Visual Understanding Environment
At its core, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.
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Goosh Google Shell - Demo,
Between my work and my blog I look at a lot of interface design. I'm always looking for new ideas that I haven't seen before but, as you know many times that's very hard to find. Today I discovered Goosh and I knew I had found something different. Goosh is a website that puts the Google and Wikipedia searchs into a shell paradigm. This give you the feel of navigating these service in a command line environment. You can search all of the standard Google search such as, web, maps, news, feeds, video, and blogs etc. Playing around with this was pure fun. BTW Goosh was written Stefan Grothkopp, and is not an official Google product.
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Graffiti Archaeology
Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present. Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.
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The Sputnik Legacy
The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked of the space race. Since then mankind has sent more than 150 missions to explore outer space. The Newsweek captures all 150 world wide space flights in an easy to use timeline format. The visualization is sortable by year, timespan, planet and country. When you roll over a timeline point you get additional information about the flight. Additionaly, if you click on the Inside Sputnik tab you get a visualization of Sputnik 1 and all of its parts. Very fun and easy to use.
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Music Maps - Find Out Who is Listening to What and Where
"The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world." I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site.
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THE Zoom Demo
Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces. The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia's Flash, in which this demo was implemented, does not reconize mouse buttons so we have to use the keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use.
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10 x 10 - Words and Pictures That Define the Time
10x10 (ten by ten) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
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Digg Arc - Content Visualization
Digg Arc is another great data visualization from digg labs that provideds a broader and deeper view of Digg.. As the labs site states, "Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs. Labs projects are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. We've also released a public API for Digg so that anyone can turn Digg data into their own visualizations." I spend a lot of time at digg labs to see a more visual and broader view of all stories being dugg.
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oSkope - Visual Search
If you frequent websites like Amazon, YouTube, flickr and eBay you probably love the mass of content that you can see at sites like these. As a designer I tire of "sameness" in ways to browse websites. With the exception of flickr the only way to browse the content on these sites is the all to common linear list view. oSkope gives you another. As they say on their website, "oSkope is a search assistant with a highly intuitive visual interface. oSkope lets you browse quickly through a large number of images a preview information with minimal paging. Selected items can be saved by registered users." In many of my test searches I found the information or product I was looking for much more quickly than on the websites themselves. While I can save individual products in a folder I also wish I could save searches. The product is still in beta, however, it is a very fun, intuitive and functional way to search the selected websites. Thanks to the developers and designers.
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Elastic Lists - Visualizing Metadata
This project is an example of the "elastic list" principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures. The data is based on the Noble prize winners dataset used in the Flamenco facet browser. Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by, visualizing relative proportions (weights) of metadata values by size, visualizing unusualness of a metadata weight by brightness and animated filtering transitions. To use the application click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. If you create an "impossible" configuration, your selection will be reduced until a match is possible. You can also switch on little sparklines to see the temporal distribution of each metadata value. While I've seen this concept used several times before the elastic list interface was very fresh. Thanks!
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Twittervision - Geographic Twitter Visualization
Twittervision is a real-time geographic visualization of posts to
Twitter. The application is basically a mash-up of the Twitter API and Google Maps. The interaction is smooth and fast and gives you a great vision into who's Twittering around the world and at what speed. If you're as big of a fan of Twitter
as I am you spend far too much time viewing the Twitter map. In order to try out the application just sign up for twitter and post. You must have a location and an image defined to appear on the public feed (and to be located on the map). Hats off to David Troy who spent his free time to develop this fun visualization of Twitter.
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ScreenVader - Algorithmic Music, Images and Video
In many ways this site feels like an exploration. There is no about section or faqs, so when you arrive you're not really sure what to expect. As I found out, it turned out to be a wonderful visual experience. The site provides several free software packages that allow you to compose algorithmic music, image and video presentations. The results are stunning as you will see from the examples on the site. While it takes a little getting use to, the flash based navigation is fun easy to use. The downloads are available for Mac and PC.
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Box Grid - Blog Content Visualization
As I've mentioned in earlier posts I'm very interested in new ways to present blog content. Data streams, attention data and rss blending all address this issue, however, they all still relay on activities presented in a liner fashion. While the standard blog layout works well for discovery I'm wondering if there is a way to display blog data in a new paradigm . Box Grid was originally developed as an experimental blog site. The two things I find most fascinating about Box Grid are the fact that it was originally released in 2002, and that does not use flash. The interface is all CSS and javascript based. While this type of content visualization will not work for every blog it's a place where we can start to imagine new ways to surf a blog. The source code is also downloadable!
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Breathing Earth - What’s Your Countries Impact?
This visualization shows the carbon dioxide emission levels for every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. The site was created by David Bleja (a.k.a. Stillwater). All of the data used in the visualization comes from the World Factbook and the United Nations. To see it in action just mouse over any country and the application will display population, CO2 emissions, death and birth rates. Another column keeps a running tally of CO2 emissions, death and birth rates for the world in the time you've been on the site. This is a very insightful way to show the impact different countries have on climate change.
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Quintura Kids - Child Friendly Search Visualization
If you have children you know that many search engines retrieve sites you may not want them to see. If you're a kid you know how boring most search engines can be. "Quintura, Inc. is the next-generation web search company that was launched with a mission to make Web search easier and faster by adding context or meaning to keywords and visualizing search. The patent-pending technology of Quintura is based on over a decade of the founders' innovative research and development in the area of neural network and artificial intelligence". Quintura also has a wonderful search for standard use, and a women's version is planned soon. So far I love both versions that are public.
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Greatfirewallofchina - Is Your Website Censored?
This is a site which lets you see in real-time if any website is blocked or censored in China. They've created a website in China and they route your url request on greatfirewallofchina.org through to their server in China. The server in China opens the url and the result is send back. Their testing is only based on one server on one location in China. They do have different backup servers in different locations in China in case one goes down. Other locations and other servers may give you different access to the various websites. While the animation is really just an activity indicator, I felt it was an effective way of showing not only that there was something load, but also a sense of what I was waiting for (e.g. waiting for the server connections in each country). Nice job!
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Visuwords
Visuwords online graphical dictionary is a way to look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Visuwords uses Princeton University's WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web. To use the dictionary just enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node.
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3D Live Stats - Website Usage Visualization
If you've ever wanted to see your website usage on a large screen in a very visual way this is the application for you. From the demo video the visuals look stunning. As the earth turns you see your website visitors pop up on the globe in real-time also showing you a variety of other statistical data. One of the coolest features is the ability to hook up an interactive whiteboard or SMART board and be able to turn the earth with your fingers. Just like in the movie "Minority Report". I do wish they would produce a web base application so my website visitors could see this information in real-time. Nice product.
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Digg BigSpy - A New Way To Visualize Digg
One of the first sites that got me interested in real-time data visualizations was digg spy. I had just become hooked on digg when the spy came out, and watching the stories asynchronously roll by was even more intriguing than going to the regular home page. As they say on the digg site, "Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list. Bigger stories have more diggs. The projects currently in Digg Labs are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. As the project matures, we'll be releasing a public API to allow outside developers access to this data".
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Musiclens - Music Discovery Visualization
There are many search tools for finding new music on the web. Just type in, "artist, genre or title and you'll find some results. Ho Hum. I've been forced to use this same music search paradigm for years. However, there is a new breed of music sites cropping up that will give you new ways to discover new music. "Musiclens enables users to find pieces of music using very vaguely described criteria, such as loudness (perceived volume), mood or purpose. The search or recommendation query can be enhanced or limited by adjusting the ten navigation control sliders". This site works well and has a great visualization tool.
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