VizWorld.com

The Harvard Business Review has a nice interview with Linda Boff of GE on their use of visualizations.

As a large multinational company, we do have many audiences. And they range from employees and retirees to retail investors and thought leaders. Initially we thought about this — and I think to a large degree continue to — as a way to do external storytelling, but we have found that it works on so many different levels.

As a result, we have used data visualization in places as diverse as our annual reports or our annual report app, which is obviously geared toward investors. We’ve used it with thought leaders. When we released a white paper last fall on the industrial Internet, data visualization was a great way to tell that story.

via How GE Uses Data Visualization to Tell Complex Stories – Gretchen Gavett – Our Editors – Harvard Business Review.

Science ge, interview

Over at the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, I recently coordinated an event where Sean Ahern of the Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Lab came and presented problems and solutions of upcoming exascale computers related to data visualization and analysis.  It’s a good hour-long talk, now available on the Data Analysis & Assessment Center website for you to view and enjoy.

Check it out, and post comments below!

Science exascale, interview, ornl

Over at Fell in Love with Data, Enciro has a great interview with Processing guru Miriah Meyer.  In the interview they get into some of the best and worst features of the tool, and provide some great insight into how to get started with Processing and what you can expect to get from it.

In short, the best aspect of Processing is the amount of code it takes to get a simple scene with callbacks going — it is a small fraction of what it would take with OpenGL. Simple primitives like circles, squares, text, etc. are nicely abstracted into one-line function calls. Mouse and keyboard callbacks are automatically handled. There is a wide variety of common graphics helper functions available, like lerp-ing colors. Full-screen apps work without having to grab weird OS handles.

via Tools from the Pros #1: Miriah Meyer on Processing — Fell in Love with Data.

Science interview, processing

FXGuide talks to two of the guys behind some of this year’s SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival entries, including some great details with Damian Nenow on his impressive geometric clouds in 3dsMax.

Most people would do clouds now as volumetric renders, but I didn’t want to use a volumetric solution because it’s hard to control them and know the final shape. So I created them first as low-poly geometry based clouds. Then, using the Vertex Color Tool in Max, which is an almost forgotten tool, I could use the vertex color data to illuminate the clouds in the way I wanted.

The way it worked was I created these low poly elements, then covered them with thousands of sprites. They had alpha channel textures on them. You can then add photorealistic textures, like photographs of fragments of actual clouds, or you can add hand-drawn ones, which is what I did. So that’s why they look pictorial. I was able to get very fast render times – between 10 to 30 seconds just using a simple scanline renderer.

The Vertex Color tool is far from forgotten in Scientific visualization arenas, we use it regularly here.  I can easily see how it’s not particularly useful amongst “normal” animation people tho.

via Behind the scenes with the Siggraph CAF winners | fxguide.

Graphics 3dsmax, animation, interview, short, siggraph

iSGTW has a great piece on the importance of Scientific Visualization and the growth of dedicated interactive analysis clusters in some of the big DOD/DOE labs, including some great quotes from VizWorld regulars Sean Ahern and Kelly Gaither.

“Data without analysis is nothing,” Ahern said. “If you’ve run a giant simulation, you’ve only done half the work. The real science comes from processing that data into something that people can understand. The job of science is done in the phase of analysis, and that’s purely where we live.”

They also highlite a typically forgotten feature of Visualization:  Computational Debugging.  Certain bugs in HPC codes can be hard to spot numerically, but really show up in visualization.  Problems like bad edge conditions (Using a reflecting boundary instead of a wraparound or exit boundary) or repeating numerical errors lead to patterns that are easily to see visually with interactive visualization tools, but nearly impossible with traditional numerical methods.

via From sight to insight | iSGTW.

Science interview, scientific

HardOCP got a huge scoop this week by interviewing Euclideon CEO Bruce Dell on some of the claims and allegations about their “Unlimited Detail” technology.

The Euclideon approach is one of creating more efficient processing and is not about throwing more power at old technologies. Bruce’s unique approach to 3D graphics has come about due to his isolation from the rest of the industry. He was not professionally educated in 3D graphics and all of his employees mentioned that they had to go through a steep learning curve to grasp the alien approach to building 3 dimensional world “Bruce Dell style.”

The interview itself is fairly long, running over 40 minutes.  He maintains his claims of unlimited detail and shows some preliminary (very preliminary, from 7 years ago) animation support, and continues to claim they have “no memory limits” due to some revolutionary “compaction” algorithms, that he won’t go into details on.

I still think that his technology is the same technology used in many other point-cloud rendering algorithms, they’ve just tweaked it for more gamer-uses.  They do discuss the allegations from Notch, mixing some praise and insults hand in hand.  He shows earlier versions of the technology from his personal development (still full of lots of replication), and various stages of development.

They get a little more in-depth into the algorithm as well:  Basically they’ve got a Point-cloud rendering algorithm joined with a screen-space optimized search algorithm, so that they can quickly search their space along a ray-tracking type path.

I still agree with Notch, and think their major limitation is memory & disk space.  Until they release some numbers on their compression and storage I have to claim all their “unlimited” statements are blatantly false PR.

Now, one thing I think that Euclideon may have in their favor is upcoming Cloud Technologies.  Their current scenes are plainly relying on heavily re-utilized blocks of data simply rotated and cloned around the scene.   This is how they’re reducing their current storage requirements (combined with their data compression schemes).

Like Notch claims, maybe they need 1000 Terabyte hard drive to store their scenes, but if that can all be stored in a giant Google or OnLive storage cloud and accessed remotely then they have a chance to truly revolutionize graphics.  I can imagine a setup of something like OnLive just shipping screen pixels back to users, accessing compute & storage remote, would be impressive.

via HARDOCP – Euclideon & Unlimited Detail – Bruce Dell Interview – Euclideon & Unlimited Detail – Bruce Dell Interview.

Graphics, Science euclideon, interview

idsgn has a nice writeup on the rising popularity of infographics, and talks to Deroy Peraza, one of the principals of Hyperakt, about what’s happened in the field recently and where he thinks it is going.

Now, after working on several infographics projects, I’m beginning to see just how much the information is shaped by the designer. The countless ways information can be represented visually allow for a great flexibility in the overall message you can send the reader. A change in scale or proportion can make the same data look extremely dramatic or very minimal. This slightly worried me as I had come to trust data visualizations as a valuable source of information. After all, I am seeing the raw data with my own eyes. Plus, these visualizations are coming to me from trusted sources like GOOD magazine and others. Could they be misleading me?

They touch briefly on issues like accuracy in visualization and intentionally misleading the viewer, but sadly move on pretty quickly to more business-related questions.

via The good and evil of infographics: idsgn (a design blog).

Graphics infographics, interview

SmartDataCollective has an interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields on the importance of data visualization and it’s many benefits.

Take any computer science Ph.D. and put five pages of rows and numbers in front of them and they’re not going to very quickly understand what’s in there. Our brains just don’t work that way. Our brains work in stories and they work in pictures. What data visualization allows you to do is take a whole bunch of numbers and tell stories with it. There’s almost never just one story in a dataset. Different people might have different stories they care about.

via Pushing the Data Visualization Envelope: an Interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields | SmartData Collective.

Science interview, tableau

At the recent Visualizing Europe event, Enrico Bertini of “Fell in Love with Data” met data visualization freelancer Moritz Stefaner, and now is collecting questions for an upcoming interview!

I will be interviewing Moritz next week about data visualization freelancing. I started collecting a number of questions for him but I need your help! What would you like to ask to Moritz? What are you curious about? Is there a nasty question no one has the courage to ask? I think it would be much much better if you guys tell me what *you* want to know. So, don’t miss this opportunity. You could realize that being a data visualization freelancer is not a dream. It’s definitely possible! And Moritz can tell you how or at least provide some indications.

via Ever Dreamed of Becoming a Data Visualization Freelancer? Ask to Moritz How. — Fell in Love with Data.

Science interview

InsideHPC has a nice short interview with NCSA’s Mark Van Moer about his work with HPC simulation experts on data visualization.

NCSA visualization programmer Mark Van Moer describes how he and Dave Bock work with scientists to transform large amounts of numerical data into images so people can use their ‘visual intuition’ to better grasp what the data mean.

This is the same stuff I do at work every day.. Glad to see it getting some exposure.

via YouTube – ‪Mark Van Moer: Advanced Application Support Visualization Services at NCSA‬‏.

Science interview, ncsa, visualization