Home » Archives for July 2009
Find a big white building, setup some cleverly positioned high-resolution projectors nearby, and what do you get? UrbanScreen got the “555 KUBIK” art exhibit, where they answer the question “what if a building could dream?”
The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.
It’s a clever use of sound and shadows to really bring a flat surface to life, and face depth where there is none. See the video after the break.
via 555 KUBIK | facade projection | on Vimeo.
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Graphics, Hardware art, projection, urbanscreen
A fascinating interactive table display allows users to interact with a pair of physical objects on a large table-display to view fonts. It has a huge amount of new interaction technologies, user interface metaphors, and just general awesome-ness.
The interactive table is an implementation of the reacTIVision system and was built by students and staff from the FHP for the mæve installation and we are really really grateful for the opportunity to use this table as a basis for our work.
The application running on the table is written in Java (using the NetBeans IDE) and based on the Processing framework. We use a MySQL Server for our database and the Processing SQLibrary to connect to it. The communication with the table runs over the TUIO protocol and uses the Processing TUIO Client. Mathematik – a part of the gestalt framework was very helpful for vector math and we have to thank Rob van der Woude for his PrintPDF batchfile.
See a video of the system in use, after the break.
via fontplore // an interactive application designed for searching and exploring font databases.
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Hardware display, font, interactive, processing, table
With the iPhone picking up steam as an “Artist’s” tool, such as with the recent Brushes success on the New Yorker cover, new apps are constantly innovating on the capabilities. Volutopia has a new app out called “SculptMaster3D” that brings volumetric sculpting capabilities, similar to ZBrush, to your iPhone.
Create amazing digital sculptures by painting and carving clay-like material with fingers! SculptMaster 3D works like any other familiar doodling application with the exception that you have now one more dimension to operate with. With the intuitive user interface, you can produce masterpieces in no time. Making three-dimensional art has never been so fun!
See a video of it in use, after the break.
via Volutopia.
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Graphics, Hardware art, iphone, modeling, sculptmaster3d, volutopia
The common Flu is both big business and big worry in the US, as companies scramble to make the necessary vaccines in time for the annual flu season and the CDC parses mountains of data to predict what type of flu and when it will strike. The CDC has some of the most reliable methods in the world for tracking this, but they are slow. However, they’ve found a new tool in the fight against the flu: Google.
Months before the recent outbreak of H1N1 influenza (”swine flu”), developers at Google revealed that they had created an ingenious method to predict flu outbreaks by tracking the frequency of search keywords. As it turns out, an increased frequency of searches for a family of words like “flu symptoms” and “runny nose” in a particular region is a reliable indicator that the flu is spreading there. Brilliant.
When this information is graphed by region and compared to data compiled by the CDC, it doesn’t just correlate-it matches almost exactly (see above). The difference is that the method the CDC uses to compile data from clinics and physicians takes much longer. Once people start to feel sick, it takes time to make an appointment to see the doctor, and for a physician to then report that information the CDC. Using search data reveals trends in real time, allowing epidemiologists to identify flu outbreaks two to six weeks faster than by using any other method.
via Searching for Outbreaks.
Science biomed, cdc, flu, google
Just wanted to let everyone know that Episode #21, which would normally air tonight, will be delayed this week. Between personal issues and the prep work for SIGGRAPH, I simply don’t have time to do it tonight. Hopefully, I’ll have an episode up for you late tomorrow night or Wednesday. The tentative agenda for Episode #21 looks like this:
In the meantime, this means you can revisit some of the posts of this last week and revisit some of the previous Podcasts. Enjoy!
Website
MeetTheBoss has a fun visualization of the various acquisitions and mergers that Amazon has undertaken over the last several years. What I particularly like about this visualization is that it shows the various acquisitions of various companies prior to merger with Amazon.
There’s a reason that Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, it realises that if a rival firm is too much of a threat, instead of competing with them, just buy them!
With news today that Amazon has dug deep for a US$928 million deal with online shoe retailer Zappos.com, it is clear that the Seattle-based company is desperate to corner the market in all retail sectors.
Despite starting off as online bookstore in 1995, Amazon quickly diversified and today sells music downloads, DVDs, clothes, electronics, furniture and clothes. As such, it has made a number of acquisitions over the years that have since their stocks soar and their profits rock
via Amazon Acquisitions and Investments | Zappos.
Graphics amazon, company, infovis, zappos
The backbone of the free DICOM Visualization and Analysis tool SMIViewer has been released as SMISDK. SMIViewer has developed a respectable following among radiology and biomedical experts, and the release of the SDK is the first step to releasing SMIViewer under a similar GPL license. The project team, “pixel.to.life” and Prashant Chopra, have this to say:
This project is another step in the direction of the mission statement of Science.Medical.Imaging group:
“Gather thoughts from the fields of acquisition, communication and understanding of medical images for better image guided diagnostics and treatment. ”
The hope is to amalgamate the best of medical imaging physics, applied mathematics, computer science, medicine, and visualization in the pursuit.
We are trying to share free and opensource resources in the pursuit of this goal as and when possible.
Visit the SMISDK Google Code Project page to download it.
Science biomed, dicom, library, sdk, volume
During the upheaval surrounding the recent Iranian elections, Twitter emerged as a primary means of communications. With it’s easy of use via email, SMS, and several applications, it became a hub of activity as information was distributed both about the elections, police activity, and various proxy information to aid in circumventing the various network restrictions. Now several people are finally analyzing the data during the event and coming up with several interesting discoveries such as the one shown here.
Here, we see the re-tweet network that formed around the top five Iranian tweets. Its structure shows a very different phenomenon, capturing the emergence not of a community but of an elite. Despite massive interest, or perhaps because of it, most people did not discover more than one of the top Iranians. The network simply grew faster than the information could naturally propagate. But a small inner circle did succeed in identifying core sources of information.
See more information in the article, such as a visualization of the cnnfail hashtag corresponding with the dissemination of proxy addresses and police activity.
via Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets.
Science iran, twitter
SIGGRAPH is only a week away, and press releases are coming out left and right. We’re trying to cover it all here on VizWorld, and to aid in that we’ve made a simple change to the right sidebar. If you scroll down a bit you’ll see that the sidebar now contains a regularly updated list of twitter messages about #siggraph. In addition, you can use any of the methods on the newly updated Follow page to see the latest news and announcements.
Website siggraph, Website
Mint Software follows on the popularity of the previous “Debt Hell” infographic, by releasing a new video visualizing $1 Trillion.
It’s official, trillion is the new billion. No longer is government spending talked about in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government spending, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all. One trillion dollars is a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. So what does one trillion dollars look like?
A fun & entertaining look into a truly depressing statistic. See the video after the break.
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Graphics, Science economic, example, infographic, video
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