Feb 3, 2009
New SMARTBoard Touch Recognition from SMART Technologies: The YouTube Video
Here's the plug:
"SMART's new Touch Recognition feature allows the SMART Board to recognize your touch and switch modes automatically. You can write with a pen, erase with the palm and move objects around with your finger without having to access other tools, buttons or on-screen menus."
Related
Learning Through Touch: The story behind the SMART Table pdf (Heather Ellwood, EdCompass, January 2009)
SMART Table Website
Feb 1, 2009
PICNIC 2008: Media, Technology, Entertainment, Art & Science
PICNIC, an interdisciplinary conference, is held each year in Amsterdam, with delegates who come from a variety of countries. "PICNIC spotlights cutting-edge products and services at the intersection of media, technology, arts and entertainment, and brings together entrepreneurs, investors, creators as well as scientists, and other industry leaders." PICNIC 2008 was attended by over 8000 people.
One of the fun highlights of the conference: Participants were encouraged to use a RFID-enabled tag, linked to their online profiles, which enabled them to participate in a variety of interactive Social RFID games.
Videos of the 2008 PICNIC presentations and panels can be found online on the Vimeo website. I've selected a few that I found interesting, especially the ones from the "Can You See What I Know" strand about data visualization.
Some themes and videos from Picnic 2008
Can You See What I Know?
"Artist, scientists and designers are exploring a new world of software aesthetics and developing new languages for interactive and visual expression. How can we make information intuitively meaningful?" Presenter: Paul Wouters, program leader of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Paul Wouters at PICNIC08: Can you see what I know? from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Quotes:
"How do you mediate the relationships between the arts and sciences, and in fact, more specifically, between academy and commerce?"
"Data is not the end of theory, nor is it the beginning, a mistake made by many social scientists. Data are the result of theory...Massive, bottom-up annotation of our physical and symbolic environment exemplifies therefore not for the end of theory, but for it's proliferation. This does, of course, considerably raise the stakes. It intensifies the social responsibility for all knowledge creators...The answer will be given by how we shape visual knowledge".
"The trouble of cross disciplinary work is difficult. It is a nightmare, and there are reasons for it."
Design as a Collaborative Process Presenter: Bill Moggridge, founder of IDEO, a design firm.
"New interactions develop into new design practices; new processes induce new forms of creativity. How can creators involve the people they want to create for in their work?"
Bill Moggridge at PICNIC08: Design as a Collaborative Process from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Celebrating Collaborative Creativity-Showcase of Creative Production
Presenter: Ton Roosendaal, founder of Blender, an open-source, cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation
Ton Roosendaal at PICNIC08: Celebrating Collaborative Creativity - Showcase of Creative Production from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Emerging Real-Time Social Web: Philip Rosedale, founder of 3D online world of Second Life
Philip Rosedale at PICNIC08: The Emerging Real-Time Social Web from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
What Will Google Do? How Google Innovates
Gisel Hiscock, Director of Business development, Google EMEA
Gisel Hiscock at PICNIC08: What will Google do? from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
From presentation:
This is what Google DOES
Start with a clear mission that withstands time:
Visualizing Knowledge Spaces - Marco Quaggiotto
Knowledge cartographies / Trailer from Marco Quaggiotto on Vimeo.
Knowledge Cartography (pdf)
Knowledge Atlas: A cartographic approach to social structures of knowledge (pdf)
One of the fun highlights of the conference: Participants were encouraged to use a RFID-enabled tag, linked to their online profiles, which enabled them to participate in a variety of interactive Social RFID games.
Videos of the 2008 PICNIC presentations and panels can be found online on the Vimeo website. I've selected a few that I found interesting, especially the ones from the "Can You See What I Know" strand about data visualization.
Some themes and videos from Picnic 2008
Can You See What I Know?
"Artist, scientists and designers are exploring a new world of software aesthetics and developing new languages for interactive and visual expression. How can we make information intuitively meaningful?" Presenter: Paul Wouters, program leader of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Paul Wouters at PICNIC08: Can you see what I know? from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Quotes:
"How do you mediate the relationships between the arts and sciences, and in fact, more specifically, between academy and commerce?"
"Data is not the end of theory, nor is it the beginning, a mistake made by many social scientists. Data are the result of theory...Massive, bottom-up annotation of our physical and symbolic environment exemplifies therefore not for the end of theory, but for it's proliferation. This does, of course, considerably raise the stakes. It intensifies the social responsibility for all knowledge creators...The answer will be given by how we shape visual knowledge".
"The trouble of cross disciplinary work is difficult. It is a nightmare, and there are reasons for it."
Design as a Collaborative Process Presenter: Bill Moggridge, founder of IDEO, a design firm.
"New interactions develop into new design practices; new processes induce new forms of creativity. How can creators involve the people they want to create for in their work?"
Bill Moggridge at PICNIC08: Design as a Collaborative Process from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Celebrating Collaborative Creativity-Showcase of Creative Production
Presenter: Ton Roosendaal, founder of Blender, an open-source, cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation
Ton Roosendaal at PICNIC08: Celebrating Collaborative Creativity - Showcase of Creative Production from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
Emerging Real-Time Social Web: Philip Rosedale, founder of 3D online world of Second Life
Philip Rosedale at PICNIC08: The Emerging Real-Time Social Web from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
What Will Google Do? How Google Innovates
Gisel Hiscock, Director of Business development, Google EMEA
Gisel Hiscock at PICNIC08: What will Google do? from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.
From presentation:
This is what Google DOES
Start with a clear mission that withstands time:
- Democratising access to the world's information
- The best search engine should give you exactly what you want
- People should have access to information whenever they want and however they want it
- Keep it open
- The litmus test: does it stand the test of time?
- Traditional product management; incremental features, ROI/Finance-driven, pie charts, etc.
- Think small, niche solutions, short-term thinking, incremental improvement, vertical solutions
- Go it alone- At Google, all information and vision must be shared across all teams
- Forget our guiding principle: users come first, not money.
- Hire the best
- Create a culture of "Do's"
- Everyone can contribute - ideas come from everywhere and all people
- Share all information - objects and plans are posted on line.
- Share your vision at every level. Vision must be shared with the team
- Morph ideas, don't just kill them
- Speed matters (Google Labs with feedback from users and customers)
- Data driven:"We are fully data driven...there is no decision that is made without pure data, and real numbers to back it up.
- Users come first
- "You really have to focus on what the user wants, what is it that they want to do on line,
- 20% is at our core- everyone in the company has time to work on their individual projects.
Visualizing Knowledge Spaces - Marco Quaggiotto
Knowledge cartographies / Trailer from Marco Quaggiotto on Vimeo.
Knowledge Cartography (pdf)
Knowledge Atlas: A cartographic approach to social structures of knowledge (pdf)
Reflections: Need for Interactive Infoviz for the Financial Biz, Business Leaders, Government Officials, Educators and the Rest of Us...
If you follow this blog because you are interested in emerging multimedia technologies such as multi-touch and gesture-based displays and tables, you probably know that there is a huge void in terms of content -rich applications for these systems.
Most of the demos show how you can zoom, rotate, and resize photographs, sort through your "stuff", or bat things around the surface as a game. There is so much more power behind surface technology that needs to be realized!
Here are some of my reflections...
As I write this post, leaders of the financial industry, large corporations, and governments are in Davos, Switzerland at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. It is interesting to note that all of these bright men and women are struggling to grasp the enormity of the world's financial crisis and come up with strategies that hopefully will work.
The graphic below depicts how much has changed in the world economy between the 2008 annual meeting of the World Economic forum and the present. It lacks the "wow" factor that one would expect for an application running on an interactive display. With some tweaking, it could be transformed into an application that supports two people interacting with the data at the same time.
(Click above photo to link to the interactive graphic.)
This makes sense.
There simply is too much data to absorb, explore, analyze, understand, and act upon. It is difficult to know if you have all of the data that you need, because some of it is difficult to access. It doesn't matter if you are a banker, a stock broker, a CEO, a CFO, a government leader, an economist, a shareholder, or a student. The current state of world economic affairs is the strongest evidence that our methods simply aren't working.
The work of Hans Gosling provides a good example of how information visualization can help increase our understanding of large quantities of data over time. Hans Gosling is a Swedish professor of development and one of the founders of Gapminder. ("Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view".)
The following video is Rosling's latest presentation, focused on debunking the myths regarding population growth:
What stops population growth? from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.
Here are some thoughts:
I started keeping up with the current economic on a more serious level in October. I was becoming numb from information overload. My knowledge about the economic and financial fields was lacking, so I decided to create a blog that I entitled "Economic Sounds and Sights" as my personal on-line repository of searchable content.
The blog has lots of pictures, info-graphics, embedded video clips, and links to a wide range of web-based resources. In my quest for information, I came across interesting quotes, jokes about economists, and tales of greed and scandals. I even found one blogger who has responded to each unfolding event of our economic crisis by re-writing lyrics to popular tunes.
For an example of one of my posts, read "Celestial Economic Sphere, Data Viz for the Finance Biz..." It is my hope that the content I've collected and shared on the blog will become part of an interactive information visualization/timeline designed to support two or more people on a large display or table.
11/4/09: Update: The economic crisis got a bit complicated, so I stopped posting. The blog still remains on-line. Interactive Infoviz for the Health Care Biz will be the topic of an upcoming post.
RELATED
Three Mirrors of Interaction: A Holistic Approach to User Interfaces (Bill Buxton)
Andreas Nicolas Fischer (Berlin-based artist who works with data, sculpture, and code.)
Google Spreadsheets Data Visualization Gadgets
Google Motion Chart (like Gapminder)
Panopticon
Death and Taxes (Wallstats.Com: The Art of Information)
2009 Index of Economic Freedom (Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation)
Visual Business Intelligence Stephen Few's Blog
Sunlight Foundation
Transparency Timeline - A History of Congressional Public Access Reform
"The Sunlight Foundation is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency."
MapLight.org "Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection"
Free Our Data Blog (Guardian Technology campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens)
2009 Death and Taxes Interactive Graphic (Click to explore.)
Mark Lombardi
Take the time to listen to NPR's Lynn Neary's interview with Robert Hobbs, curator of the an exhibit of the late Lombardi's "conspiracy" art/visualizations linking global finance and international terrorism. Lombardi's background as an archivist and reference librarian served him well in his art depicting interesting large-scale networks. Although his art was not interactive, his techniques have inspired the development of computer-based interactive information visualizations.
FYI:
To satisfy my curiosity about Mark Lombardi, I followed a link to "Obsessive-Generous": Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi, by Frances Richard, posted in the 2001-02 section of the WBURG website.
The examples below are of Lombardi's work connecting the relationships between George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens:
George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
c. 1979-90, 5th Version 1999
Enlarged Version
Close-up of network detail
Most of the demos show how you can zoom, rotate, and resize photographs, sort through your "stuff", or bat things around the surface as a game. There is so much more power behind surface technology that needs to be realized!
Here are some of my reflections...
As I write this post, leaders of the financial industry, large corporations, and governments are in Davos, Switzerland at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. It is interesting to note that all of these bright men and women are struggling to grasp the enormity of the world's financial crisis and come up with strategies that hopefully will work.
The graphic below depicts how much has changed in the world economy between the 2008 annual meeting of the World Economic forum and the present. It lacks the "wow" factor that one would expect for an application running on an interactive display. With some tweaking, it could be transformed into an application that supports two people interacting with the data at the same time.
(Click above photo to link to the interactive graphic.)
Via the Wall Street Journal
Here are more examples related to the current economic crisis:
Annus Horribilis in 3D
Financial chart by artist Andreas Nicholas Fischer via Dan Pink
Life in the Left Tail
(Click for a larger image) via Greg Mankiw's Blog:
Random Observations for Students of Economics, via Daily Kos
I've been thinking about interactive information visualization and how it can support our understanding of the current economic crisis a bit lately, inspired by what I learned in Dr. Robert Kosara's InfoViz class I took last year. In a recent post on the Eager Eyes blog, Dr. Kosara floats the idea of the establishment of a "National Data Agency".Here are more examples related to the current economic crisis:
Annus Horribilis in 3D
Financial chart by artist Andreas Nicholas Fischer via Dan Pink
Life in the Left Tail
(Click for a larger image) via Greg Mankiw's Blog:
Random Observations for Students of Economics, via Daily Kos
"On this chart each block represents a year and each column represents a range of return on the S&P index. Over on the right side are those lucky years where the index has soared upward from 50-60%. In the middle are the more typical years, where the market has risen less than 10%. That little box on the far left? Yeah, that's this year..And hey, how many of you knew the S&P had been around since 1825?." - Devilstower of the Daily KOS
"What we need is a National Data Agency (NDA). This agency would be tasked with collecting data that all other agencies collect and produce, and making it available in a central place and in electronic, machine-readable form. There could and should be a reasonable data presentation on its website, perhaps even a National Data Dashboard (showing data of interest like debt, spending, jobless rate, etc.). But the bulk of data analysis would be left to third parties: analysts, journalists, citizens (and also aliens like me). Easily available data would make for more insightful reporting, more informed decisions, and endless business opportunities." -Robert Kosara
This makes sense.
There simply is too much data to absorb, explore, analyze, understand, and act upon. It is difficult to know if you have all of the data that you need, because some of it is difficult to access. It doesn't matter if you are a banker, a stock broker, a CEO, a CFO, a government leader, an economist, a shareholder, or a student. The current state of world economic affairs is the strongest evidence that our methods simply aren't working.
The work of Hans Gosling provides a good example of how information visualization can help increase our understanding of large quantities of data over time. Hans Gosling is a Swedish professor of development and one of the founders of Gapminder. ("Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view".)
The following video is Rosling's latest presentation, focused on debunking the myths regarding population growth:
What stops population growth? from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.
"Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels. We are a modern “museum” that helps making the world understandable, using Internet."
The visual representation of economic data, if done well, packs a powerful punch. To me, images form a kernel in my memory related to the messages conveyed, and when recalled, also bring up a range of related conceptual details. It is sort of like what happens when I hear the first few notes of a tune from the past.
This doesn't seem to be the case for me when thinking about related text, or even thinking about "boring" charts and graphs.
This doesn't seem to be the case for me when thinking about related text, or even thinking about "boring" charts and graphs.
The world needs effective and efficient data and information analysis and interactive visualization tools in order to solve problems that are on such a colossal scale.
The use of collaborative gesture and multi-touch display systems for data and information visualization is something that I believe will support better methods of decision-making in a variety of fields. Now is the time for the interactive information visualization community and related disciplines such as interactive multimedia and HCI to assist in this effort.
Here are some thoughts:
- Those who are coding gesture-based or multi-touch programs need to understand what sort of content people will explore, and make sure that applications provide flexibility in use.
- Human-computer interaction specialists will need to continue the study a range of interfaces and interactions in order to determine what supports human cognition of larger amounts of data and information.
- Creators of interactive multimedia content, web developers, and others will need to re-examine their work and think about ways their content can support new ways of thinking and problem-solving within the context of "surface" computing.
- Computer Supported Cooperative Work researchers will need to figure out what needs to be in place so that information can be effectively shared and analyzed between pairs or teams of people, and how this information can best be communicated to others within a business, agency, or organization, as well as the public.
One of the challenges facing this effort is that few people have an in-depth understanding of what it will take to make it happen. We will need to take an inter-disciplinary effort requiring a much higher level of communication and collaboration between people not accustomed to working within this context.
We will also need to take a "big picture" approach.
Because of the world's economic crisis, I think that interactive information/data visualization applications should target the needs of people who are working to understand the crisis and who have the power to do something constructive about it. This can not happen if they rely on the models and data analysis techniques of our recent past.
At the same time, these tools should be available to the rest of us, via the Internet, so that we may do our part to move us forward.
Back Story:
We will also need to take a "big picture" approach.
Because of the world's economic crisis, I think that interactive information/data visualization applications should target the needs of people who are working to understand the crisis and who have the power to do something constructive about it. This can not happen if they rely on the models and data analysis techniques of our recent past.
At the same time, these tools should be available to the rest of us, via the Internet, so that we may do our part to move us forward.
Back Story:
The blog has lots of pictures, info-graphics, embedded video clips, and links to a wide range of web-based resources. In my quest for information, I came across interesting quotes, jokes about economists, and tales of greed and scandals. I even found one blogger who has responded to each unfolding event of our economic crisis by re-writing lyrics to popular tunes.
For an example of one of my posts, read "Celestial Economic Sphere, Data Viz for the Finance Biz..." It is my hope that the content I've collected and shared on the blog will become part of an interactive information visualization/timeline designed to support two or more people on a large display or table.
11/4/09: Update: The economic crisis got a bit complicated, so I stopped posting. The blog still remains on-line. Interactive Infoviz for the Health Care Biz will be the topic of an upcoming post.
RELATED
Three Mirrors of Interaction: A Holistic Approach to User Interfaces (Bill Buxton)
Andreas Nicolas Fischer (Berlin-based artist who works with data, sculpture, and code.)
Google Spreadsheets Data Visualization Gadgets
Google Motion Chart (like Gapminder)
Panopticon
Death and Taxes (Wallstats.Com: The Art of Information)
2009 Index of Economic Freedom (Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation)
Visual Business Intelligence Stephen Few's Blog
Sunlight Foundation
Transparency Timeline - A History of Congressional Public Access Reform
"The Sunlight Foundation is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency."
MapLight.org "Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection"
Free Our Data Blog (Guardian Technology campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens)
2009 Death and Taxes Interactive Graphic (Click to explore.)
Via Stephen Few: Example of Horizon Graphs, developed by Panopticon. (Year's worth of prices of 50 stocks in 2005 and comparisons between them, click to enlarge)
Mark Lombardi
Take the time to listen to NPR's Lynn Neary's interview with Robert Hobbs, curator of the an exhibit of the late Lombardi's "conspiracy" art/visualizations linking global finance and international terrorism. Lombardi's background as an archivist and reference librarian served him well in his art depicting interesting large-scale networks. Although his art was not interactive, his techniques have inspired the development of computer-based interactive information visualizations.
FYI:
To satisfy my curiosity about Mark Lombardi, I followed a link to "Obsessive-Generous": Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi, by Frances Richard, posted in the 2001-02 section of the WBURG website.
The examples below are of Lombardi's work connecting the relationships between George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens:
George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
c. 1979-90, 5th Version 1999
Enlarged Version
Close-up of network detail
(missing)
Close up depicting a profit made by Bush, 2 weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
via Frances Richard
Close up depicting a profit made by Bush, 2 weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
via Frances Richard
"...though he possessed the instincts of a private eye and the acumen of a systems-analyst, Lombardi was of course an artist, and from the raw material of wire-service reports and books by political correspondents, he drew not only chronicles of covert, high-stakes trade, but technically pristine and sensually compelling visual forms"-Frances Richard
Update:
Lombardi's Narrative Structures and Other Mappings of Power Relations
Fosco Lucarelli, SOCKS, 8/22/13
Learning from Lombardi
Ben Fry, 9/2009
Update:
Lombardi's Narrative Structures and Other Mappings of Power Relations
Fosco Lucarelli, SOCKS, 8/22/13
Learning from Lombardi
Ben Fry, 9/2009
Jan 28, 2009
Details about gesture and free-air interaction from LM3LABS an Ubiq'window
Ubiq'window, by LM3LABS, is a gesture-based system that is used for interactive show windows, interactive in-store marketing, museum installations, and more.
The slides provide details of the Ubiq'window's system specifications, including a gesture recognition set. The slides also higlight "Airstrike", a system that allows for free-air, touchless interaction.
RELATED
Lm3lab's Blog
The slides provide details of the Ubiq'window's system specifications, including a gesture recognition set. The slides also higlight "Airstrike", a system that allows for free-air, touchless interaction.
RELATED
Lm3lab's Blog
Jan 26, 2009
SPARSH: DYI demo of an open-source multi-touch table and applications by NUI-group members
The following video is a demonstration of "Sparsh", an interactive multi-touch FTIR table built in eight weeks by a group of engineering students in India. Most of the information regarding the hardware and software you see running on this low-cost system can be found on the open-source NUI-group website, forums, and wiki.
Sparsh Multitouch Display from anirudh on Vimeo.
I especially like the multi-touch DJ application!
For more information, view the posts related to the NUI group on this blog.
Sparsh Website
Sparsh Multitouch Display from anirudh on Vimeo.
I especially like the multi-touch DJ application!
For more information, view the posts related to the NUI group on this blog.
Sparsh Website
Jan 24, 2009
Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Jonathan Harris - Food for Thought for Interactive Timeline Design
I'm in the process of creating an interactive timeline, and as I revisited my links and bookmarks, I came across a link to a video of Jonathan Harris discussing his ideas regarding digital storytelling, overlapping threads, and multiple perspectives.
Jonathan explores real-life stories and celebrates the interconnections between events, ideas, feelings, and people. Linear narrative and linear time lines do not do justice to the richness and complexities of human experience.
"Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world."
Jonathan explores real-life stories and celebrates the interconnections between events, ideas, feelings, and people. Linear narrative and linear time lines do not do justice to the richness and complexities of human experience.
"Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world."
"Jonathan Harris is redefining the idea of what it means to tell a story. Take a ride through an arctic whale hunt and plunge headfirst into the feelings Harris finds running rampant in cyberspace as he describes what he calls “storytelling platforms.” "
Below are links to two story-telling platforms described in the presentations. The Whale Hunt is organized so that the user can explore the story through a variety of perspectives and interfaces, and at different points in time.
The first screenshot shows how the user can select one of the "cast" members to see how the story unfolds from that person's point of view.
"Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved...The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions..."
Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories
If you have some time on your hands, explore Jonathan's Universe project:
"Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit."
Universe was created using Processing, which is an open-source software that is used by people from all sorts of disciplines to create interesting interactive information visualizations and more. The data used in Universe is from Daylife. For more information about Daylife, visit the Daylife Labs.
Sidenote:
Jonathan Harris collaborated with Sep Kamvar on the We Feel Fine project. Sep Kamvar teaches classes like "Social Software" and "Computational Methods in Data Mining" at Stanford University. Sep is part of the Stanford Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Group.
Stanford's HCI group's weekly seminars highlight a variety of interesting speakers. Current and previous talks are available via Stanford OnLine. You can link to current presentations and videos from the Human Computer Interaction Seminar website. If you are curious, past presentations/abstracts can be accessed on-line alphabetically or by date, going as far back as 1990.
Dan Saffer, author of Designing Gestural Interfaces, presented "Tap is the New Click" on January 23rd, 2009 at Stanford. You can access the video directly.
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