InformationAesthetics brings us a great talk from TEDx on Molecular Animation. Chemistry was one of the earliest forms of visualization, classic ball and stick visualizations that brought particles tinier than the eye can see to life. Today, many molecular visualizations are the same but new technologies are coming along to show new effects in bonds and structures with amazing detail and opening the world to whole new types of computational chemistry.
Next to a movie that originates back from around 2003 that focuses on the replication of DNA, he also shows a newer version that has been accomplished through “updated science, updated technology”, revealing how DNA mitosis through a nifty process of some quite ‘mechanical’ signal broadcasting system. At the end, he highlights the processes behind a malaria infection of a human child via a mosquito bite, through invasion of cellular tissues including the liver and blood. malaria spreads in your blood.
Aaron Koblin, famous for his work with Flight Patterns and other interactive visualizations, has a great presentation at TED where he discusses the many ways you can introduce the human element into visualizations.
Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data — and at times vast numbers of people — and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the “Wilderness Downtown” video that customizes for the user, his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human.
On GE’s website they’ve got a pretty interactive visualization, created with help from TEDMED, that charts various aspects of people’s health for individual states against the national averages.
The visualization above, created as part of GE’s sponsorship of TEDMED, allows you to take an in depth look at the relationship between risk factors and common conditions by state. You might be surprised by what you discover. Please take a look and share your insights.
Click on any of the circles for more detailed numbers and a reference of where that number came from.
The Huffington Post points us to a fun TED talk from David McCandless about new ways to mash up and merge data into fun and useful visualizations, and slyly throws in a plug for his book The Visual Miscellaneum.
McCandless’ genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data — the actual graphics aren’t the real innovation here — as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). McCandless contributes a monthly big-think graphic to the Guardian’s Data Blog, and makes viral graphics for his blog Information Is Beautiful.
The videosphere project aims to link and visualize the many semantic relationships between video, and has been initially loaded with the TED talks. Computing a “relationship” factor based on the shared tags between videos, the result is a fun interactive space where you can see the many relationships between the videos and find unexpected relationships.
The University of Washington hosted TEDx Seattle today, and now their Master’s of Communication in Digital Media department (MCDM) is awarding their first “Digital Disruptor” award to Tableau Software for their Tableau Public software. The award is given to any local entity that pushes communication with innovative technology solutions, looking to identify “seismic shifts” caused by the digital media revolution.
“As an application that facilitates the use of data visualization in websites and blogs, I see ‘Tableau Public’ as the YouTube of storytelling through data,” said Hanson Hosein, the MCDM’s Director. ”Societal demand for transparency calls for more disclosure from our major institutions in the form of data. Tableau’s platform allows us to digest that information and share it with others. It was obvious to me that we should recognize Tableau for this major development, as we all seek to make sense of communication in the ‘Data Age.’”
Congratulations to Tableau! Read the full release after the break.
A great TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee discusses the potential and possibilities of merging open data and data visualization into fun and fascinating new ways.
At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for “raw data now” — for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.
Infosthetics points us to a recent TED Talk from Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, where he demonstrates their new “Pivot” technology. Based on the Seadragon technology, it offers views of an immense quantity of data with very nice and smooth zooming & multiresolution features.
“Right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse, we talk about the curse of information overload, drowning in data. What if we can turn that upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden.”
At the recent TED2010 event, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Microsoft’s Bing Maps research in front of the live audience. Starting with the already available aerial view, isometric view, street view and others, he then moves on to showing features in development. This starts with Flickr geo-tagged photo integration, and then moves into their “backpack camera” that enables street-view level imagery in internal spaces. Then he moves onto the most impressive new feature: Live geotagged streaming video from a location, as some of his fellow employees stream video of themselves playing at a local fish market into his browser. An interesting example of a kind of reverse-augmented reality, augmenting a computer display with live video, but very powerful.
A new TEDxUSC talk from Paul Debevec gets into the details of “Digital Emily”, a digitally reconstructed face so realistic is can withstand multiple takes.
Paul Debevec’s digital inventions have powered the breathtaking visual effects in films like The Matrix, Superman Returns, King Kong and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Called “Hollywood’s Master of Light” by MIT’s Technology Review, Paul Debevec leads the Graphics Laboratory at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, where he directs the development of the Light Stage systems, which capture and simulate how people and objects appear in real-world illumination.
InformationAesthetics brings us a great talk from TEDx on Molecular Animation. Chemistry was one of the earliest forms of visualization, classic ball and stick visualizations that brought particles tinier than the eye can see to life. Today, many molecular visualizations are the same but new technologies are coming along to show new effects in bonds and structures with amazing detail and opening the world to whole new types of computational chemistry.
Aaron Koblin, famous for his work with Flight Patterns and other interactive visualizations, has a great presentation at TED where he discusses the many ways you can introduce the human element into visualizations.
On GE’s website they’ve got a pretty interactive visualization, created with help from TEDMED, that charts various aspects of people’s health for individual states against the national averages.
The videosphere project aims to link and visualize the many semantic relationships between video, and has been initially loaded with the TED talks. Computing a “relationship” factor based on the shared tags between videos, the result is a fun interactive space where you can see the many relationships between the videos and find unexpected relationships.
The University of Washington hosted TEDx Seattle today, and now their Master’s of Communication in Digital Media department (MCDM) is awarding their first “Digital Disruptor” award to Tableau Software for their Tableau Public software. The award is given to any local entity that pushes communication with innovative technology solutions, looking to identify “seismic shifts” caused by the digital media revolution.
A great TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee discusses the potential and possibilities of merging open data and data visualization into fun and fascinating new ways.
Infosthetics points us to a recent TED Talk from Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, where he demonstrates their new “Pivot” technology. Based on the Seadragon technology, it offers views of an immense quantity of data with very nice and smooth zooming & multiresolution features.
At the recent TED2010 event, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Microsoft’s Bing Maps research in front of the live audience. Starting with the already available aerial view, isometric view, street view and others, he then moves on to showing features in development. This starts with Flickr geo-tagged photo integration, and then moves into their “backpack camera” that enables street-view level imagery in internal spaces. Then he moves onto the most impressive new feature: Live geotagged streaming video from a location, as some of his fellow employees stream video of themselves playing at a local fish market into his browser. An interesting example of a kind of reverse-augmented reality, augmenting a computer display with live video, but very powerful.
A new TEDxUSC talk from Paul Debevec gets into the details of “Digital Emily”, a digitally reconstructed face so realistic is can withstand multiple takes.
VizWorld.com 
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