Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – Concepts | finette.co.uk » blog.

nice project on representation of tabbed information over time; it would be a nice tools in association with OnLife for personnal timetracking…

the visible archive: Packing Them In

The Visible Archive is a research project on the visualisation of archival datasets, by Mitchell Whitelaw, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design and Creative Practice at the University of Canberra.

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Project Palantir: Facebook Interactions Visualization

The goal of Facebook’s Project Palantir is to “visualize all the data that Facebook gets”. Each Facebook action is geo-located on a 3D globe, becomes a particle that floats off the surface of the Earth, and then disappears. Facebook interactions (e.g. friend requests, pokes, wall posts) are shown by 3D splines or a trailing mesh connecting 2 locations, with each color representing a different sort of interaction.

Watch the demonstration movie at Facebook, or the high-quality YouTube version below.

Similar globe-based visualizations include: Google’s Information Display at GooglePlex, 3D Live Stats, the still impressive InfoMagnet, Google Proximity between Cities. One more Facebook visualization is the Lexus social network graph, and there is a considerable collection at Many Eyes.

In the meantime, lets see whether the recent addition of Lee Byron as an Interactive Information Designer at Facebook, and known from the stacked Stream Graph of LastFM listening behaviors, will bring forward more Facebook visualizations!

Thnkx Nick. Via TechCrunch.

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(via information aesthetics.)

Von B and C

I must be honest and confess that I cannot read most of what is going on at Von B and C but what I can see are some absolutely fantastic examples of informational graphics.

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(via Changethethought™.)

Visible Sound: Graph Stitching Sewing Machine

An electronically enhanced sewing machine [soundsbutter.com], able to represent sound through the height of the stitches it creates. The resulting stitch pattern thus becomes visually similar to an equalizer timeline. Unfortunately, currently a non-working prototype only.

Via SwissMiss.

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(via information aesthetics.)

Deep Screen

Are these circles burnt onto my retina from the screen I have been staring at or are they painted onto the canvas? Roland Schimmel researches visual perception. His tools: screen and canvas, light and paint.

The effect even works well in this .jpeg

If you stare at a white wall and see a black square with 1024 x 768 proportions, time to turn off your computer and visit your friends.

This was one of the exhibits at Deep Screen, one of the last exhibitions to show at Stedelijk Museum CS building, Amsterdam. I managed to get there in the last days. Picking up a hand held controller and sitting in front of a big screen I experienced physical and virtual interaction in a similar way to making my first abstract marks on paper. Artist Jodi.
Artists Arthur Elsenaar and Remco Scha use the human face as an interface to express a computers emotions. Electrodes attached to the face programmed by the computer results in some funny faces. Faceshift (2005)

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(via ∞ unlimited edition.)

Widgenie data sharing widgets

a new online socially-driven data visualization service, in the same line of Many Eyes & Swivel & Track-n-Graph, which allows users to visualize & share information through the use of small widgets. Widgenie allows data to be acquired from spreadsheets & be visually shared online through a sequence of simple, online steps. the current visualization methods include the traditional line charts, bar charts, area charts, pie charts & text clouds.

[link: widgenie.com]

UPDATE: unfortunately, the widget seems to mess up the layout terribly…

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(via information aesthetics.)

Scientists replicate traffic-jam “shockwaves” in real-world experiment

This is fascinating to watch: A team of Japanese researchers have created “shockwave traffic jams” that replicate the dynamics of real-world highways.

For 15 years, researchers have known that traffic jams can emerge out of the blue. All it takes is for one driver to momentarily slow down, at which point the person behind him hits the brakes, forcing the person behind him to hit the brakes even harder, and so on, and so on. One teensy butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon the whole damn interstate’s a mess. If you’re in a helicopter, you can watch the “shockwave” of slowed-down cars propagate backwards through traffic like a wave through water. Physicists have long produced eerily accurate computer models that replicate this phenomenon precisely. But because it’s pretty hard to commandeer an entire highway for the purposes of research, no one has ever replicated the phenomenon in a real-world experiment.

Until now! The Japanese team got a cluster of vehicles to drive in a circle. As the New Scientist reports, here’s what happened:

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

“Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways,” he told New Scientist.

Check out the video of the experiment. Towards the end, the shockwave becomes deliciously mobile — you can really see it moving backwards.

This also puts me in mind of William Beatty, the electrical engineer who — while stuck in traffic in 1998 — figured out a way to hack traffic jams and erase them. Basically, when he was stuck in a jam, he’d slow down until he had a really large amount of space between him and the car in front of him. Then he moved forward in at very slow, uniform speed, so that he no longer stopped and started. Sure enough, the wave stopped at him: Everyone behind him began driving at a uniform 35 mph. “By driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been ‘eating’ the traffic waves,” he wrote. The only problem, of course, is that he himself was stuck traveling at the average speed of the wave in front of him, which — at 35 mph — is pretty pokey.

(Thanks to Greg Sewell for this one!)

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(via collision detection.)

twistori twitter message filter

a “first person” visualization of Twitter messages, inspired by We Feel Fine. Twitter messages are filtered by occurrences of the phrases “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I believe”, “I feel” & “I wish”, which are placed in a visual scrolling message ticker, similar to Digg Labs BigSpy.

[link: twistori.com/|thnkx debuche]

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(via information aesthetics.)

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