VizWorld.com

Chris Jordan has created several fantastic visualizations bringing some of most staggering minute statistics into the forefront, and for his efforts managed to get invited to TED2008 to present his work and ideology.  The video is online.

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics — like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.

Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life — making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.

See the full talk (11 minutes) after the break.

via Cool Infographics: Chris Jordan’s TEDTalk 2008 – Visualizing Our World [video].

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Graphics, Science infographic, ted

It’s a problem you hear over and over again.  A large collection of material, in this case the National Archives of Australia, is digitized and computerized so that the entire collection is at your fingertips at a moment’s notice.  However, as the digital collection grows it becomes more and more difficult to actually find anything as you drown in the mountain of data.  This case has a happy ending as Michell Whitelaw has developed a pair of downloadable visualizations for visualizing the massive collection.

The first, “Series Browser”, organizes the collection into Agencies (the organization responsible for what’s in the document) and Series, and visualizes it as a hierarchical collection of two-tone boxes where the inner area is proportional to the number of items and the outer area is proportional to the shelf meters used.  It provides a powerful of visualizing the size of certain collections.

The other, “A1 Explorer”, is a classic text visualization operationg on word frequency of item titles.  It contains a classic histogram of word frequency, but also connects words into frequent combinations and co-occurences.

Both visualizations can be downloaded from his site, and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The Visible Archive, via The Visible Archive: Mapping the National Archives of Australia Collection – information aesthetics.

Science infovis, text

If you’ve seen “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and marveled at the fantastic shader and colors, then you can thank Danny Damian (amongst many others).  From humble Romanian origins, he’s risen to a star inside Imageworks for his computer programming and graphics knowledge, and discusses it all with CGSociety.

“I was really excited to have the opportunity to use a GI [global illumination] renderer in such a creative way,” he says. “We did a lot of exploration into how to do highly choreographed, artistic work with a ray tracer, to constantly shape it to do what we wanted to do, to manage the rays to shape the light the way we wanted. The art director was particular about hues, ranges and colors inside and outside, so we provided more creative control in shaders and lighting that you might expect.”

via CGSociety – Danny Damian.

Graphics, Science interview, movie, shader, vfx

A new website, wearecolorblind.com, aims to educate graphic designers in proper color combinations and patterns that are effective to a variety of color-perception disorders.  Surprisingly, a large portion of the website focuses on data visualizations, probably because of the important of color in many of them, and contains sample colorbars and visualizations that remain effective across a broad spectrum of vision disorders.

We are Colorblind » Patterns for the Color Blind. via information aesthetics

Science colorblind, human vision

If you thought Starbucks was everywhere, then you need to take a look at a great graphic at WeatherSealed where he charts the distance to the nearest McDonalds from every location in the US.

So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…

Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!

His discovery: The farthest away you can get from any McDonalds is in plains of South Dakota where you can be 107 miles away from the nearest McDonalds (145 by car).

via Where The Buffalo Roamed « Weather Sealed.

Graphics, Science geospatial, infographic, map, mcdonalds

At the Technology Review EmTech Conference at MID, Steve Perlman spent some time demonstrating the OnLive gaming service live in front of the audience and discussing some of the technology they use.

Perlman was willing to talk briefly about the hardware that powers things at the server level. The basic functional unit is a standard PC motherboard. Casual games get by on built-in video, while they’ll be using motherboards with high end hardware from NVIDIA and AMD for the current generation of games. The only custom hardware is a single add-on board that handles both compressing the video for transmission to the end users and smoothing over the inevitable network hiccups.

via Cloud gaming service OnLive shines at MIT conference – Ars Technica.

Hardware conference, emtech, nvidia, onlive, video game

At the recent Intel Developer Forum, Intel created quite a buzz with a live demonstration of their top-secret Larrabee chipset performing real-time raytracing.  The scene was a simple one, a boat on water with some helicopters flying overhead.  Running on their upcoming Gulftown 6-core CPU with a Larrabee chip, it did a good job demonstrating how they could render high-quality graphics with ray-traced effects.  Plus:

What’s more impressive is that the effects were apparently generated using ten lines of shader code in C++. To achieve an impact like that in less code than the length of this blog post is amazing. Games have been moving towards increased realism, and I’m sure any game coders (and players) in the crowd were buzzing about the potential of Larrabee.

See video of the demonstration after the break.

via IDF2009 first: Larrabee live demo of ray-tracing « SoftTalk – multicore and parallel programming. and FiringSquad

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Hardware conference, idf, intel, larrabee

Layar, the impressive mobile-phone augmented reality tool, has undergone another major revision and now supports 3D overlays in addition to the previous 2D overlays.  This opens a whole new world to AR developers who can now use it to overlay 3D objects into the viewable space.

“We are very excited to announce this groundbreaking addition to the platform. Augmented Reality is an experience medium, not just a tool or a substitute for maps. With 3D we deliver these experiences. The platform currently facilitates over 500 developers who from November onwards will have endless possibilities to create rich 3D multi-sensory Augmented Reality experiences.”

via Layar Reality Browser adds 3D to its Platform « Layar.

Science augmented reality, layar, mobile

As if to prove the adage, “They can’t all be winners”, the latest GOOD transparency is up and it’s.. Well.. Let’s begin with the description:

If this year is any indication, when these kids grow up, this is what they’ll be arrested for. The FBI recently released its report on U.S. crime in 2008, which includes a breakdown of the number of arrests made for every type of crime, offering an interesting picture of how Americans break the law (or, at least, how they get caught doing so). It seems that drugs and alcohol are getting us into a lot of trouble.

Ok, seems simple enough right?  Well, I have to agree with the synopsis of ChartPorn on this one:

This has got to be one of the silliest and content-lacking infographics I’ve seen in a while. The pie charts are almost useless, most of the icons indecipherable, and placing them over the faces of schoolchildren?!?

With a name like ‘GOOD’, I guess it’s ironic to see something so bad.

via Transparency: The Most Committed Crimes in the Country | GOOD.

Science bad, good, infographic

In Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox slowly transforms from a beautiful high-school girl into an evil man-slaying succubus demon.  The transformation takes progress over the entire movie and involved a lot of fancy camera work and visual effects magic from MPC.

“Stage one is beautiful Jennifer and then two and three were strictly makeup where her eyes become more recessed and she would start to look plain like the rest of us. And stage four was some custom dentures that KNB made for her, and then visual effects in stage four was mainly facial warping and recessing her eyes some more and having a pinning effect to her irises and a variety of other musculature deforms, just bringing her cheek bones down more.

via Jennifer’s Body: Jaw Dropping VFX | AWN | Animation World Network.

Graphics movie, mpc, vfx