Positive Technology Journal - information_visualization

Ring°Wall: World Largest Multi-Touch and Multi-User Wall

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:19:00 +0100

The World's Biggest / Largest / Longest Multi-Touch (and evidently Multi-User) Wall is installed in Nürburgring (Germany) consists of a huge LED media facade (at the top), and a multitouch information-wall (at the bottom), and impresses by its physical size, as it totals a surface of about 425 square meters, equaling more than 6000 computer displays.

The interactive interface emerges out of 34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers. The multitouch capturing itself is based on laser technology, also called Laser Light Plane Illumination (LLP).

This means more than 80 users can simultaneously get informed about news and activities around the ringworld. Now imagine the sorts of sparklines this device could display...

You can watch a documentary movie below.

Emotional Cartography

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:11:00 +0200

Via Info Aesthetic

The free-downloadable book Emotional Cartography - Technologies of the Self is a collection of essays that explores the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology. The theme of this collection of essays is to investigate the apparent desire for technologies to map emotion, using a variety of different approaches.

The Allosphere: an immersive virtual reality system to visualize scientific data

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:35:00 +0200

The need for computing tools that allows to visualize, explore and manipulate huge multidimensional data is becoming a key priority in several fields of science and engineering

From this perspective, an interesting possibility is the use of Immersive Virtual Reality. For example, researchers at the California NanoSystem Institute lead by Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin have created the AlloSphere, an interactive chamber made of two 5-meter-radius hemispheres of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent.

There are currently two projectors, mounted around the seam between the two hemispheres, approaching eye-limited resolution on the inner surface. The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (around 500 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Other clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, effector-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments.

You can tour the Allosphere in this stunning video:

Here is an exterior photo of the AlloSphere @ the California Nanosystem Institute

Turing Tables to understand earthquakes

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:05:00 +0200

Earthquakes are complex natural phenomena that are difficult to predict but also to understand.

German artist Franz John created an online installation - Turing Tables - that makes earthquakes easier to fathom while reminding us how alive the Earth is.

Inspired to the work of matematician Alan Turing, The Turing Tables gathers data from a multitude of small earthquake sensors (called “fingers”) stationed around the globe into a real-time, online installation before converting the data into image and sound. Green-and-black moving wallpaper—composed of numeric data and the locations and times at which the readings are taken—fills the room, along with a grating yet melodic soundtrack courtesy of Oakland-based sound artist Ed Osborn.

Quicktime-Movie (40MB)

Closr.

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:14:00 +0200

Closr is a free service developed by the infoviz company VisUp that allows sharing and zooming high-resolution images (JPG, PNG e GIF format supported) in an easy, simple and fast way. The widgets have several useful functions, including a full-screen button, drag&drop photo navigation, and the possibility of resetting the picture to the starting size.

Thanks to these features, it is possible to embed the images in a blog post or in social networks. More, widgets can be tracked and organized using tags.

It took me 30 secs to upload and share this picture:

The creators of the service are Daniele Galiffa and Gabriele Venier. Nice job guys!

Own Your Choices

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:08:12 +0200

Re-blogged from Info Aesthetics

Own Your Choices aims to reveal how personal choices affect others and characterize one's self. In particular, the website focuses on starting the conversation around topics such as tobacco, health, self-image, culture, alcohol, relationships and school. Users are invited to connect with peers on these issues, to share their opinion and influence the conversation. And by accident, the interface seems driven by simple dynamic graphs of the statists resulting from the data-gathering surveys.

Individual people are represented by small outer sectors on a circle, which are linked to individual profile pages. One can use filters on the right side of the screen, for instance to filter by gender, age or location, or to find like-minded peers, or complete opposites. More colors means more activity.

WideNoise

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:36:00 +0100

One of the thing I hate most about living in a big city is the noise from road traffic. The most disturbing types of noise for me are (in order of irritation):

1) motorbike noise

2) emergency noise

3) noise from construction/demolition activites

In addition of being very unpleasant and harmful for our hearing system, noise can have negative impact on general health. For example, Swedish researchers have found that the exposure to even relatively low levels of noise may increase increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack and high blood pressure.

Even though we are accustomed to this background noise, we should at least be aware of how dangerous it is. Guys at WideTag have developed an iPhone/iPod touch application - WideNoise - that allows to monitor the noise level in the space surrounding the user. The noise data are collected and displayed on an online map. I think that this application could be also used by employers to monitor workplace noise.

Good job guys!

Electronically enhanced sewing machine

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:10:56 +0100

Via Info Aesthetics

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.

Textual emotion recognition and visualization

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:02:14 +0100

From InfoAesthetics

a textual emotion recognition & visualization engine based on the concept of synesthesia , or in other words: "code that feels the words visually". the synesketch application is able to dynamically transfer the text into animated visual patterns.

the emotional parameters are based on a WordNet-based lexicon of words with their general & specific emotional weights, for the emotion types happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise. the visualization is based on a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles. colors & shapes of these patterns depend on the type and intensity of interpreted textual emotions.

Europe’s economic weather forecast

noreply@blogspirit.com (Andrea Gaggioli) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:18:56 +0100

Cool infoviz services, in times of global financial crisis

Check it out: