous data-art site: tell it what you earn and it shows you who you are — everywhere on earth. Your income becomes a single dot among 8.1 billion, then gets re-lived in 147 countries: same money, different life.
Built by New New, the consultancy of Nuno Veiga. No accounts, no cookies, no tracking of income — every calculation runs in the visitor's browser and the number they type never leaves their device.
Its quiet thesis, named openly in the methodology: the world moves forward through wages, not aid — there is dignity in making something for someone and being paid for it — and it is further along than the stories suggest.
Fact sheet
- What: a scroll journey through the global income distribution, personalised to the visitor's own income — ending with what the same money weighs elsewhere on the curve.
- Coverage: 147 countries, ~7.97 of 8.1 billion people, from World Bank percentile distributions (2021 PPP dollars).
- The field: 20,000 income-ordered WebGL particles — every dot stands for roughly 405,000 people. One field becomes the queue, a population globe, and the 1990→today poverty rewind.
- The personas: 42 countries carry hand-written occupation vignettes (337 income bands), each calibrated to where that occupation's typical earnings sit on the country's curve — and each written under a dignity rule: no country reduced to a stereotype.
- Privacy: income is never transmitted or stored. The site is a static page; the machine is entirely client-side.
- Price: free, no sign-up, works on phones.
The honesty rules (what makes the numbers citable)
- Percent, never rank-talk. "Richer than 97% of the world," not "97th percentile."
- Precision only where the data has it. Inside the top 1% the display moves in 0.1% steps; all claims stop at "the top 0.1%" — the survey horizon. Past it, the site says so plainly: "you are past where household surveys see clearly."
- Big numbers are floored, not rounded up. 8.058 billion shows as "8.0 billion" — the machine never rounds a crowd up to "everyone."
- Home is never a persona. Visitors' own countries get position only, never an occupation label — the re-embodiment is subjunctive by design.
- Take-home, compared with take-home. Gross entries are converted with published single-worker rates, the derived figure is always shown, and the visitor's own number wins.
Data & methodology
Country income curves come from the World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform — survey-based percentile distributions, merged into a 1,001-point global distribution in 2021 PPP dollars. The extreme-poverty trend (1990→today) comes via Our World in Data. Land geometry is Natural Earth. Gross→net conversion uses curated single-worker effective rates informed by published OECD figures. The full methodology — including what the machine deliberately refuses to claim — is one click from every page: the machine → Methodology & honesty.
Suggested citation: The Perspective Machine
(perspectivemachine.io), built on World Bank PIP data, 2021 PPP.
Images
Nine ready-to-run stills — three moments, each in wide (1920×1080), square (1200×1200) and story (1080×1920). Click any image for the full-resolution file. Free to publish with credit.
The images show a demonstration income (€12,000/year in Portugal), not any real visitor's data — the machine never stores or transmits what visitors type.
Usage
Free to screenshot, embed, link, and republish stills with credit to The Perspective Machine (perspectivemachine.io). The underlying data is the World Bank's and Our World in Data's, under their open licenses (CC BY 4.0). No permission needed — though we love hearing where it lands.
Contact
Making video instead of prose? The creator kit has a demo mode with a fictional income, a replay button for clean takes, and filming notes.
Interviews, background on the methodology, custom renders in other ratios, or an embed: newnew.consulting.
The machine also scales to walls — available for exhibitions and installations; get in touch.