Dec 6, 2010

Interactive Information Visualization for the Kinect? Something like Jer Thop's "Just Landed-36 Hours" might work nicely if revamped!

I follow the O'Reilly Radar blogs and came across a recent post about an information visualization created by blprnt two years ago using Processing. I think it would have great potential if it was re-purposed for use on the Kinect! In the article, Edd Dumbill discusses the advantages of using Processing to create data and information visualizations.  


One example of the power of Processing is an information visualization, "Just Landed -36 Hours, created by Jer Thorp.  Jer gathered tweets from Twitter that included the statement, "just landed", along with location information for each tweet, within a 36-hour period, to create the visualization.


36 Hours- Just Landed is a great 3D visualization of air travel on our planet.  I especially lik the different views that the application provides. As soon as I watched the Just Landed video, I thought it would be great if it could be revamped for use on the Kinect!   (Leave a comment if you know of anyone working on a project in this area.)


Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.


Information about the video from blprnt's Vimeo site:


"I was discussing H1N1 with a bioinformatics friend of mine last weekend, and we ended up talking about ways that epidemiologists model transmission of disease. I wondered how some of the information that is shared voluntarily on social networks might be used to build useful models of various kinds...I'm also interested in visualizing information that isn't implicitly shared - but instead is inferred or suggested...This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...'. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta's Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time...I'm not entirely sure where this will end up going, but I am reasonably happy with the results so far.   Built with Processing (processing.org) You can read more about this project on my blog - blog.blprnt.com"


RELATED
Strata Gems:  Write your own visualizations:  The Processing language is an easy way to get started with graphics
Edd Dumbill, O'Reilly Radar, 12/3/10

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