Robert Kosara is a professor at UNC-Charlotte, responsible for opening my eyes to the world of information visualization and visual communication when I was a student in his graduate course a few years ago. He is a deep thinker and his blog/website, Eager Eyes, is well worth taking the time to explore!
Here are some links to his posts:
You Only See Colors You Can Name"While color is a purely visual phenomenon, the way we see color is not only a matter of our visual systems. It is well known that we are faster in telling colors apart that have different names, but do the names determine the colors or the colors the names? Recent work shows that language has a stronger influence than previously thought."
One of my favorite blogs is FlowingData, Nathan Yau's labor of love for the past several years. Nathan is a UCLA PhD candidate in statistics with a focus in data visualization. He shares interesting tidbits of information on his blog, including those that relate to his main interests, social data visualization, self-surveillance, and data for non-professionals. He supports accessible and useful data visualization.
On October 28th, the Envision Charlotte project was launched during a celebration at Two Wells Fargo Plaza in uptown Charlotte. As part of the celebration, interactive displays were turned on as part of an effort to establish Charlotte as the "most sustainable urban core in the country". Although this is a lofty goal, it is important.
Although I am a little disappointed that I missed the Envision Charlotte launch party, I was happy to learn that I how interactive technology will play a role in helping people support the goals of Envision Charlotte and Duke Energy's Smart Energy Now campaign:
According to information from the Smart Energy NowSM blog, large interactive display kiosks in urban spaces will encourage a large number of people to make simple changes in their daily work lives by showing the correlation between their actions and energy consumption. "The kiosks will be in approximately 70 buildings in uptown Charlotte. More than 80,000 employees will be able to visualize real-time energy usage as a single number — a number that could lead to real change in the way Uptown uses energy." 35 buildings were installed with 47-inch displays during the first phase of this endeavor, with more planned for the near future.
It is possible that this effort might help to decrease energy use within the uptown business section by 20% over the next five years.
Video: Envision Charlotte-Uniting for a Sustainable City
I'll bring my video camera the next time I visit Uptown Charlotte to get a closer view of the interactive displays!
RENCI stands for the Renaissance Computing Institute. It is a multidisciplinary collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, with Engagement Sites at UNC Asheville, Duke University, Eastern Carolina University, North Carolina University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, and the UNC Costal Studies Institute. According to the mission statement, "RENCI develops and deploys advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations." Much of the work of RENCI focuses on large-scale information and data visualization. Why is this important? It provides an effective visual-cognitive means of understanding complex data from a variety of disciplines, and also supports the collaboration of researchers across a variety of disciplines. It has the potential to support larger-scale decision-making and problem-solving in our technology-dependent, interconnected world.
RENCI: Gaming the Future The video below provides an overview of how innovative interactive visualization tools support decision-making across many disciplines.
RENCI: Unity 3D game engine to support immersive information visualization applications:
Y. Xin, I. Baldine, A. Mandal, C. Heermann, J. Chase, and A. Yumerefendi. “Embedding Virtual Topologies in Networked Clouds.”The 6th International Conference on Future Internet Technologies (CFI). Seoul, Korean, June 2011 Y. Xin, I. Baldine, J. Chase, T. Beyene, B. Parkhurst, and A. Chakrabortty. “Virtual Smart Grid Architecture and Control Framework.” 2nd IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (IEEE SmartGridComm), Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 2011 X. Ju, H. Zhang, W. Zeng,M. Sridharan, J. Li, A. Arora, R. Ramnath, Y. Xin. “LENS: Resource Specification for Wireless Sensor Network Experimentation Infrastructures. ” The 6th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization (WinTECH), Las Vegas, Nevada, Sep. 2011 RENCI's Facebook Page Twitter: @RENCI
(I missed this one when the buzz started. Thanks to Liz Dorland for the link.)
Museum of Meis a website created by Intel that provides a variety of interesting information visualizations of your photos and other information from Facebook. Below is a video from Intel that gives a preview of what Museum of Me is about. Better yet, take a look at all of the 'Museum of Me' videos posted on YouTube.
If you use twitter, you might like exploring Jeff Clark's on-line interactive Tweet Topic Explorer to get a new perspective of your tweets, or the tweets of others. (Just enter the twitter ID in the search box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.) Here is a screenshot of my tweets.
Jeff Clark created this application using Processing.js. According to his blog post, it works well in the Chrome browser, and doesn't work in IE. Jeff is a programmer with an academic background in Applied Physics and Mathematics, and is interested in data mining, statistical analysis, and visualizations. You can learn more about Jeff Clark's work, and visually-inspired thoughts/communication on his Neoformix blog.
The following video about the Bifocal Display concept is an interesting look at how a set of ideas unfolded in the early 1980's. These ideas took flight and influenced many of the design concepts we view as "new" today.
The video was posted on the on-line Interaction Design Encyclopedia, a free, open source multimedia resource that includes a range of chapters written by leading researchers and practitioners from fields related to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design (IXD), User Experience (UX), Information Architecture (IA), Usability, and more.
"People want to see context...." -Robert Spence
1980's Paper Prototype of Carousel Concept (screen shot from video)
"Let's apply this idea to my in-tray, an information that is quite varied, and often full of surprises..." -Robert Spence
Also take a look at the recent videos from InteractionDesign.org related to this topic. What a great way to gain insight about the design and development process!
In this post, Robert reviews of some of the important trends in information visualization in 2010, discusses the potential of HTML5 for creating information visualization experiences on the web, and makes a few predictions about the near future. Robert is pretty sure that the world is ready for "truly interactive, browser-based visualization". He notes that the Protovis Primers he shares on his website are quite popular.
Most of the following resources and links were taken from the eagereyes website:
node.js: (How to run JavaScript on a server.) JavaScript: The Key to In-Browser Visualization Robert Kosara, eagereyes, 2/11/10 PROTOVIS A Protovis Primer, Part 1 A Protovis Primer, Part 2 A Protovis Primer, Part 3 "Protovis is a very powerful visualization toolkit. Part of what makes it special is that it is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser without the need for any plugins. Its clever use of JavaScript's language features makes it very elegant, but it can also be confusing to people who are not familiar with functional programming concepts and the finer points of JavaScript."-Robert Kosara
Following a link from Nathan Yau's recent Flowing Data blog post, Our Changing World in Cartograms, I discovered that FedEx's "Our Changing World" website. It provides an interesting way to explore data about various countries by mousing over countries on a map.
I have an HP TouchSmart PC, and found that the touch-screen interaction offered by this website was better than using the mouse. I'm pretty sure that this website would be fun to use on a larger touch-enabled display, and in in the classroom, on interactive whiteboards.
To my surprise, I also discovered that the website offers a 3D augmented reality version of "Our Changing World": Experience the changing world in augmented reality "See the world and the information that shapes it. Watch it come to life as a 3-D hologram..."
(I'll play with the AR hologram later today.)
Note: The FedEx website provides links to additional resources for each topic area, as well as a link to the sources used for the data included in the information graphics. It is important to remember that graphics do not always accurately depict the numbers!
"At experience.fedex.com, visitors can interact through a world map with data and content provided by The Economist Intelligence Unit on eight world trends initially, including air travel, people in cities, entrepreneurs and success, paper trail, business growth, education, money and happiness, and research and development.Visitors also have an opportunity to analyze the data, share information, or participate in real-time, online polls....“At FedEx, we pride ourselves on our ability to offer great customer experiences,” said Malcolm Sullivan, vice president, Marketing, FedEx Express Asia Pacific. “Experience.fedex.com is an effective way for us to extend these experiences to the virtual world. By making visualizations of complex and important information available to people everywhere, FedEx makes it easy for anyone to learn about their world and share their discoveries with friends.”"
Microsoft Surface 2.0 was unveiled at CES 2011 a few days ago, the result of a collaboration between Microsoft and Samsung. Surface 2.0 is a step up! The 40 inch 1080p high-definition LCD display no longer requires a projection/camera system, which clears the area below the screen of bulky hardware. The best part about Surface 2.0, in my opinion, is that it doesn't have to be used as a table. It can be configured in a variety of ways, even mounted on walls. For this reason, it will be useful in a variety of settings and situations.
Below is a quote about Surface 2.0 from Steve Ballmer's recent keynote address at CES 2011 that outlines the new technology that is embedded in the Surface 2.0 display:
"But what's really amazing about this technology, what really makes it magical, is the sensor itself. So, those first-generation Surface PCs needed cameras underneath that would look up to try to see what was going on. But what we have here is called PixelSense. PixelSense is new technology we've invented where there's infrared sensors all across this screen. Every single pixel is actually acting as a camera. The PC, the Surface here, can actually see." -Steve Ballmer: My Keynote Address at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show"(Huffington Post, 1/6/2011)
The good news is that developers have been busy at work to create applications for Surface 2.0. Below is a video demonstration of what the folks at InfoStrat have recently created to support collaborative information visualization activities:
Here's the information about the controls from the Infostratcville YouTube channel:
"This is a sneak preview of a suite of data visualization controls developed by InfoStrat for Microsoft Surface 2.0. The controls will be made available as open source software at no charge on CodePlex.com in the first half of 2011."
"This data visualization control suite provides multi-touch versions of the following controls: - DeepZoom multi-resolution image control that allows high performance display of very high-resolution imagery - PowerPoint Viewer which enables slide decks to be arranged and presented using multi-touch - PivotViewer chart control that allows dynamic sorting and categorization of data - PhysicsCanvas which provides an infinite, dynamic canvas for viewing and organizing content"
InfoStrat Releases Next-Generation Data Visualization Controls for Microsoft Surface 2.0
Washington DC – January 6, 2010 – InfoStrat today announced plans to support Microsoft Surface 2.0 by releasing a control suite that accelerates the development of next-generation multi-touch data visualizations. The controls will be made available as open source software at no charge on CodePlex.com in the first half of 2011.
This data visualization control suite provides multi-touch versions of the following controls:
§ Deep Zoom multi-resolution image control that allows high performance display of very high-resolution imagery
§ PowerPoint Viewer which enables slide decks to be arranged and presented using multi-touch
§ Pivot Viewer chart control that allows dynamic sorting and categorization of data
§ Physics Canvas which provides an infinite, dynamic canvas for viewing and organizing content
Other features of the controls:
§ Works on both Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Windows 7 with touch
§ A single application built with the data visualization framework can support multiple hardware form factors including: horizontal multi-touch tables, tablets, and large format vertical touch screens
§ Innovative object recognition to enable rapid data manipulations (only on Microsoft Surface)
InfoStrat is a member of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Microsoft Surface. As a Microsoft Surface 2.0 TAP member, InfoStrat receives early access to hardware and software, allowing InfoStrat to gain expertise and influence the development of the product before it was released to the public.
In 2008, InfoStrat solved the problem of using Bing Maps 3D on Microsoft Surface in a way that performed well and was WPF-friendly. InfoStrat open-sourced the solution as a reusable control for the WPF and Surface community. Since then, the control has received over 120,000 page views and has over 8200 downloads, and has also been featured in many of our own applications. This control, known as InfoStrat.VE, has become one of the most popular controls for building mapping applications on Microsoft Surface: http://bingmapswpf.codeplex.com
“We are proud to be part of the Microsoft Surface development community,” according to Jim Townsend, president of InfoStrat, “and excited about the possibilities of Microsoft’s new version of Surface.”
Microsoft Surface provides a new way to experience and use information and digital content, engaging the senses, improving collaboration and empowering people to interact. Microsoft Surface is at the forefront of developing software and hardware that uses vision-based technology to fundamentally change the way people use computing devices. More information can be found at http://www.surface.com.
Information Strategies ("InfoStrat") is an award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a Microsoft Surface Strategic Partner and member of the Technology Adopter Program.
Hans Rosling's enthusiasm for data visualization has increased my appreciation for statistics. In the video below, Rosling interacts with 120,000 data points related to 200 countries over 200 years. I especially like the "Alternate Reality" effect.
"Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view"
Hans Rosling is a Professor of Global Health in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Director of the Gapminder Foundation. The Gapminder World website has a wealth of resources for teachers, students, and anyone who is interested in learning about things through the use of information visualization.
According to information from the website, "Gapminder is a non-profit venture – a modern “museum” on the Internet – promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.Gapminder was founded in Stockholm by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling on February 25, 2005. Gapminder is registered as a Foundation at Stockholm County Administration Board (Länstyrelsen i Stockholm) with registration number (organisationsnummer) 802424-7721."
Below is a list of annotated links to various Gapminder webpages:
Gapminder Labs: "Gapminder Labs is where we experiment with new features, visualizations and tools. Some of these might later gain a more prominent place on Gapminder.org." Gapminder for Teachers: "This section is for educators who want to use Gapminder in their education. You'll find shortcuts to tools and guides for Gapminder in a classroom." Gapminder Downloads: This section includes links to downloadable content, such as Gapminder Desktop, handouts, lesson plans, including teacher guides, and a good number of interesting interactive presentations. Gapminder Videos: The videos include interesting presentations as well as a number of Hans Rosling's TED talks. The material is free to use and distribute under the Creative Commons License. Data in Gapminder World: This section includes all of the indicators displayed in Gapminder World. Gapminder World Gapminder FAQs
I follow the O'Reilly Radar blogs and came across a recent post about an information visualization created by blprnt two years ago using Processing. I think it would have great potential if it was re-purposed for use on the Kinect! In the article, Edd Dumbill discusses the advantages of using Processing to create data and information visualizations.
One example of the power of Processing is an information visualization, "Just Landed -36 Hours, created by Jer Thorp. Jer gathered tweets from Twitter that included the statement, "just landed", along with location information for each tweet, within a 36-hour period, to create the visualization.
36 Hours- Just Landed is a great 3D visualization of air travel on our planet. I especially lik the different views that the application provides. As soon as I watched the Just Landed video, I thought it would be great if it could be revamped for use on the Kinect! (Leave a comment if you know of anyone working on a project in this area.)
Information about the video from blprnt's Vimeo site:
"I was discussing H1N1 with a bioinformatics friend of mine last weekend, and we ended up talking about ways that epidemiologists model transmission of disease. I wondered how some of the information that is shared voluntarily on social networks might be used to build useful models of various kinds...I'm also interested in visualizing information that isn't implicitly shared - but instead is inferred or suggested...This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...'. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta's Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time...I'm not entirely sure where this will end up going, but I am reasonably happy with the results so far. Built with Processing (processing.org) You can read more about this project on my blog - blog.blprnt.com"
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have a passion for interactive displays. Imagine my excitement when I learned about Microsoft's recent patent for a display that has a "topography-changing layer including a light-induced shape memory polymer.." !
The name on the patent application is Erez Kikin-Gil. I did a quick search and found someone by the same name who works as a Senior UX Designer at Microsoft.
According to information on his blog, Tiltool. Erez Kikin-Gil's graduate thesis focused on the development of the Eco-Pod, a TUI (Tangible User Interface) designed to help children develop cognitive skills to support systems thinking. He has a range of interests, including information visualization, touch interaction, prototyping, product design, and user experience.
The Clock is Ticking from Long Island Index on Vimeo. I came across the above video infographic on the Tracy Boyer's Innovative Interactivity blog. In a few minutes, it tells a story about how the economic downturn has impacted Long Island. My take-away from the video? We are not provided an accurate or meaningful picture from traditional media sources about our nation's economic woes. It is a good sign that the stock market is doing better, on balance, than in 2008, but the economic wounds run wide and deep. These wounds need to be counted and presented in a way that makes sense to policy makers AND the rest of us! If not, the cycle will repeat.
Tracy discovered the video from a post on the Simple Complexity website: The Clock is Ticking On Long Island: Infographic Video Neal Levene, Simple Complexity, 11/22/10 "Simple Complexity: Making Simple Sense From Complex Data" The video was created by Duarte, a company that focuses on visual means of information presentation. Duarte is known for supporting presentation literacy using VisualStory methodology.
Comment: Wouldn't it be great if we could simply load data related to our own communities and regions and have it automatically feed into this sort of video info-graphic?!
Geoff McGhee is a journalist who specializes in multimedia and information graphics. He currently works at the Bill Lane Center for the Amercan West at Stanford, where he previously spent a year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at the university, studying data visualization.
In the following video, Journalism in the Age of Data, McGhee provides an interesting overview of the ways different disciplines are collaborating-and converging- to create visualizations that communicate data and information in effective and meaningful ways. The video is over 50 minutes long, but worth viewing.
Info from McGhee's Vimeo site:
"Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualisation techniques from computer scientists, researchers, and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays? Watch the full version with annotations and links at datajournalism.stanford.edu "
Hrvoje Benko and Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research demonstrate a system that uses 3D depth support tracking and interpreting the interaction between people, It also allows for manipulating digital content across a variety of surfaces.
Information Visualization Meets Augmented Reality?
Here is an update about the the work of students in the Interface Cultures program, which will be presented at the Playful Interface Cultures at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria:
"This year‘s presentation by students in the Interface Cultures program showcases newly emerging artistic skill profiles at the nexus of interactive media technology and interface technology. These artists adroitly combine complex disciplines such as communications technology, biosciences, physical computing, interaction design, fashionable technology and information visualization in their test environments and experimental concepts."
Dr. Robert Kosara's area of research is information and data visualization. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, College of Computing and Informatics, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and also a member of the Charlotte Visualization Center. He's fascinated with parallel sets/categorical data visualization.
Dr. Kosara is known for his deep thoughts about information visualization, as well as persuading others that they should think deep thoughts about the subject, too! His latest work is an example of interesting multi-touch interaction with representation of parallel coordinates using multi-touch trackpads commonly found on laptops, including the Macbook Pro.
Indirect Multi-touch Interaction for Brushing in Parallel Coordinates:
"This is the companion video for a paper we submitted recently. It describes a technique for interacting with parallel coordinates using the multi-touch trackpad found on laptops like Apple's MacBook Pro.
Below is the abstract from that paper: Interaction in visualization is often complicated and tedious. Brushing data in a visualization such as Parallel Coordinates allows the user to select data points according to certain criteria. Modifying a brush or combining it with another one usually requires a lot of additional effort and mode switches. We propose the use of multi-touch interaction to provide fast and convenient interaction with Parallel Coordinates. By using a multi-touch trackpad rather than the screen directly, the users hands do not obscure the visualization during interaction. Using one, two, three, or four fingers, the user can easily and quickly perform complex selections. Being able to change the selections rapidly, the user can explore the data set more easily and effectively, and can focus on the data rather than the interaction."
