While personally I wouldn’t consider jogging with an infant’s stroller, industrial design firm phil&teds has made a pretty good living out of designing children’s products for use by ‘active parents’, and their latest creation is the “World’s Fastest Jogger”, a children’s stroller specifically designed for jogging, modeled and designed in modo401.
“At phil&teds we don’t like to muck around with projects in the hope that we will invent something fantastic over time,” said Brace. “We always test the waters in advance to reduce risk, but in this case, visualizing the final product in modo told us most of what we really needed to know. I can honestly say that modo is the best of the many software solutions I have used over the years.”
Juice Analytics has a great writeup of Edward Tufte’s “Small Multiples” concept, using many small iconic visualizations to replace large overly complex ones.
Small multiples can show rich, multi-dimensional data without trying to cram all that information into a single, overly-complex chart. Small multiples go by many names, including Trellis Chart, Lattice Chart, Grid Chart, and Panel Chart. I would even argue that sparklines are a simpler, smaller cousin of small multiples
Along the way he shows many examples and references from the likes of Many Eyes, Stephen Few, and Tableau. Definitely worth a read;
3d-io Gmbh has updated their skinning package BonesPro to a new version 4.20 that adds in support for Autodesk’s 2011 products including 3dsMax and 3dsMax Design. They maintain backwards compatibility all the way through 3dsMax 9, but manage to add in several new features:
Added support for Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 and Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011.
BonesPro now accepts shape objects as bones.
Added support for various additional object types as bones (i.e. dummy helpers) and improved handling and accuracy of certain types like CAT muscles.
Soft selection now supports custom falloff curves.
Various minor fixes, including improved *.bpm file handling of CAT bones.
You can download a free trial version (good for 30 runs), or buy the full version for 299 €.
Everyone that has taken advanced Calculus remembers those nightmarish problems of revolving curves around axes, and integrated the resulting volumes. An unlikely article in the New York Times discusses this with the signature project of the class, computing the volume of the space between two perpendicular intersecting cylinders, and gets into how you go about visualizing such a problem.
Archimedes managed to find it, but only by virtue of his astounding ingenuity. He used a mechanical method based on levers and centers of gravity, in effect weighing the shape in his mind by balancing it against others he already understood. The downside of his approach, besides the prohibitive brilliance it required, was that it applied only to a limited range of shapes.
PSFK has a new infographic online that shows the surprisingly decline of cash transactions over the last decade, based on data from “The Way We Pay” report from the Payments Council of the UK.
The number of cash transactions in the last ten years tell their own story. According to the Payments Council statistics, in 1999 three-quarters of all transactions were carried out using cash (73 percent), compared to 59 percent in 2009. The Council suggests that by 2018 less than half of all transactions will be paid by cash.
There appears to be a lot of information in this graphic, although it’s rather difficult to interpret. Each circle is broken into 4 rings that show the number and value of cash and total transactions, but since the emphasis is supposed to be on Cash vs Credit, it seems odd that they interleave them among the rings. Rather than mapping colors to Cash vs Credit, the colors are mapped to Number of Transactions vs Value of Transactions. The outermost green ring is the “Value of Cash Transactions”, so I think you’re supposed to marvel at just how thin that line is.
Inglobe Technologies, an Italian software company specializing in augmented reality solutions, has release the first Augmented Reality Plug-in for Autodesk 3dsMax. Based on their existing ARmedia platform, it allows the user to visualize their 3dsMax models on their physical workspace using a simple webcam and printable image-marker.
By means of the AR-media™ Exporter users can create and publish augmented reality files autonomously. Files created by the Exporter can be visualized on any computer with the freely available AR-media™ Player, without the need of having Autodesk® 3dsMax® and the Plugin installed. Users can now create their own 3dsMax® Augmented Reality models and distribute them to their clients as independent, stand-alone files and let their clients experience such models in Augmented Reality in a click.
Look after the break for all the details, and another demonstration.
The New York Times has an interactive infographic showing how the ash cloud from the icelandic volcano has spread over Europe, and id affecting airports. Obviously red means that the airport is closed; yellow means that the airport has reduced operations; green means that the airport is open and only flights to the regions affected by the ash cloud are canceled. It looks like my friends will not make it out of London today.
A list of airports that have been affected by a cloud of ash from an erupting volcano in Iceland. Leave your comments below.
NASA has been publishing some nice shots of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland spewing ash into the atmosphere. This has caused airlines to cancel many flights around Europe.
The MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. EDT) on April 17, 2010.
The Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland erupted Wednesday, April 14, for the second time this month. The volcano is still spewing ash into the air and the ash clouds are impacting air travel in Northern Europe.
NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team
I normally do not think about how a volcano will affect my travel plans. However, some of my friends are stuck in London right now since their flight was canceled last Thursday. it took them awhile to get their luggage released by the airlines. (Can you imagine being stuck in a foreign country without your luggage?) They are due to make it out today and fly home to Uganda, if the ash plume from the volcano does not cancel their flight, again.
Information Is Beautiful has posted an infographic comparing the emissions of CO2 from the European aviation industry versus that being released by the Icelandic volcano. My favorite part of the whole thing is how they calculated the CO2 emissions from the volcano:
Of course this graphic has special meaning to me since it directly affects my friends.
UPDATE 1: A few people have asked so here’s how we estimated the CO2 emissions of Eyjafjallajoekull.
We couldn’t find a direct CO2 emissions figure for the icelandic volcano but we did find an emissions figure for Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) – 3,000 tons a day (Source)
When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it emitted 42 million tons of CO2 (source) and 17 million tons of SO2 (source). That’s a CO2-to-SO2 ratio of 2.47:1
Applying that ratio to the 3,000 tons of SO2 emitted by Eyjafjallajoekull gives us the figure of 7,412 tons of CO2 per day.
Clearly, this is a ballpark figure and it’s likely to be more complex. If any vulcanologists are passing by and would like to enhance or correct our numbers, please help yourselves to the data!
UPDATE 2: We’ve been sent some new figures from the Nordic Volcanological Institute of the University of Iceland (thanks Nicole!). They’ve measured the CO2:SO2 ratio as 5:1 (source). So Eyjafjallajoekull is emitting an estimated 15,000 tons of CO2 a day – twice our original estimate. We’ve updated the diagram accordingly
It’s been a while since we heard anything about the interesting Augmented Reality Lego Set kiosk that mysteriously popped up in Illinois, but a press release lets us know that it was created by MetaIO, and will now be coming to all Lego stores worldwide.
“The DIGITAL BOX helps consumers get a better impression of our products,” says Torben Nielsen, Director of 3D technology from the LEGO Group´s Digital Development Department, and adds: “we`ve had very positive feedback from our stores and customers. Thanks to metaio`s technology, we can excite and inform our customers on a new level.”
Read the full release and see a demonstration video of the technology, after the break.
While personally I wouldn’t consider jogging with an infant’s stroller, industrial design firm phil&teds has made a pretty good living out of designing children’s products for use by ‘active parents’, and their latest creation is the “World’s Fastest Jogger”, a children’s stroller specifically designed for jogging, modeled and designed in modo401.
Juice Analytics has a great writeup of Edward Tufte’s “Small Multiples” concept, using many small iconic visualizations to replace large overly complex ones.
3d-io Gmbh has updated their skinning package 
It’s been a while since we heard anything about the interesting 
VizWorld.com 
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