I’m a sucker for Minecraft (My daughter & I play almost every day on our personal server), and thanks to the folks at the MIT Media Lab I can now placate my wife by showing her how it can be used for design and rapid prototyping.
Minecraft.Print() then outputs a standard model file for printing to either a professional 3D printer or (MakerBot or RepRap). Now that you’ve printed out your creation, it’s time to show it off. We figure you know how to do this part.
You build your creation inworld and then delineate it with a combination of rare blocks to define 2 corners, then use their python scripts to export it into a printable format.
The MIT Media Lab has a new project underway called ‘Project Playtime’ which combines visualization, immersive environments, and haptic robotics into an interactive storybook world. As technologies like Wii and Kinect bring traditionally ‘research’ technologies like vision tracking and motion tracking into the home, it seems that MIT might really be onto something.
These days, a lot of work at the lab is building on a larger trend: Instead of people adapting to computers by learning to type on a keyboard or use a game controller, computers are adapting to computers by learning to read natural movements, whether on an iPad touchscreen or with a Wii or a Kinect.
Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viegas, recently snatched up by Google, recently held an hour-long presentation at MIT on data and visualization. Famous for the results of their FlowingMedia company, they’ve gained both scientific and public admiration for their clever use of proper visualization methods with artistic flair.
For the most part, he focuses on past projects, which I am sure you’ve seen. However, even if you have seen all of Martin and Fernanda’s work, it’s still worth a watch as he highlights the interesting tidbits that each tool or piece can reveal. The rundown makes you appreciate the work that much more, in the same way you appreciate art when you know the story behind the picture.
The presentation is just under an hour (56 minutes), but well worth the watch.
Next time you start to suffer eye-strain headaches, you may find yourself grabbing the phone not to call the Optometrist, but rather to find there really is “an app for that” courtesy of some MIT researchers.
The application shows two lines on the phone’s screen. It asks users to align them using the phone’s arrow keys while looking through the small plastic device placed atop the screen. The test is repeated eight times with the lines in different places on the screen, after which the application calculates the user’s prescription. The whole process takes about two minutes.
The process requires a small plastic cube that can currently be manufactured for only $2, but at volume could be mere pennies. The work is to be presented next month at SIGGRAPH.
A new FireFox extension from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab collects web browsing behavior and compiles some interesting graphics showing your usage history.
Eyebrowse [csail.mit.edu] is an add-on for Firefox developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, which has the ability to record, visualize, and share one’s browser history in real-time. The resulting data is represented as a collection of insightful data visualizations, such as individual profiles, tickers, page stats or more data-heavy bar graphs, timelines and dot charts that highlight day-by-day usage patterns (e.g. top URLs, #websites over time and time patterns respectively).
Such data could one day supplement (or replace) information from search engine companies like Google & Alexa, making targeted information and detailed analytics more accurate.
A fun little online toy called “Personas” allows you to enter a name, preferably your own” and then have it mapped into a collection of categories.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
The visuals are impressive and the resulting graph has alot of style, however the searching could use some work. With a name like “Randall Hand” it found alot of what I think is NSFW material (“Randall’s hand” was in alot of odd places). Try it out for yourself and see what you get.
MIT has a new online visualization of call activity during the presidential inauguration. Combining call volume with caller location and destination location, they’ve generated a beautiful visualization of phone traffic.
The data analyzed consists of hourly counts of mobile phone calls served in Washington, D.C. and includes the origin of the phones involved in the calls. The map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.
I’m a sucker for Minecraft (My daughter & I play almost every day on our personal server), and thanks to the folks at the MIT Media Lab I can now placate my wife by showing her how it can be used for design and rapid prototyping.
The MIT Media Lab has a new project underway called ‘Project Playtime’ which combines visualization, immersive environments, and haptic robotics into an interactive storybook world. As technologies like Wii and Kinect bring traditionally ‘research’ technologies like vision tracking and motion tracking into the home, it seems that MIT might really be onto something.
A new FireFox extension from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab collects web browsing behavior and compiles some interesting graphics showing your usage history.
A fun little online toy called “Personas” allows you to enter a name, preferably your own” and then have it mapped into a collection of categories.
VizWorld.com 
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