DMI Blogs » Scott » November 2008

Scott (5 unread)

Posted: November 27th, 2008, 2:15pm PST by Scott

From Michael Chang, the guy who brought true scalable type to Processing, comes a demo reel of data vis interaction inspiration. In my own work, I’ve focused on just “getting it to work” and display the data, but now I want to make sure the whole experience is as beautiful and fluid as in Chang’s work.
Posted: November 16th, 2008, 2:30pm PST by Scott
Disturbing facts from today’s Times article “Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe”:
- No US President has ever used email while in office.
- No US President has ever used a laptop computer while in the oval office.
- For the first time ever, the weekly Democratic radio address was delivered in a new, so-called “moving picture” format. (Obama’s speech was videotaped and posted on YouTube, see above.)
It will be interesting to see how this new administration uses modern technology to communicate, inform, and influence the public. (Will Obama still TXT me? Can I subscribe to an executive orders feed? Will Malia and Sasha write guest posts on a White House blog?)

On another note, update your bookmarks from barackobama.com to change.gov, the temporary website of the Obama-Biden transition team. Note, too, the URL’s brand extension of their campaign. Clever.
Posted: November 12th, 2008, 1:55pm PST by Scott
Image from Flickr by Torley

I attended a captivating talk last night by Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Their research focuses on manipulating social interactions in virtual environments, thereby testing subjects’ reactions to situations that could not occur in physical reality. For example, in virtual reality, my avatar could be made to maintain eye contact with yours at all times, even though in physical reality, I am avoiding eye contact. Creepy, right?

I highly recommend watching the lab tour video, but if you don’t have time, here are some of their most interesting findings he presented:
- Although constant eye contact makes subjects extremely uncomfortable, the result is greater engagement and increased learning. This has significant implications for teaching via VR environments. Imagine if each student perceived that the teacher’s avatar is looking at them.
- When study participants’ avatars were made to be 10 inches taller than their co-participants, they felt more confident and were always more able to convince the “shorter” person of a certain point of view. Same goes for more attractive vs. less attractive avatars. Also, the confidence that appeared in users with taller or more attractive avatars was maintained outside of the virtual environment for at least an hour. (No longitudinal studies have been done yet, but maybe repeated exposures to tall, attractive, virtual selves could increase feelings of self-confidence. VR is already being used to treat various phobias, like the fear of flying, but perhaps it could be extended for more general treatments of mental health.)
- There are almost no obese avatars in Second Life, where prejudice against obesity is as prevalent as in reality. Subjects who spent 10 hours a week using Second Life with obese avatars did not enjoy it, and their decreased self-esteem actually extended beyond the game and into their real lives to a degree unexpected (and undesired) by the researchers.
- Similarly, players in World of Warcraft advance more quickly in the game if their avatars are tall and “attractive,” even with all character skills being equal. Short, “ugly” characters progress more slowly.
- The lab has developed software that can track facial expressions using a regular web cam and relay that information to remote participants. Imagine video chat, but with a 3D on-screen avatar whose face mimics your actual facial expressions. (Watch the video. It’s eerily well-done.)
Side note: The talk was free, and presented by Café Scientifique at SRI. There are lots of local “Café Sci” groups all over the world. Check out their website to find a local group and tons of interesting speakers. The SF group, for example, has an upcoming talk on “How Computers Look at Art.”

Also, if you’re in the Bay Area, note that SRI is also presenting a sort of Doug Engelbart retrospective in December.
Posted: November 6th, 2008, 2:30am PST by Scott

Launch the project >

That’s not the catchiest headline, but it’s what this post is about. I’ve finally solved the problem I’ve been working on since September: how to take a bunch of circles of different sizes and group them around a central point, while preventing any overlap. See this illustration:

This turned out to be much more complicated than I had expected. If all the circles were of the same diameter, it would be easy to calculate regular positions and space them evenly. But I have a project with circles of all different sizes, and I needed them to be near each other, maybe even touching, but not overlapping. I knew it was possible, because I’d seen it done before, such as in visualizations on Many Eyes.

I started by trying to solve the problem using trigonometry. Measuring radii, tangents, and such seemed to be the answer, but got very complicated very quickly. Then I turned to the Traer Physics library for Processing. My idea was to have a central point of “gravity” that would attract the circle objects, but then make each circle repel the others, so they would sort of come together and then space out. JohnG, on the Processing boards figured out a way to do that, but his example used objects of uniform size and mass. With a variety of sizes, again, it got more complicated, and was using more computation power than I needed. After all, I didn’t need cool, fluid-like motion. I just needed to arrange things properly.

My answer came from Mike G. (thanks, Mike!), who suggested using a square-spiral approach, no trigonometry involved. Take circle A, placed at center. Then place circle B at center as well, but move it to the right one pixel. Then check to see if it’s colliding (overlapping) circle A. If so, move it down one, then left one, two, then up one, two, then right one, two, three, and so on. Keep “spiralling” outward along a progressively larger square path, and eventually you will find a point where the two circles no longer overlap.

This was a major breakthrough, and I got pretty close to figuring it out myself, but had to call in Mike for help. He sent me some code this morning for spacing out three circles. Things got more complicated the more circles I added, but I managed to get it working, finally, this afternoon. Give it a shot, and play around with adding/subtracting circles and seeing how the cluster is recalculated. As a bonus, I factored in a spacing variable, so you can have the circles sit farther apart or closer together. The next step is to integrate this into my iTunes visualization.

Launch the project >
Posted: November 4th, 2008, 4:27pm PST by Scott

A New York Times interactive feature running today captures the moods of its visitors. It’s simple and typographically beautiful, and reminds me of Simon’s emotion-related projects. You can even filter by McCain and Obama supporters, to compare their states of being. (I’m the “exhausted” one at lower right.)