Tweetping

Franck Ernewein created this piece which displays a live display of all tweets worldwide. It shows the tweets as bright spots on a world map and also displays running statistics for tweets from different parts of the world.

http://tweetping.net/

I like it for a few reasons. The color choices he made make it feel sharp, elegant and techy, while also giving the feeling that the map is a night view and the tweet dots are lights. It is also dense enough with data in its lower partition to look like something incredibly serious. I also enjoy that the stats start from when you open the page, and given time you can aggregate a bright map that is unique to the time frame over which you’ve opened the page.

I feel this project was very well done. If any improvement could be suggested, it is that it is only real-time. Maybe if a function to view charts from other times, or to see how a timespan looks or changes on the graph existed, it could be more interesting. It may also be interesting to have an overlay with daylight on it to show what time of day it is everywhere.

Metrico

Metrico (by Digital Dreams) is a platform style game with dynamic levels based around gameplay. The graphics and level design are meant to look like infographics. I enjoy this project because it is and isn’t infographics and I enjoy the idea of bringing the aesthetic to a game. I also enjoy dynamic levels in games. For all of this to work together makes it a great project in my mind.

The numbers and variable pointers that update in the game showing you what is dynamic and changing helps make the game look more dynamic and makes the motion of those elements more reconcilable to me.

The tetrahedron landscape bothers me. The pointy structures seem odd and are inconsistent with the foreground cubes. They also seem to differ in color schemes. I feel the aesthetic could be more appealing if this were remedied.

Selfie City

Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur and Alise Tifentale made Selfie City which is a piece where they have collected thousands of “selfies” from a few different cities and some statistics about them. Some of these statistics are based on research (age and location, and maybe gender), and others based on facial recognition software.

I like this piece because of the interactive nature. The interface updates to show you what portions change based on the filtered data set (in green). This gives a good representation of relational statistics. For instance, I noticed that women tend to tilt their heads more so than men in selfies.

I also appreciate the real-time update of pictures, and the clean look of the user interface.

To improve this piece, I would like to see more data, as this feels like a very limited sample set of the world, and better facial recognition software because I noticed that many open mouth images were not actually images of people with open mouths.

http://selfiecity.net/