Aaron is running a workshop at AVI 2008 on “designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and private displays”. If you have a novel idea for an interactive system involving mobile devices, fixed displays and surfaces; or if you just need an excuse to put an iPhone on your research budget, head over to the PPD ’08 website.
visualisation
Entries tagged with “visualisation”.
The best t-shirt I never bought. Sold out! Bah.
Electric sheep has become a very popular screensaver in the SRG office since it replaced my previous favourite, Fireflies some months ago. A special presentation of the high-definition version (“Dreams in High Fidelity”) is being displayed at Siggraph 2006, which starts today. We’ve seen some of the best sheep float through the office.
Say hello to my little friends.
I got word in April that my first paper, the alluringly-titled “Collaborating in Context: Immersive Visualisation Environments” which I submitted in March to the Context in Advanced Interfaces workshop at AVI06, had been accepted. So, Mark, Mike and I headed off to Venice for the week to watch presentations, ride around on boats and eat octopuses.
The paper concerns the design and development of our unique visualization lab here in UCD. My presentation at the workshop went fairly well, considering I had completed a cross-city dash minutes before starting (Venice is a big place!). My slides are available with the others at the workshop’s results page. My paper has been published in the ACM digital library.
AVI 06 proper was an excellent conference, with plenty of interesting work going on, and people to meet. My trip report is available:
![[PDF]](/blog/media/pdf-icon.png){kind=icon}
Trip Report: AVI 2006 May 23–26, Venice Italy
Our own photos are online, and you can also check out the very lovely Geoffrey Ellis’ AVI photos (spot the goons!).
2-D or not 2-D? (That is the question) finds fault with some of the new graphical features coded into the latest version of Keynote, which were subsequently used by Steve Jobs at the latest Macworld keynote. Interestingly, the slides contained a number of basic, but easily-made information visualisation mistakes; what Tufte would call a lack of “graphical integrity.”
Digital magpie Marko sends on a cool floor screen demo apparently made by Nintendo and shown at last year’s E3 Expo (a venue that is forever on my list of things to go to). It seems Nintendo are really pushing new ways of interacting with software, especially considering their plans for their next console’s controller.
Mark found an interesting video (80mb) rendered with Blender and OpenGL 2.0, that has a nice zoomable interface. It’d look good running in the Viz lab.
IBM Research has some examples of a Weather Visualisation system they have designed.
We are preparing to install IBM’s Deep Computing Visualization software on a computer in the new Visualisation lab that’s hooked up to the DiamondTouch. This will allow us to both:
* “Explore the styles of interaction possible across different devices and a heterogeneous computing environment”
* Support simultaneous multi-user interactions across different displays
I am expecting to demo my simulation on the multiple displays in the Viz lab in the months ahead, so this will be a good introduction to the technology.
From the fact sheet (PDF):
High-end graphical images can be viewed in two visualization modes — SVN (Scalable Visual Networking) to increase screen resolution and multiplicity of physical displays; and RVN (Remote Visual Networking) to allow remote use of the application.
These two modes reflect two of the challenges in my PhD research: creating a visualisation of a large dataset across many displays, and to allow parts of the visualisation to migrate across devices.
After my initial foray into predicting the future was met with puzzlement, I’ve been thinking back over the idea of, as Aaron put it, “marrying the Scientific Visualisation with the Information Visualisation”. This seemed like the logical way to go, but right now it doesn’t look like what’s actually required or even desired for this project. Nonetheless, I want to write down the reasons I originally started thinking along this track.
- Spatial Representation
- First of all, because an autonomic system is made up of a large and fluctuating number of sensors and actuators, it made sense to have some form of spatial representation of where the sensors are located. This allows such actions as the person watching the visualisation saying “show me activity for the sensors at the rear of the car”, or for those clustered in the engine, for example. This would surely be a useful UI for interacting with the simulation.
- Sensor Grouping
- Beyond these ‘logical groupings’, they could also simply drag a box around the sensors they were interested in, and use the usual Shift-click/Ctrl-click interaction to add or remove sensors from their selection, and then generate the visualisation from this selection. Splitting the sensors driving the visualisation into groups like this would simplify the task of focusing on certain parts of the simulation, or moving parts of it onto other display devices (particularly low-power devices, with not enough processing power to generate the entire visualisation).
- Using a 3D Camera
- When sensors fail, as they are wont to do, the camera in the 3D environment can be positioned to show the location of the failure. This would allow the user to select nearby sensors and get realtime data from just those sensors surrounding the problematic one.
Recent bookmarks tagged with “visualisation”.
- Facebook | Visualizing Friendships
Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.
- YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four
- The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com | eagereyes
Kosara: So what went wrong? Mulloy: It all points back to this: the CEO was incompetent, or not as on the ball as he could have been. I couldn't have said this easily a year and a half ago, but now with more time between me and what happened, I think it was just a number of mistakes. We had phenomenal people, phenomenal investors, really talented people. When you look at what the guys and gals have done since Swivel, they're all really interesting, fun projects, that are making a difference. So I think I didn't orchestrate the business as well as I could have, and made a lot of little mistakes that added up to not being the success that it probably could have been.
- LinkedIn Targets College Students With Career Path Data Visualizations
Translating user data into useful information is now the cornerstone of LinkedIn’s product roadmap. For example, the company recently updated company profiles with additional data visualizations such as the most popular schools attended by employees, the segmentation of an employee base by skillset and more. Today, LinkedIn is launching a new data-focused feature, called LinkedIn Career Explorer, that provides college graduates with insights from other LinkedIn members to help them visualize a career path.
- YouTube - Information is Beautiful
- Bullet graph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The bullet graph features a single, primary measure (for example, current year-to-date revenue), compares that measure to one or more other measures to enrich its meaning (for example, compared to a target), and displays it in the context of qualitative ranges of performance, such as poor, satisfactory, and good. The qualitative ranges are displayed as varying intensities of a single hue to make them discernible by those who are color blind and to restrict the use of colors on the dashboard to a minimum.
- Google Visualization API Gadget Gallery - Google Chart Tools / Interactive Charts (aka Visualization API) - Google Code
This gallery lists visualizations gadgets built on the Google Visualization API. Some of these have been written by Google, and some have been written by third parties. Links below point to the XML for the gadget, documentation, examples, and author information. To learn how to use visualization gadgets, see Using Visualization Gadgets.
- Pulp Fiction timeline
In case you were confused by the Pulp Fiction storyline, dehahs has plotted it out for you. Inspired by Randall Munroe's character timeline, each line represents a character and intersections show interactions. The story board rests in the background. Like any good Quentin Tarantino flick, everyone dies more or less. Bang, bang. Boom, boom.
- PeteSearch: How to split up the US
As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there's a line between them. Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South:
- PeteSearch: Why nobody understands your visualization
Keep it simple There really is a visual vocabulary that we all learn. Our visual vocabulary is not as obvious as the verbal one because acquiring it is a much more informal process. There's no dictionaries or classes dedicated to understanding diagrams, so I had the unconscious idea that they just automatically make sense. This is seductive because our culture ensures that most of us do readily comprehend common charts like maps and bar graphs, which in fact would be incomprehensible to most of our ancestors. As the Tour through the Visualization Zoo points out "Although a map may seem a natural way to visualize geographical data, it has a long and rich history of design". Every familiar form (even the map) had to be invented, and only became widely-understood after it had proved its usefulness over a long period of time.