The image pictured is called a Filigram and was invented by programmer Simon Tatham. He was playing around with code trying to come up something vaguely fractal and came up with this.
There are several examples on the page and if you know which end of a C compiler you pour the code in, you can download the source code and try these out for yourself.
Link
Popularity: 5% [?]
This is a bit of a gimmick and it shows in Dollars or Euros only (what about £ Sterling!). Enter your salary in and it shows how much you earn each second or minute etc.
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Catherine Mulbrandon is an Economics graduate and Masters in Interaction Design who is into visualising data (her job is an interaction designer/information architect) and creates posters about aspects of the US economy, particularly income distribution as a hobby.
The segment shown is from one showing incomes levels for typical jobs from the year 2000. Depressingly, I realise that my salary then was exactly what she shows for the average income (and Computer Programmers, which is what I am!). If you like her posters- which have a clean open look to them, you can buy them online at cafepress.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Newsmap is a news headline aggregator written in Flash. It’s pretty slick and shows headlines according to how popular the story is- judged by how many sources carry it. You can display them in a square look ( as shown) or an almost bookshelf type look.
Particularly clever is the way you can filter by major countries. If you click on a section, it shows you how many sites have this story and you can click through to one- though I’m not sure how it chooses.
Popularity: 12% [?]
On the linked page the dancer figure is rotating. If you perceive her as rotating clockwise then you are a right brain persona and anti-clockwise implies left brain person. IE a person whose actions are dominated by that particular part of the brain.
Left brain are apparently more logical, whereas right brain are more intuitive and feeling. I come out as right brain.
Popularity: 31% [?]
This is possibly not the greatest way to visualise data (in this case US House Prices adjusted for inflation) but it is a somewhat visceral method, where you feel every drop!
The last few years were a long steady climb but in the US, house prices have plummeted over the last few months. The video stops before this happens but it’s obvious that the continual climbing has plateaud out just before the end. This was made using Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, one of my favourite games.
Popularity: 19% [?]
This is really clever. Select one of the Amazon websites (com, uk, Japan or Canada) then a category (books, music or dvd/videos) and a search phrase.
I entered portent and you can see the word in the picture. Move your mouse over and click and it expands- I clicked a picture in the lower half of the “o” in portent (I highlighted this and combined into one image with box and arrow) , so you can see the book covers. As you move over then you get a pop up with book details etc. Now click again and you’re on the chosen site, on the page for that book etc. Quite clever especially as it’s a Japanese site (with text in English) and it has to pull the details and images from the selected Amazon site.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the thought of space and the vast empty spaces between planets and galaxies.
This image shows a map of our Universe with galaxies colour coded to indicate their red shift. The red shift is a manifestation of the Doppler Effect- when a car moves away from you, if you hear its horn, the frequency of the horn drops as it gets further away. The horn’s frequency hasn’t actually changed, just that the sound has further to travel and so sounds lower. The light from an object moving away lowers frequency towards the red end of the spectrum; that’s the red shift.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Thanks to the New England Journal of Medicine, this 108 second long visualisation, hosted by the Washington Post) shows a network of friends connections (the original type of social network!) and how obesity spreads through it.
I’d guess it’s about life styles and sharing it with friends. Who wouldn’t want to sit around, watch a DVD and eat pizza? Maybe the answer is to get out more, ditch your fat friends and avoid fast food. Even if you don’t live any longer, it will seem like it!
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Retro-Futurism is looking back to a time when they foresee the future somewhat differently to how it panned out.
By now of course we should all have flying cars and video phones and live in peace and harmony. TV programmes like Tomorrows World from the 1970s envisaged us living in a plastic furnished world, usually in white. Of course things never turn up quite as people imagine them- we’re not quite in Orwell’s dystopian 1984 or some other’s utopia but somewhere in between and not living in a Bladerunner type world.
The linked site has a number of French illustrations from 1910 on how they thought the world of 2000 might look like. Some ideas seem positively quaint and we now know them to be dangerous- eg heating with radium!
Popularity: 23% [?]
These days, in 3D computer games, the visuals of the game are not generally created a new for each game but use an engine, basically a library that developers have put together.
We take it for granted but it’s only 15 years since PCs were fast enough to support 3D games- now much of the work is done in hardware chips called GPU (Graphical Processing Units) but how these are used depends upon the development teams. Crytek had an instant hit with their game Far Cry, one of my favourites and for the next version of that they have developed CryEngine2.
This is a very impressive demo with real time detailed shadows, time of day lighting, gorgeous vegetation with soft shadows and long fields of view. Buildings can break and you can even shoot vegetation! Not to mention very impressive character animation including facial expressions.
The ultimate aim of course is true photo realism and each new engine pushes closer to that; this demo gives an idea of where the state of the art is in 2007.
Popularity: 15% [?]
This is interesting and a bit different. If you plot countries of the world according to how they rate on the two scales of Traditional/Secular-rational and Survival/Self-Expression then you get the chart shown.
What makes it particularly interesting is how the cultures spread between countries. If you are into this type of thing then you’ll find the surveys and past survey data of interest on the site, plus a bigger version of the chart. (All pictures etc on Portent.org are reduced to 320 pixels in width)
Popularity: 18% [?]
This is run by IBM, part of one of their research groups. It lets anyone upload data sets on anything at all and then display it using one of a number of visualisation methods such as statistical charts, maps, word trees or even tags. It’s completely free and anyone can use it. Nice looking website as well with tutorials on how to upload, and a blog.
The chart shown took 2005 data for the money earmarked by Federal Govt per state on a per capita basis. I.e. I’d guess it’s the total spent on each state divided by the number of inhabitants. Alaska came out well!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Welcome to the birth of a new visualisation technique! The photo (which is Flash driven) changes to show the time of day it was taken as the cursor moves down. I’ve grabbed two instances of it.
The one on the left is at 6.10, the second 90 minutes later. Most people don’t notice the nuances of dusk arriving as it’s like a minute hand on a clock, movement too slow to perceive. But moving the cursor slowly down the screen lets you see the change in light. Very novel use of flash and photography.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Since 9/11 the US police have increased their use of paramilitary raids. Instead of approaching a house and asking politely they assume that the inhabitants are armed and go in very heavily handed as this tale recounts.
The Cato Institute is a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institute is named for Cato’s Letters, a series of libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. They have catalogued and now used Google Maps to highlight the increased number of botched paramilitary raids.
Understandably against real armed baddies, of which there are no doubts many in the USA, the old approach would be ineffective. But the number of botched raids does suggest a degree of sloppiness. In the tale listed, they only realised their mistake when they cleared the second floor “But the target has only got one!”…
Popularity: 17% [?]