Changing Tides

• paperium
  Another digital pen using special paper. Bluetooth to send drawing as vector art or writing back to computer. Mac software.
  (tags: digital_pen)
• Livescribe :: Never Miss A Word
  Digital Pen using special paper. Records sound in synch with writing. Window only but Mac planned.
  (tags: digital_pen)

Another video from the see conference #3

Frank Van Ham is from the IBM Research - IBM’s Many Eyes project. Focussed on the collaborative aspects of information visualisation - the communication of ideas by sharing visualisations.

He describes the history of the project saying that the idea for it came from a variety of things they were noticing as researchers, but in particular three projects.

1. The first project was done by a colleague - a Visual representation of peoples email done in 2003. She stressed privacy to people - but found that people actually sent screenshots to other people - didn’t want to keep it private they wanted to share it.
2. The second project was the Baby Name Voyager. A graph of the popularity of baby names over the last 100 years. In 2005. People started challenging each other to find patterns in this data, as a game.
3. In 2004 there was a visualisation of the USA election with red states and blue states. Different visualisations were shared through blogs.

From these examples they developed their research agenda of “Massive Public Visualization”. Scaling the audience instead of the volume of data.

Important part was to make it easy for people to comment on the data and make their own visualisations. People get excited when they can see their own data.

The site is available www.manyeyes.com

They provide a wide range of visualisation types. Types of uses that they have seen of the site:

• Scientists have been using it for analysis.
• Other people have been using it for personal expression.
• Journalism and Advocacy
• Social Interaction

ManyEyes lets people take their visualisations and embed them into their own websites or blogs. The site is free, but all data is visible to everyone.

Another video from the see conference #3

Zachary Lieberman, Peformance Artist and Researcher speaks on “Making the invisible visible”.

He starts his session with a demonstration of piece called “Manual Input Session“. That uses a camera looking down on an overhead project with a red screen on it. As he makes shapes with his hands and other objects the computer generates shapes and sounds.

Was a fine artist, got into computers because he liked animation and liked the idea of bringing things to life.

He likes the works that he does not to be focused on technology, wants them to be something happening without needing to understand the technology.

Until he was invited to give this talk he hadn’t thought of himself as being involved in information visualisation. But after thinking he realised that a lot of his work is doing something similar. He is trying to make sense of data - the human body, gesture, the voice and come up with a reasonable visualisation.

He has been involved in developing Open Frameworks a C++ library which is also used for visualisation (not released yet).

He is excited and passionate about making the voice visible.

Created both performance pieces (Messa di Voce) and interactive installations exploring ways to see the voice. Went on to adapt some of the technology developed for these for schools teaching children with learning disabilities.

Developed open source software for choreography - rotoSketch - that lets you draw simple lines over video of a dancer and visualise the choreography.

He showed a work called ‘drawn’ that was used both for performance and installation where you start by making an ink drawing and then can move the pieces of the picture around on a screen. Sounds are generated by the shapes and movements.

He concludes by saying his research is about trying to create wonder, to create a sense of wonder for the people who see his work.

His website is http://www.thesystemis.com.

• GLProgramming.com
  Site for members of the opengl help network to share projects and development help with each other.
  (tags: 3D programming)
• MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 2008 | Design and the Elastic Mind
  “The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design.”
  (tags: Visualisation design exhibition innovation)

I’ve been watching the videos from the see conference #3.

Ben Fry

Ben Fry takes a whirlwind tour through his Masters thesis ‘Organic Information Design’ and PhD dissertation ‘Computational Information Design’ and then looks at his current projects and those of his students.

I like his description of the data visualisation process as moving from Data to Understanding through the following actions:

aquire -> parse -> filter -> mine -> represent -> refine -> interact

He showed a good diagram of this from his PhD thesis and explained that one of the problems is that these steps have been spread across different disciplines.

During his PhD he developed some software that combined all the types of representation (at that time) of human genome project genetic data and let you interactively explore the different ways of seeing the same data. (Available on his website - isometricblocks). He demonstrated a visualisation of a genetic search algorithm (a version is available at MIT - genome valence).

Recently he has been working with a friend of his, John Underkoffler, who developed the gestural interface animation used in the film Minority Report. After the movie, John decided to try to make a real interface that works with gestures. The software is called G.Speak and the company he founded is Oblong Technologies. Ben has used the software for a project visualising the traffic data from Los Angeles. He gave a demonstration of his software, although without the gestural interface. The gesture interface lets people collaborate on the information and move around a lot of data easily on the large screens.

He describes his development process as starting with a sketch to see what sort of patterns there are in the data. He then looks for what is interesting, and tries to mine out the most interesting bits. He expands on this during the question and answer session at the end of his talk - “Do several dumb things first and then try to be a bit smarter about it”.

He likes using Processing because it lets him develop sketches quickly - it can’t handle quite as much data as C++ could, but the trade off for the development speed is what he thinks is important.

Another comment that he makes to support the importance of rapid development is that refining the visualisation requires stripping out the less interesting/useful bits, which means that you will have to discard a lot of the work that you have done along the way.

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling discusses when is it better to have a visualisation than the thing. His first example is money, a symbol of wealth. Much easier than having to barter. Other examples are medical scans, house buying via internet, stock certificates instead of an assembly line. He runs through his book “Shaping Things”. The images of the diagram he uses are available on Flickr.

He talks about SPIMES “A theoretical object that can be tracked precisely in space and time over the lifetime of the object.” and how ubiquitous computing and lifecycle tracking of SPIMES can help sustainability.

In the question/answer session he says that one of the big impacts of SPIMES is to be able to do a time and motion study of your stuff. He thinks that would make it easy to get rid of lots of stuff - press the F1 key and put everything you haven’t used for two years onto eBay.

He thinks that we would find that many of the things we think we value really don’t have utility for us - they would be amongst the things we don’t use. You use your bed for about 1/3 of your time so “why do you have family silverware and a bed that hurts your back?”

He thinks that this lifecycle tracking will start in small places like a hospital or a ship and then if it is useful it will spread in the same way that the internet spread. The ‘internet of things’.

Asked about optimism or pessimism he says “you need to become the change you want to see - this should be a fulfilling thing.”

He highly recommends visiting the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA (there is an online exhibition as well). He says “it will turn your head right around” “it is one of the coolest ones I’ve ever seen”.

Last night I tried to watch the live stream from the ’see conference #3′ in Weisbaden, Germany. It is a conference for the visualisation of information. With the time difference it ran from 6pm to 3am here, so maybe I’m lucky that it didn’t work. The visual stream was great, but unfortunately the sound kept dropping out after 30 seconds.

This morning the recordings are still not working properly in Safari, but can be watched in other browsers (I’m using Flock). The quality of the video stream is great and they zoom in on the display screen when it is important to what is being discussed so that you can see the visuals well.

The conference website is - http://www.see-conference.com/ To see the videos, go to the ‘live stream’ and then select the presenter you want to watch.

Even with the technical problems, this really shows how much more accessible conferences can be now - you can watch the conference live from anywhere, and the same recording is immediately available to be viewed on demand.

Attending a conference will still be a much fuller experience - it is only by being there that you get to meet all the other people with similar interests. But a video stream is much more effective than looking at written proceedings, especially for a ‘visualisation’ conference.

Johnny Lee demos his wiimote whiteboard and wiimote headtracking/3D applications at TED 2008.

Uwe Schmidt has made an excellent Mac OS X version of wiimote whiteboard in Java (he also has a cross-platform version available).  It is available from his website - http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard - and includes TUIO support for multitouch.

Lots more information about Johnny Lee’s projects and other peoples additions to them is available on the Wiimote Project site.

I’ve been having a look at the Processing language (http://www.processing.org/). After using the Processing IDE for a while, I decided to try using the Xcode IDE instead of the Processing one. I’m a beginner with both Java and Processing, and I had a difficult time getting it to work. The only instructions I could find were for an older version of Xcode, and didn’t make sense with the new version. But I have it working now (at least as far as my testing can tell).

Here is what I’ve done:
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