Pedro Miguel Cruz has published some videos of his master thesis in information visualization and interaction design at DEI/FBA. The visualizations displays the traffic evolution in Lisbon during 24h.

Pedro has created a plethora of visual representations of the same data, each with a different visual style to focus on a variety of aspects of the data. These aspects include traffic speed, density and areas of traffic jams. The video below is a combination of some of these aspects and can be seen as the conclusion of the series.

Via Information Aesthetics

James Frost, director of the popular music video clip “House of Cards” by Radiohead among others was approached by Ogilvy & Mather NY to direct the new spot for the IBM Smarter Planet campaign. The result is is a stunning journey through an invironment of raw data.

James Frost, Zoo Films:
When Ogilvy New York approached me with the concept for the spot, I was immediately interested as it was an opportunity to take everything I’d learnt from the Radiohead House of Card video I made and explore the different techniques possible with 3D scanning. The Radiohead project was showing data in its purest form – it had a distinctive look and feel and was very much exactly how I saw it for the song, where as with IBM we wanted build a world which was created from data and within this world show how data exists.

The Smart Planet campaign focuses on how organizations around the world are going about the business of actually building it. One of the pillars of building a smarter planet is the emergence of data and the ability to harness it for answers to our biggest problems. With the current campaign, they wanted to educate business leaders on the importance of data, provide some context for its proliferation, and suggest the enormous opportunities that lie within it.

With graphical cleverness resembling the early posters by Paul Rand (remember eye-bee-m?), IBM has produced a series of short animated infographics explaining the ideas behind their Smarter Planet initiative. The distinct look and the simplicity make the microsite a joyful visit.

Visit the IBM – Smarter Planet Website

(Sorry for the poor quality of images. If you have access to higher quality ones, please let me know.)

Pedro M. Cruz has published a small experiment about springs and soft bodies in data visualization. The animated visualization shows the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent.

The empires are represented by circles and as parts of the empire become independent they split away. Thus the size of the bubbles shrink over time. While the animation is rather playful than informative the concept of showing the decline in this way seems to have some potential. Pedro is well aware that there’s space for improvements.
He notes:

…as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge. Although, it works very well as a ludic narrative. I ultimately found it very joyful.

Read more about the experiment on Pedro’s Master Thesis blog

Freeband Communication and IIPIC share a vision of the future: a world in which information and communication technology render one’s surroundings into a thinking and caring environment. Martijn Hogenkamp from the QBF created an animated video using infographics to explain the vast quantities of data.

The QBF » Freeband · The Ambient Life
via LooksLikeGoodDesign

Concave Scream is a promotional website that recently caught my eye. It presents indie band Concave Scream’s latest instrumental album “Soundtrack for a book”. The Flash based applet is a playfull visualization of various book covers.

The user can interact with the visualization just by moving the mouse, draging the cover and destorting the image based on the position of the mouse on the y-Axis. Beside the direct manipulation the user can interact with the animation with a small set of controls. Switching on/off audio based animation and auto-rotation or changing parameters like zoom, contrast and so on.

Although not information visualization by definition but this small applet is worth a look non the less.
The website was created by Kinetic.

Inspired by the music of Olafur Arnalds, Esteban Diácono created this little video gem entitled “let yourself feel“. It’s an animation based on the underlying audio along with some inspiring quotes from various sources.

Via Rubbishcorp
See more videos we enjoy on our Vimeo Channel

This is a spot created by Hellmann’s along with Sons and Daughters director Steve Gordon for the Hellmann’s site eatrealeatlocal.ca

Hat tip to Cool Infographics and Wehr in the World

James Glanz from the new NY Times has published an article about the earthquake risk posed by a geothermal dig. While the article is well written and comprehensive the animated explanations using information graphics and data mapping does an excellent job in communicating the technical essence of the article in a fraction of the time it takes to read the article itself. “Interactive” is somewhat misleading as the application simply is a movie with a visual timeline and meta data to the discussed subject.

The application is a great complement to the actual article and provides an intuitive way to earn a technological overview over the discussed topic using heatmaps, map plotts and 3d animations.

Science is an active process of observation and investigation.
Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? examines that process, revealing the ways in which ideas and information become knowledge and understanding.

Concept

The Flash Application My Evidence by Exploratorium, Museum of science art and human perception, explores and then visualizes the way we get to know what we know. The user is asked to answer questions about facts that are hard for the individual to experience by himself. For example “Humans cause global warming” is a theory believed by many people but quite hard to proof by one individual. Going further it’s nearly impossible for the individual to know such things if it’s on its own. The answers to these questions range from “I noticed or experienced” to “I heard on TV or radio”. Further attributes of an answer are the place where someone learned it, the person’s gender or age and how much the author refutes or supports the stated fact.

Visualization

The most important part is the visualization of the statements. They are represented as circles or rings, depending on support or refute of the author. The color indicates the source of the knowlege. By hovering over an object it reveals the author’s comment on the statement.

The objects move around and bounce off each other, similar to the great visualization of we feel fine from Jonathan Harris and Seb Kamvar.

Interaction

There are two interfaces to explore the data.

• The Filter tool does exactly what you would expect. You can filter out statements with certain attributes to get more information of a subset of the data. The Cluster tool groups statements together based on your selection.
• The cluster gets created rather in a loose manner. The interaction model supports the playful approach of the visualization and forfeits some of the precision of the visualization.

We think it’s a clever application with a focus on playful interaction which could be beneficial to gather a relevant amount of data. And we’re looking forward to the outcome of these crowd-sourced investigations.