VizWorld.com

An interesting visualization of Piano Music makes use of the repetitive design of the piano, 12 semitones on black and white keys, and maps it onto a spiral where each ring of the spiral indicates another octave.

In this representation, the notes with higher frequencies are in the center of the spiral, starting with C8 (as in the piano). Each radial block of keys represents a single pitch class, so octaves (when two adjacent notes of the same pitch class are played togeter) look like a pair of keys being pressed radially. You’ll see this a lot in the Scott Joplin videos I’m going to upload shortly.

An interesting approach that yields some neat graphics.  Not terribly interesting from a science aspect, but fun to watch.

Science music, spiral, visualization

Jeff Heard was tasked with creating some beautiful supporting graphics for the director of iBiblio to include in a keynote speech at code4lib based on iBiblio’s approximately 8TB of weblogs accumulated since the beginning of the project.  His creation is this interesting “sphere” design showing source traffic.

I broke all these addresses up into subnets and assigned a unique position in a sphere to each subnet. Longitude is the first octet, mapped from 0,255 to (-180,180) Latitude is the second octet, mapped from 0,255 to (-90,90), and the radius out from the center is the third octet. The subnets are visualized by a PovRay blob component or a sphere in the case of more than 10% of active internet subnets have hit the site. The radius of the sphere or the strength of the static field behind the blob is the number of IP addresses within the subnet that have touched the site.

The culmination of his work can be seen on his site, a massive 6kx3.5k poster at 300dpi.  Rendered via POVRay, it’s interesting to look at.

via Visualizing iBiblio Traffic Redux | Hieroglyphics.

Science ibiblio, povray, visualization

A new case study from VSG, the Visualization Sciences Group, discusses how tire-maker Michelin has integrated MeshViz XLM and OpenInventor into their simulation analysis.

In order to handle the increasing size of data volumes (e.g. full 3D computations with all surrounding objects)‚ Michelin needs more and more high-performance tools such as VSG’s new module MeshViz XLM, which completely lives up to their in-house customers’ expectations. In particular‚ MeshViz XLM can directly access application data structures, avoiding time and memory wasting copying of data, and directly supports parametric nonlinear mesh cells.

Read the full press release after the break, and read the Case Study here (Download PDF, or View Online).

Read more…

Science openinventor, visualization, vsg

The latest issue of ‘nature|methods” journal contains give special articles all about visualization of biological data.

A series of five commissioned Reviews discuss the challenges of visualizing biological data and the visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data.

The five articles are:

• Forward: Supplement on Visualizing Biological Data, by Daniel Evanko
• Commentary: Visualizing biological data – now and in the future
• Review: Visualizing Genomes: Techniques and Challenges
• Review: Visualization of multiple alignments, phylogenies, and gene family evolution
• Review: Visualization of image data from cells to organisms
• Review: Visualization of macromolecular structures
• Review: Visualization of omics data for systems biology

Far too many names to include here, but all articles are available in Abstract, Full Text, and downloadable PDF.  Go check `em out.

via Table of contents : Nature Methods.

Science biomed, genome, visualization

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has both a 4-sided CAVE (3 walls & a floor), and a large 9-projector display wall, that they use for education and research.  In a fluffy writeup on the UAB website, they talk to Dr. Bharat Soni about the potentials for the technology.

“This facility creates a virtual environment and multi-dimension visualization capability resembling a real world,” explains Bharat Soni, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “At UAB, we’re using this technology mostly for engineering and health-care applications, but the possibilities really are virtually endless.”

They cover uses for visualizing airflow simulations, biomedical data sets, and connecting it to haptic devices for even better results.  I like this idea in particular:

Soni’s team is exploring collaborations with the School of Health Professions and Birmingham’s Lakeshore Foundation that will enable patients to perform rehabilitation activities in this controlled environment. “This is an exciting area in which to expand our 3-D capabilities because it has so many practical applications,” says School of Engineering Dean Linda C. Lucas, Ph.D. “In this virtual environments you can see the limitations and the areas that are showing progress, and all this is done with minimal risk to the patient.”

For example, amputees often are taught to water ski as part of their therapy in order to strengthen their muscles and improve balance. The cube can become a lake, and with the help of haptic and other devices the patients can experience virtual skiing.

See the article, and see the smiling Dr. Soni & Alan Shih, at the UAB site.

via Visualization cube offers infinite educational possibilities.

Hardware, Science biomed, cave, uab, visualization

Designers, coders, artists, and visualization folks alike can start filling out travel request as a new reason to attend London’s IEEE IV010 conference comes courtesy of Information Aesthetics: the DAVis`10, or International Symposium on Design & Aesthetics in Visualization.

“This symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of design, art and related disciplines. The goal is to share their stories and experiences on how the needs and goals of both users and businesses are met through information visualisation.

It supports the publication of research in two general domains: Design and Aesthetics. Design refers to the development of visualisation as a creative design process. Aesthetics refers to the role of user experience in visualisation, as understood in three distinct components: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience.

Deadlines are tight tho, just 2 weeks (March 1st) but even if you don’t present you definitely want to attend.

via DaVis’10: Design and Aesthetics in Visualization – information aesthetics.

Science conference, davis, visualization

Apple is rapidly approaching their next landmark, 10 Billion songs downloaded via iTunes.  They’ve placed a counter on their website and announced that the lucky downloader of that 10-billionth song will receive a $10k iTunes gift card.  Robert Kosara has written some scripts to download the currently counter data at regular intervals and created some nice interactive javascript visualization on his site with the data.

The bottom part of the visualization shows the number of downloads as a blue area, and the rate of downloads as a line. The pattern in the background has an edge every six hours, so two gray and two white stripes make up one day. The top view is a circular view, with one full round around the circle representing one day. The gray wedges correspond to the gray stripes in the bottom view, plus there are additional lines for each hour to make comparison easier. The lines are color-coded by the day, so the corresponding data in both views can be identified.

No surprise to see a cyclical shape in the visualization, people download more during daylight that midnight of course, but the the circular graph is a clever way of displaying it.

See all the details, with links to download the data yourself, on his site.

via iTunes Ten Billion Song Downloads Visualization | EagerEyes.org.

Science interactive, itunes, visualization

The UCLA Asia Institute will be hosting a presentation next Thursday (February 18th, 3:00PM – 4:30PM) from Professor Lewis Lancaster and Mr Howie Lan (both of UC Berkeley) where they will demonstrate a new visualization tool for large text analysis.

A demonstration of a new method of search and retrieval of word occurrence that displays results in abstract visualization. This system developed with support from the National Science Foundation and the Luce Foundation by Professor Lancaster and Mr. Howie Lan is based on the digital version of the Korean Buddhist canon. The interface system will provide a new approach to the study of the 13th century Haein Sa printing blocks content.

In addition to the demonstration, they will discuss how to deal with large datasets and search results that return thousands of hits at a time.  The presentation is free.

via Visualization of Pattern Recognition from the Korean Buddhist Texts: Computational Humanities at the UCLA Asia Institute.

Science presentation, text, visualization

Those of you looking for a free data visualization and analysis tool and found Google Fusion Tables lacking have a new tool to check out : Tableau Public.

“Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “We created this product because we want to make data a first class citizen on the web. We want to change the way people interact with data online by letting them tell stories with flexibility and beauty.”

Already getting rave reviews from the folks in the beta, perhaps most notably Robert Kosara (eagereyes) who has been using it to visualize the massive Climate dataset released recently, it’s now freely available for the world to try via their website Tableaupublic.com.  For some inspiration of how you can use it, check out Brad Feld’s visualization of his running data in the MIT Technology Review and the Funding Breakdown for the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.

See the full press release after the break, along with a sample visualization of The 2009 Investments of the Top 100 VC firms, from CrunchBase data..

Read more…

Science free, interactive, software, tableau, visualization

Twitter has just started a new blog where they talk about some of the challenges that have faced, and new features that are coming down the road. As part of the kick off for the blog, they have created a visualization using CodeSwarm. From the article:

Icons represent developers, and particles represent files added or modified. It doesn’t cover prototypes or contributions to open source, so it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.

Take a look at the embedded after the break, then hit the site for more news.

Read more…

Graphics code swarm, twitter, visualization