Absolutely stunning.
Far reaching implications. Why didn't Nasa do this. Explore space using imagery from the Hubble telescope. Record your trip. Play back your trip. Share your trip with friends. Leave comments for strangers. A fantastic teaching tool and social experience.
Went to a panel on visualization yesterday at sxsw. Some interesting stuff. Nothing too earth shattering. Some notes follow.
Presenters: Joy Mountford (formerly of Yahoo). Peter Kirn
Terms to think about how UI will move from page based mechanisms:
* ambient interfaces - happening in the background
* active interfaces - you interact with it
* performative - you physically manipulate it
These UIs all entail different levels of attention and purpose. Some are to be used in real time, some over time. Thinking about computing in this manner significantly increases the vectors that we design around.
Mentioned this article in the NyTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09stream.html
She showed a lot of interesting visualizations including:
* Internet Archive - photos of pages from old picture woodcut books 1/4 million pages on one screen, easily navigable. this one was very very cool. Simply way to navigate enormous datasets
* Internet Archive -another touch screen UI where you could make a scrapbook from an old book. This one to go on display at the Exploratorium soon
* airtraffic control... different ways of seeing air traffic
* search traffic on globe from various searches. have seen this one before.
* traffic patterns in LA
* audioization of Peter Kirn's email spam box. This was awesome! Sounded like beautiful music. He turned lemons into lemonade.
Question: How accessible will your own data be? Now, and especially in future, we'll have so much personal data and no way to access it all. We can start using viusalizations to navigate our own complex data sets.
They talked a lot out processing.org and its open source data viz tool, which looked pretty lame... but haven't checked it out much. Also mentioned Arduino.cc which looks awesome - it's an open source electronics prototype platform.
Really interesting question at the end about why Yahoo didn't start using any of Mountford's interfaces for their products. She basically said that the mail people didn't even want to hear about it. That you have to do something really radical to cause the shift.
Other resources they mentioned:
Flight404.com
createdigitalmotion.com
labs.noisepages.com
People:
Ben Fry
Casey Reese
Mark Henson?
Ben Clemens
Michael Chang
Doug Fritz
Ray McClure
Parul Vora
Aaron Koblin
(hey if any of you guys ever read this, it'd be great if you put your slides from the talk up somewhere)
This very rich visualization looks great - pulls data from all over the web dynamically. Very smart. But difficult to understand what's going on. http://universe.daylife.com/
YouTube is in the visualization game now - along with Digg. Link here.
David Troy's Twitter API project, Twittervision will be opening at the MoMA in New York City on Tuesday as part of a show called Design and the Elastic Mind.
Wow, this show sounds great. Twittervision is cool - i was thinking recently that a more abstract and personal representation might be interesting. Show blurb below and interesting show website at: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5632
Design and the Elastic Mind explores the relationship between science and design in the contemporary world, comprising more than 200 design objects and concepts that marry scientific research with consideration of human limitations, habits and aspirations.
Here's an interesting find: http://www.textmap.com
It scourers news sources, identifies "entities" in these sources using natural language processing and then maps entities to one another. They narrow the field of inquiry by: news, medical, & business. A snap of their relational network is at left - one of many graphs mapping relationships between entities. Without doing some serious studying of their map key, the visualizations don't add a whole heck of a lot of value. The heat-map visualization may be the only one that makes immediate sense. I wonder if these visualizations require study to be useful or if they just need a talented designer?
A really smart visualization that seems to work fairly well in playing around with it.
They mention that they presented it at Apple - wonder why this kind of UI was not selected for iphone...
link: http://www.iverse.org/l2dsspace/index.htm
and http://www.iverse.org/l2dsspace/ml2dss_movie.htm
wish it wasn't Mac only. playing with the demo makes me really want to use it. it seems so smartly done.
My friend Michael Logue turned me onto this method for content navigation by Paul Chang. An impressive feat of programming and design. Not convinced that it works really well - it's difficult to make the connection between the controls and the interaction - I think you need to better see how the sliders are connected to the art works. But overall a fantastic rethinking of how to browse art.
Spurs me to think about 2 dichotomous directions for presenting art online - Chang's approach is the Ayn Rand direction - stripping away artifice - displaying ony the data that is necessary - closer to a pure use of web technology to navigate art. And I've been going down another path - the reconstruction of our real-life world online - a full hearted attempt to construct artifice - and thereby, familiarity. Chang's method is surely more efficient & elegant. But it is also less accessible and perhaps less appealing to our social needs. Or maybe it just doesn't incorporate social elements, which may be a different problem, altogether.
Thought provoking. To be sure.
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added: 12.20.07
ahh - i get something now that i didn't get before (didn't read the intro). all of the art is by one artist. that makes the controls make a lot more sense. even so - i think it could benefit from a tad more structure to help you get a visceral sense for how the controls affect the selections - at present, it seems like it could be random (which it's not), but if it seemed less random - that would make the user feel like they were really navigating the collection
I'm so inspired by Digg Lab's news visualizations. Visually, I love the "Stack." Functionally, the "BigSpy" works better.
What if there was something similar for art? Like if you could see art coming in from all over the world. Could also be mashed-up onto a Google Map - so you get a big picture view of the kind of art that's being created in different locals. And then can zoom down to street level and see the pieces in the context of where they were created. Or the artist could set a location that's relevant to the piece itself. A merging of art and physical location.
I wonder if you'd start to see any trends? Like - are German artists creating a certain style of art in general - how is it different than art from Zimbabwe? Maybe this type of visualization would change how art movements are perceived. Like when did the impressionist movement become a movement? At what point did it move from being a couple guys painting in a similar style to a movement. Would a visualization and mapping of art today lead to the identification of art movements?
