June, 2008

Just had to post this explosive visualization app called Solar, built by this guy Robert Hodgin. It's a music/lyric visualization built with Processing, must take a lot of juice to run, but it's hot hot.

Jon and I were talking about how to parallelize the room-size computer. Interestingly our main debate seems to be an old-one. The Eulerian perspective is to divide the particles according to their locations in space, while the Lagrangian perspective divides particles into arbitrary groups regardless of position.

I found this article comparing the two methods to be very instructive. To cut to the chase, it basically says that the Eulerian approach scales better than the Lagrangian one for very large numbers of particles (N). Euler scales like N/P (P = number of processors), whereas Lagrangian scales like N over sqrt(P).

a pretty sexy demo for a large handheld interface called flicflex, built by this guy Chris Woebken

more information and another video at Woebken's site.

general search alternatives:
viewzi: a lot of different ways of seeing and searching through data
mnemomap: nice interface with semantic map and a variety of tools
searchme: turns web search into quicklook visual browsing, a little too sexy for its own good
bryns brain: another sexy interface with web previews
touchgraph: uses Java to visually displays results from the Google search API
research beyond google: some useful resources for doing academic or statistical research
textmap: visualizes tons of data related to search topics or issues (news histogram, relational network, juxtapositions)
a couple of categorizing engines: grokker, clusty and quintura

360 degrees for all colors

the MoMA had an exhibit of Scandinavian artist, Olafur Eliasson, who works with light in lots of different ways and contexts. one of the most engaging was called '360° room for all colors' which had a changing variable display of colors along the walls of a large round room. as you move in very close to the screens along the walls you plunge into the color abyss, your peripheral vision disintegrates and all you see is color changing slowly from cools to warms -- like jetting through a cloud on some foreign planet.

about halfway through the video here see the piece in action. there are exhibits at MoMA and PS1 until June 30.

Aside from the standard visualization resources out there (visualcomplexity.com, infosthetics.com and flowingdata.com...), here are some interesting pools of visualization:

Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About

SmartTiles - Room-Sized Artifacts (2005) - download pdf
These guys have developed a very modular setup for a tiled room -- 1 computer per tile -- for educational purposes. It seems they choose high modularity because they want students to be able to program individual tiles. Haven't read all of it but they sound pretty smart and have a forward-thinking perspective on education. There's not too much talk about hardware, but it looks like it has some good sources in the bibliography.

Steady Rise of the Information Age

ComScore, a leading source of Internet trends and statistics, reports that for the month of February 2008 there were roughly 9.9 billion searches made in the U.S.. They claim this refers to Americans at "Home/Work/University Locations" but it probably also includes users on mobile devices. It's not entirely transparent if this also includes users of the Google API's that can be based on automated systems. But even if it is, it's still a mighty big number of things that are being searched. Actually, put in perspective, it amounts to about 1.3 searches per American per day. Roughly 60% of those searches occurred on Google. Also, there is a rate of increase of approximately 1% per month.

I wonder how many printed book pages your average American reads a day. Is it one page? It might be a slightly different story if we included pages of online books, or digital books, or even newspapers online and offline, etc.. But even then, if you are looking for specific information why read a book when you can search for the topic by keyword and glance through some small excerpt. You get to skip all that extra(neous) information.