Using senses other than eyesight to visualize data is a pretty broad topic. There are a couple of interesting projects that come to mind.
A recent article in Interactions (link) highlights experiments that test if people can match sonifications of a data set (with a particular sampling rate) with their visual graphs. 70 listeners had about a 60% accuracy rate (higher than the 25% random rate).
Another project, called Olly (link & article) aka Smelly Bot, is a stackable “robot” that releases a smell/”aroma” when you receive a specific event from Facebook, Twitter and the like.
My favorite, though, is not really a visualization, but I’d like to think it opens up possible avenues for exploration. It’s a TED talk by Homaro Canto & Ben Roche about the work they are doing in their Chicago restaurant, Moto. I don’t know if they entire talk is applicable, but being able to print out the taste of your food on a sheet of paper is pretty cool.
I think all of these different senses could potentially open up richer ways to visualize data.
@0:44
Soundmachines
Soundmachines are table-sized instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs. Each table has three units of what look like unconventional record players. Each unit spins a disc with concentric geometric patterns that translate into control signals.
I’m pretty tone deaf so I especially appreciate this project. In fact, making music or having to understand music scares me and sometimes I’ll have to ask other people to count down beats for me. It’s pretty intimidating. What I loved about this project is that the mapping between beats, tunes, etc and the geometric patterns on the discs was pretty easy to grasp and it makes the act of making music easy and accessible. Although this project uses Arduino and actual discs, I don’t see a reason why the player couldn’t be virtual: like your iPad. You could also add your own discs for new patterns.
lumiBots
lumiBots are autonomous UV light emitting robots that roam on top of a 1 x 2 meter phosphorescent surface. So, I didn’t particularly love this project. What I did like were the light traces that the bots left behind. I think there’s definitely a lot of potential to make that look interesting. I didn’t really find the final complex pattern that emerged interesting and felt it was pretty random. I do think that there must be other algorithms that create interesting patterns with the traces that are left behind. This could also be because there were only 9 bots: maybe more would make the effect better.
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Essentially, this project uses face tracker software like Face OSC to tilt, recolor,and increase the stroke weight of a given font (particularly, the letter “a”), tilt. As a BSA student concentrating in Communication Design, I find this type of thing extraordinarily inspiring! The possibilities and implications of using a designer’s expressions to control the design elements of typography are immense and far-reaching. If I had to do anything, I would add the ability to resize the letter and possibly place it in the background so that a user could edit letters and place them in the background, effectively spelling out words in various alterations to the original typeface.
My other concentration through the BSA program is in Mathematical Sciences. As a math major, I’ve often been asked “so, Math, huh? what do you plan to do with that?” Well now, I can reference this awesome information design chart that actually depicts the annual salary of various forms of employment in relation to how much math they had to study. This type of thing is not only interesting, but really motivational to me. As this weird sort of hybrid of two fields, my major really urges me to use information design like this to explore some common perceptions of a person who majors in just math. If I had to change anything, I’d probably better explain the bottom axis. Right now, I can’t figure our the use of the units on the bottom axis. I mean, I get what it’s attempting to depict, but I’d at least include a blurb about what the axis does.
Outside of school, I’m a huge fan of Rap & Hip-Hop. This image is the collective visualization of the distribution of rapper names based on ideas,objects,or titles that the rapper derived his/her name from. I could honestly look at this thing for hours on end. It’s really inspiring to see design and information visualization come together to form something that I generally find the public not know or care about. If I had to add anything, I’d see if I could tie in the dates in which the rapper was born to see if any interesting facts emerged from the timeline of choice of rap name.
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0arZMuPK58w]
The project was created by Joon Y. Moon, which uses light and boxes to create shadows and portrays life form around it. The cube blocks cast distorted shadows on the table top surface which looks like a house. The other elements such as trees, birds and people car projected on the surface. The design exhibits a form of life, where people move towards light sources and come back to their houses to light up the house. The project may be just an art form but can be used to do other interesting things. The idea of using shadows is very compelling and makes me think what more can we do with shadows and light forms.
Project Cascade
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQBOF7XeCE0]
Project Cascade was initiated by Mark Hansen at the NYTimes R&D. The project visualizes the spread of a message such as a tweet over social media. The project captures spread of a tweet takes over the social space and the people involved. The project maps beautifully captures the complex spread making it intuitive. The visualizations can be drilled down or rolled up to see key components, which makes it even more interesting. The idea can also be used to see how people interact in a more social setting like facebook, to identify outward people in your network as opposed to just being friends on the list.
All Eyes on you
[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/33186969 width=”600″]
This an installation named the Britzpetermann shop installation. It uses kinect, openframeworks and arduino to project generated eyes with different radius onto a glass pane. The installation is programmed such that the eyes are always looking at the person walking outside. What is really interesting about the project is that it take a simple concept of concentric circles and programs it to attract attention. The render of the eyes are really strong which adds to the overall effect. It would be interesting to see how this project is installed for advertising purposes, where the eyes look at you for a while and then diverts back to the product displayed on the window.
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An installation for the Vancouver Aquarium, Jelly Swarm consists of a large, triangulated metal support hung with lighted origami jelly fish. The lighting patterns are generated based on interactions between neighboring jelly fish or by visitors using a touchscreen controller. My initial interest was purely visual — I’ve always enjoyed how jelly fish exhibits at aquariums use light to emphasize the structure and motion of the creatures. But I think what sets this apart from other interactive light installations I’ve seen is the use of origami for the jelly fish. The angles of the objects and the supporting frame are a nice contrast to the mushy blobs in the surrounding tanks. That said, I wish that I could see it in the space. The lighting interaction seems very simple (and not very interactive), but perhaps no more is required given the scale and layout of the space.
Portrait of the Ghost Drummer
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/34682556 w=400&h=280]
Motion capture of a drummer is played back in 3D space without the drummer or the drums. Instead, the drummer’s sticks trace arcs through space that build up to represent the whole performance. There’s a lot of potential in visualizing a drum performance using stick motion because the drum set is such a complex instrument to play. When I first read about this piece, I hoped it would reveal some of the secrets of how drummers move between drums so quickly and perform intricate patterns, but I was disappointed by the execution. First, and most importantly, I thought the quality of the performance was lacking; I was distracted by parts that seemed out of time and tempo changes that didn’t feel deliberate. But accepting the performance, I still found the visualization cluttered and confusing. Being able to follow arcs in addition to hits was helpful, but while a real drum set is necessarily compact, a virtual drum set can be spread out, which I think would help the viewer better follow the whole pattern.
Loop Waveform Visualizer
Loop Waveform Visualizer is a relatively simple in-browser music visualizer by Felix Turner (requires Google Chrome to run). While I like the simple “retro-graphics” aesthetic, I’m more interested in the technology behind it. While this isn’t the most impressive demo of WebGL that I’ve seen, it’s one of the first projects I’ve seen that makes use of the Web Audio API in Chrome. The ability to do more advanced things with audio in the browser is exciting, especially since most browser developments are (understandable) visual. I hope to see wider support for web audio in the near future. More information and images are available at Create Digital Motion.
The Dream House is a sound and light environment created by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in the 1970s. It is currently available for viewing in a permanent installation space in TriBeCa in Manhattan. The piece invites its viewers to enter a room bathed in pink-blue light. There are is a large loudspeaker in each corner of the room playing back seemingly dissonant sine wave frequencies into the space. As the viewer enters the space, the sound is encountered in relation to their position in the space – that is to say, dependent on where you stand in the room, you hear something completely different. The sine wave generators in the space are tuned in such a way that spatially-variable interference patterns occur. I chose to blog about this work because it is, essentially, an algorithmic artwork: using mathematic principles, La Monte Young was able to create an experience that transcends conventional perception.
David McCallum – Warbike
Warbike is a project designed to enable the exploration of electromagnetic space. A microcomputer is programmed to sniff out wireless networks as the participant explores an area with the Warbike. As different wireless networks with different attributes are encountered, the Warbike plays back a synthesized chime sound articulating the invisible activity. I like this project because it gives viewers a means of engaging with the wireless geographies that we are constantly immersed in.
AIDS-3D – World Community Grid Water Features
At first glance the World Community Grid Water Features are purely aesthetic objects – purposeless water fountains, decorative at best. What is concealed is that each of these objects contains a computer that is running a distributed computing platform, running processes that contribute to research towards cancer and AIDS cures, renewable energy projects, etc. AIDS-3D’s project targets the stereotypically self-serving and aesthetic nature of both computing and art, fulfilling Joseph Beuys’ famous question, “Can a sculpture change the world?”
The Physiognomic Scrutinizer is an installation the scans a person as s/he walks through a doorway and matches his/her face to that a face of a person who is famous for controversial reason. The author of the blog post said that the project was very influential and he went back several times. It doesn’t sound seem like having your face matched to someone else’s would have that dramatic of an effect, but perhaps it would make you think about the lives of these people and have some sort of sympathy for them. I think this piece might be better if it stressed the random sympathy that can be induced in one’s brain.
In this installation the user interacts with a handle in the middle of the piece to turn the inner structure around. The turns create changes in the lights around the inner structure. I don’t really understand what this is supposed to represent from the artist’s description, I think he is trying to link to light to the strength of the magnetic field. This is not a clear relationship to me, I think it would be more interesting if you made something move in an unexpected way as you turn the handle
This project maps your music library to a virtual “solar system” that you can travel through to shuffle between artists. I like the idea of creating a new dimension/reality to your music library, but I’m not sure if I understand why it is a solar system. I think a globe that actually maps where the artists are coming from or where the music was made. The solar system suggests that the music was created throughout different stars, I guess drawing from the idea that artists are all “stars”.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Voice Array leads participants to speak into a small microphone that records a snippet of their voice. What they say is then visualized by the first pair of LEDs on a linear array of 576 white LEDs. This recording is then joined by the previous 287 recordings in a giant cacophony of both light and sound. (One participant’s homage to pop music at 2:13 works particularly well, in my opinion.) What’s particularly striking about this piece is how each person is reduced to a voice whose only physical embodiment is the pulsation of a pair of white LED lights. I also think it’s also very interesting to see how adults react with amazement from hearing their own voice recorded and visualized in a manner that one might expect from a child. However, it took me a while to realize where the random voice at the end of the visualization was coming from; this was the 288th oldest voice, which was now being pushed off the stack. I’m not sure I agree with that choice.
From the Future Feeder blog, I then discovered the Looking into the Past pool on Flickr. This is an awesome pool of modern photographs with decades old photographs of the same location spliced in. Below, I’ve included the image on Future Feeder that caught my attention. However, a handful of photographs in which old pictures of children were spliced into their old rooms and haunts also caught my eye. I think this style of mashup captures some of the temporal nature of photography, which was on my mind after I went last year to a couple places that I had originally ventured to in 2008, never expecting to return. I now have a series of photographs from both times, and I wonder whether mashing up these photos would be interesting. Overall, I like that this Flickr pool has created a community of individuals using technology in the same way to make art that involves the same process, but with diverse effects.
Nils Volker’s Variations on Pi is a series of light paintings loosely based on the digits of pi. The most interesting part of this series of light paintings, however, is that they were created by a robot he built. When filmed from above, this robot, whose wheels seem to be designed specifically to turn in circles, is able to make wonderfully symmetric light paintings. I particularly like the idea of using a robot to algorithmically create light paintings. In some sense, I always imagine people making light paintings with flashlights, flailing around wildly. The preciseness of a robotic light painting adds something new, sterile, yet fascinating to the form. However, I wonder why he didn’t provide an interface for himself or others to make arbitrary light paintings with this robot. While the digits of pi are interesting, a multipurpose robot for light painting, with a thoughtful interface, would be awesome.
This is a map of New York City with a layer of information revealing where tourists and locals take photographs. Tourists are red, locals are blue, and the yellow areas are where both groups mix together. Eric Fischer has created graphics like this for many cities by analyzing thousands of geotagged images from Flickr.com. His program determines if the person who took the picture is from the area or not and creates a dot with the corresponding color. This simple idea reveals a lot about the dynamics of major cities and how “tourist” zones are often compartmentalized from the rest of the city.
I am a musician and have spent a lot of time in New York so this creation by Alexander Chen really intrigued me. His work, Conductor, takes data from the MTA about when trains are arriving or departing and maps their routes using HTML5 and Javascript. Routes become plucked strings when they intersect each other and the resulting sounds escalate as the time approaches rush hour. The idea that static data such as a train schedule can be manipulated into a dynamic visualization is very inspiring for me. Using this visualization to create music is a great idea that sets a new precedent for how we can experience information. The concept of using senses besides our eyes to experience data is very interesting.
I will finish this first Looking Outwards with another musical visualization work by Alexander Chen. This project visualizes the first J.S. Bach Cello Suite using 8 lines that act as strings. These strings are plucked by dots rotating on a circle and the strings change length to indicate pitch. This visualization is very effective at revealing the underlying tonal and rhythmic structures of this piece. Music of the Baroque era is very mathematical; this visualization helps to show that there is a constant structure over which Bach wrote this piece. I am all for any visualization that makes something complex, such as musical structures, more comprehensible to the untrained listener.
For a time, it was good. Then, seeds of dissent began to take root….at Gooski’s.
Ping pong playing robots have come a long way. I can remember when ping pong playing robots were little more than a box holding a paddle and connecting with about 10% of incoming traffic. Well, cousin, those days are over.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkk8kMm08cA]
I look forward to the days when they begin competing with humans. And then beating them. The first league of biological and artificial athletes. Boy, won’t that be something? A second Renaissance. Utopia. How could it possibly go wrong?
