Current shows a snapshot of what the entire internet-using population in America has been thinking for the last 24 hours, in the form of their collective search history. This information is condensed for readability into memes, living ‘thought organisms’ that act as though they have agency, control, and a selfish motivation.
News relies on soft stories like horoscopes, celebrity gossip and restaurant reviews to subsidize the important but less sensational stories that keep democracy running. At base, any solution to News’ present problems must address the balance between the hard news we need and the soft news that drives advertising dollars. By visually anthropomorphizing the capricious nature of public attention Current can spotlight these missed opportunities in news coverage.
The tools: the Google Top-20 hourly list of rising searches, Google News, Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo Keywords API, PHP, Processing. An early proof of concept was shown at the 2009 ITP Winter Show. The final version was shown at the ITP Spring Show.
Scales: International Finance Interpreted as Fish . [Website]
Scales tries to make international finance accessible by displaying dry numbers in fish form. Weak currencies are content to swim with the school in the pond, while stronger currencies race each other upstream. Users can add or remove fish throughout the simulation to see how they compare.
The fish themselves are made of undulating sine waves. Their motion follows “flocking” rules with border-detection while in the pond, but uses “path following” algorithms while attempting to get upstream. The waterfalls are made from particle systems and the steam at the bottom of each waterfall is Perlin noise. The values for each fish are pulled from a financial rss feed that is updated every 6 hours. The interface is rendered in Processing (Java) using OpenGL. [Website]
Featured in the 2009 ITP Spring Show
Featured in the Reuters report 'Wacky inventions on view in New York'
Separate events without a good narrative thread are just things that happened. For example, the many subsidiary holdings, leaders, press releases, legal motions, suits, counter suits, stock prices, internal memos, PR materials, and historical events which collectively make up the story of the American International Group (AIG), now one of the most infamous corporations in the history of business. This visualization seeks to put some of the collective pieces of AIG's story in context. Interaction courtesy of Javascript.
InfoTrunk
The InfoTrunk tool was created to provide realtime statistics and analysis on traffic patterns for the Analytics team and Customer Insight Group at NYTimes.com. The CMS used is Knowledgeable, coding is in PHP.
Eye Music: A music visualization
This is a simple music visualize. Pure Data analyzes the music being played for attacks, the start of a new note. When it detects one it pulls the tone and volume for the specific instrument - in this case three different windchimes and some wind. It uses OSC to pass the data to Processing (Java), which generates an onomatopoeia readout for us to read, and also some pretty lights for us to look at.
Ethan Zuckerman believes the world was becoming more insular because news sources focus so tightly on a few small areas, while missing the news in others. The Overlooked News-Reader uses the New York Times to chart out what news articles are being reported right now, and locates articles from countries the New York Times has chosen to overlook. Application uses Processing.
For the visually inclined, the letters at the right change color from black to green as they count out the milliseconds, seconds, minutes, and hours that make up a day. The display area reads out a bunch of visual feedback to give the position of the sun or moon, lightness of sky, number of stars. Feeling Impatient? Use the slider at the bottom to see what the world will look like at some other time. Applet uses Processing. [Active Clock
Site]
Taking the Temperature of the Blogsphere
This applet queries LiveJournal each moment for "happy" and "sad", and plots the general mood as sine waves. The result is you can tell how the blogosphere is feeling at any given moment. Application uses Processing. Completed with Vital
Source code coming soon, promise.
New York Times Web Traffic
These screenshots are taken from animated visualizations created for the New York Times Analytics Department to help understand movement of traffic throughout the NYTimes.com website. The first shows entry pages vs time spent on the site, the second shows bounce rate (traffic that arrives at a site and immediately leaves) by country.
A virtual aquatic environment including hungry fishes, a physical way to feed them, and stress sensors for participants. The feeder includes an accelerometer that can track the position, and when it is being used for feeding. The water is an LCD screen. Fiber optic grass reflects the fish's hunger level. Galvanic Skin Response Sensors on wrist bands track when users are stressed, and send the fish to comfort whoever is having the worse day. Project completed with Rajan and Gloria using an Arduino chip and Processing.
The Water Canary (patent pending) is a low-cost, instantaneous water testing device that will radically reduce the time and funds needed to respond to disasters effectively. Its innovative use of inexpensive UV light technology reduces testing time to seconds and lowers the cost per test to a fraction of current solutions. The Water Canary was created in conjunction with UNICEF and is currently a semifinalist in the Stern Business Competition Social Venture Competition.
A natural, visual interface for a singer to be able to express themselves during a performance. Input is received through a small microphone embedded in a choker that rests against the voicebox. Butterfly wings are driven by a single push-solenoid, controlled by an Arduino chip.
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