DMI Blogs » Scott » August 2008

Scott (8 unread)

Posted: August 31st, 2008, 7:01pm PDT by Scott

This morning’s Times had a little write-up on IBM’s many-eyes.com, with an emphasis on the benefits of collaborative data visualization.
Posted: August 29th, 2008, 1:18pm PDT by Scott

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Processing in just two weeks here in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to learn how to get your computer to do really neat stuff, learn more about the workshop here. Space is limited, but don’t worry—if you can’t make this one, there will be many more coming soon!

Thanks to everyone at NoiseBridge for their encouragement, support, and assistance.
Posted: August 29th, 2008, 11:09am PDT by Scott

Wednesday was the first day of the semester at UC Berkeley, where I attended the first lecture in my Visualization course. In it, the professor was obligated to mention John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera deaths near the Broad Street pump in London.

It’s a landmark work in the fields of both visualization and epidemiology. But I was still surprised when, the next day, exploring my local used bookstore, I came across The Ghost Map, a book that recounts every detail of the epidemic and Snow’s path toward discovering its means of transmission. I’m looking forward to reading about how Snow came upon the insight to use a visualization—a map, in this case—to convince others of his theory that the disease was carried in water, and that the Broad Street pump was the source of so many infections. (In case you haven’t heard the story, his visual argument was a success. The pump’s handle was removed, so the people had to look elsewhere, to uncontaminated sources, for water.)
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:32pm PDT by Scott

Ted Nelson’s dream has finally been realized by artist Joe Davis with his Telescopic Text.
Posted: August 18th, 2008, 6:53pm PDT by Scott

If only I had taken my early anticipation project, extended it into the third dimension, and thought to make it more game-like, I might have ended up with something like Coign of Vantage.
Posted: August 11th, 2008, 7:55pm PDT by Scott

While working on my own 3D visualization of my iTunes library, I came across this visualization of Netflix data. It seems interesting, although not very dynamic. It includes several essentially static 3D plots of the data.
Posted: August 7th, 2008, 7:59pm PDT by Scott

I had my first taste of 3D in Processing during our last class, and now I’m hooked. Here’s my first attempt at generating a bunch of spheres, each one a different random color.
Posted: August 3rd, 2008, 12:20pm PDT by Scott
People have been talking about resolution-independent user interfaces for years — such a UI would gracefully scale larger and smaller, and look good on any display, whether an old 72 ppi CRT or a higher-resolution 163 ppi iPhone.

But I’ve never heard anyone dream of, let alone implement, an orientation-independent interface, one in which text and other elements would always be displayed “upright” from the user’s perspective, regardless of the physical orientation of the display in space.

The creators of the new iPhone game Dizzy Bee have done just that, however, and the execution is completely flawless. Just as the iPhone itself has set the standard for multi-touch interfaces, Dizzy Bee has broken new ground and established a successful structure for future orientation-independent UIs.

Here’s how it works: UI elements rotate freely so that their bottoms point down in the physical world, as detected by the iPhone’s accelerometer. This is appropriate, given that the game itself is played by rotating the physical device in order to direct the bee (and other elements) as they “fall” in the direction of gravity. Here’s an example of the UI shown between levels — this is one of the islands around which Dizzy Bee navigates:

And here’s that same screen, as it appears when I rotate the device around 180 degrees:

Notice how, while the island and compass rose remain fixed on the display (so they appear “upside down” here), all the text elements rotate to stay “upright.” Here’s a shot of the screen that appears when you complete a level:

Here’s that same screen, but I’ve tilted the device 225 degrees clockwise:

From this, I will infer four new guidelines for successful orientation-independent interfaces:
1. Each UI element’s top and bottom edges must be defined.
2. A point at which the rotation occurs must be specified.
3. Elements should be placed so as not to overlap too much, no matter the rotation.
4. Background graphics should be appropriate at any rotation.
And as if a ground-breaking UI weren’t enough, Dizzy Bee is also just really fun to play, with cute graphics, great sound design, and lots of puzzling levels to play through — for only $2.99! See it in action here: