The United States is the 7th largest per capita consumer of residential energy, but where is all of that energy going? For GE, Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed an easy to understand visualization that calculates energy use of home appliances.

The various appliances are represented by a series of playfully illustrated icons that users can turn “on” or “off” to get approximate totals for their own profile. The unit converter presents the energy use of each appliance in terms of watts used, the cost in dollars, and the equivalent power consumption in gasoline. The kilowatt hour is the billing unit used for electricity but is a relatively abstract measure for consumers. The visualization describes what one kilowatt hour yields for each device, a fun and easy way to understand the relative amount of energy required to run household appliances.

The application is a simple and intuitive way to measure your own consumption and with the different approaches on how to communicate the result the user can actually understand the implications of turning off unused devices.

From the MIT senseable city lab comes another superb concept. Under the direction of Carlo Ratti, the team behind the Copenhagen Wheel tries to mix crowd sourced data collection with personal data analysis.

The Copenhagen Wheel transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and breaking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7y3qIQu3Gc

Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheels sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity.

Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.

The Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland will take place this weekend from January 27th to 31st. To examine some of the most important topics in advance the WEF website hosts the interactive application Risks Interconnection Map 2010. The RIM 2010 is a network visualization weighting the most important global risks and their connections.

The risks are grouped in Economics, Geopolitics, Environment, Society and Technology (Personally, I am dissappointed by the evanescent of focus on the Environment). The interaction model is very limited and reduced to selecting risks and viewing more details about the selected interconnections. With the underlying dataset, I could imagine a more powerful tool to reveal formerly invisible interconnections.

Visit the WEF Risks Interconnection Map 2010

Simon Rogers from the Guardian Data Blog takes a look at the latest (2007) figures about carbon emissions per country. China seems to take over the lead followed by the USA. The Guardian tries to communicate this information with a bubblechart showing the total emissions between 1997 and 2007. China shows a healthy growth (please, feel my sarcasm) of 102%.

The Data

The data is collected by the EIA and they try to extend the dataset with the new figures for 2008 by the end of this year. As a few commenters point out, it would be important to see the data per capita. The information is in the datatable to be used for further investigation but an infographic focused on this information would be more compelling in my opinion.

BELLA GAIA (Beautiful Earth) is an audio visual “Living Atlas” journey of our world, expressing the deeply moving beauty of planet Earth as seen through the eyes of astronauts.

The vision of BELLA GAIA is to bring the power of art, technology, space science, and real scientific data visualizations together, into a context that is both entertaining and educational, fused with a common goal of raising the awareness and appreciation of our home planet.

Bella Gaia was presented at the Iyashi Fair in Japan on August 8th, 9th 2009. It is a 45 Minutes long show that combines classical Music and astonishing visualizations of real data about our planet. If you ever have a chance to visit BELLA GAIA be assured of my jealousy. Seriously, it seems like a beautiful way to not only read and see data but to experience it.

Watch more videos on the BELLA GAIA YouTube channel.

Cascade on Wheels is a visualization project that intends to express the quantity of cars we live with in big cities nowadays. The data set we worked on is the daily average of cars passing by streets, over a year. In this case, a section of the Madrid city center, during 2006. The averages are grouped down into four categories of car types. Light vehicles, taxis, trucks, and buses.

The project consists of two different visualization created with Processing based on the same dataset. The intention behind the two visualizations is to:

1. present the data in a readable and understandable way and
2. express the meaning by using intuitively understandable metaphors

Walls Map

The Walls Map builds three dimensional objects on top of the streets depending on the average quantity.

Traffic Mixer

The Traffic Mixer represents the data using visual clues along with an audio display. Turn on your speakers for full enjoyment if you dare.

The dataset was built by recording noise levels at different locations in and around the airport building/boundaries. The information recorded has also been presented in a visual format in order to communicate the levels of noise. A Book, an interactive website and a set of data posters are all final products.

Spheres

One ring portrays noise levels recorded at locations in and around Heathrow Airport. A complete circle represents two minutes. This is the average time gap between two aeroplanes landing.

Matrix

The matrix displays the links between each location in and around Heathrow Airport. Location and the type of sound recorded over two minuets.

Density

Each column portrays noise levels recorded at locations in and around Heathrow Airport. Each line represents when the noise level reached above the average of 57 dB. The scale on the left hand side represents every ten seconds. All locations can be traced via the location map. Starting left with location 01 the columns run in sequential order to location 15. A complete column represents two minutes.

Map

This is a dB noise map of Heathrow Airport runway 1 & 2. The map shows areas with a specific dB level.

See all the visuals on iancarr.net
]]> http://datavisualization.ch/showcases/noise-at-heathrow-airport/feed/ 8 http://datavisualization.ch/notes/mapping-co2-data-in-googleearth/ http://datavisualization.ch/notes/mapping-co2-data-in-googleearth/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:18:19 +0000 Benjamin Wiederkehr http://datavisualization.ch/?p=1062 Simon Ilyushchenko from the Google Lat Long team posted an article on how he created a visualization by mapping CO2 emissions and a detailed explanation about the composite. He wrapped it up in an easy to understand video: