Spatial Media looks to be an interesting topic. One thing that I could really take away from Jared’s first presentation was:

“It’s about context in space. It’s about information – all information has a space. Conversely, all places have information.”

Assignment 1: The Kitchen
What is the context of a kitchen? How do people really use kitchens?

A quick (hardly inclusive) list of kitchen based activities: Cooking, eating, cleaning. Socializing. Entertaining. Storing food – pantry / refrigerator.

Drilling down into just one activity, cooking, what could be involved in that task which could have an interface designed? (more…)

For today’s project I wanted to do something with the analog decibel meter that Tymm gave me on day one. My idea is to calculate some kind of signal to noise ratio in my email inbox and to display the value on this physical meter. Since I already get a lot of noise in there, maybe the value won’t change very dynamically, but be a steady din. Perhaps I could tie into the junk mail filter to show just how much work it’s doing, like a tachometer. Who am I kidding, really, I’m likely going to jump into what all the cool kids are doing and just come up with some type of Twitter visualization… (more…)

An in-class exercise in trying to convey the sense of touch on-screen. Given a matrix of white points on a black field, we had to rework the project with our own “fingerprint” in about 30 minutes. (more…)

In conducting research for the CycleSense bicycle traffic proximity system I gathered data about the amount of space behind a bicycle rider traveling through typical New York City traffic at various times and locations. The initial visualization of this data was to graph the distances over time to look for specific events that the system would need to detect in order to be useful. I cross-referenced the space data with video taken on the same rides

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In reaction to seeing my research on the cycling proximity project Jane sent me some really interesting information about Edward Hall and his work on Proxemics. I’m still reading up on the concept, but in brief it pertains to the study of space that individuals maintain in various social interactions and specifically how several cultures maintain different norms.

Here is an update to the proximity visualization application incorporating the 4 Proxemic distance classifications of Intimate, Personal, Social and Public. I’m hoping to show that while riding a bicycle in traffic riders experience frequent intrusions by vehicles into the Personal space. The haptic feedback device that is being devised for the CycleSense project will transpose the events in Social and Personal space to the Intimate space to provide an immediate awareness of these intrusions that generally go unseen as they occur behind the rider.

The next HUGE challenge is to refine the rangefinder sensor package, which I’ve never been able to get completely reliable.

combining the various sense visualizations into a collage. each layer is taken from a separate project. the overall guiding comment in this arrangement is that sound envelops and vision centers my awareness

looking forward to the final project for visualizing senses, i’m thinking of working with touch and space. several projects that i’ve investigated for other classes have involved interaction with proximity and awareness. what specifically drives the tactile sense? does the chill of a breeze or the warmth of nearby body stimulate similar senses as physical contact? at jane’s suggestion i’d like to read up on the field of proxemics as introduced by edward hall – the categorization of physical proximity and interactions deemed appropriate for each category. all this space around us…

wow. what a night. exhausted but filled with hope.

the visualizations of the results as they filtered in were great, but the new york times seemed best. specifically that you could zoom in and also look at historical results by state or county. great work

Working with a large database of wines for the next Visualizing the Five Senses project. The database contains much information on approximately 5000 wines. After much thought on the sense of taste and after reading up on wine varieties, I decided to focus on the six categories of wine (Red, White, Sparkling-Red, Sparkling-White, Fortified-Red and Fortified-White), and several oft-repeated taste characteristics noted in the wine descriptions.

This is very much a work in progress. (more…)

Trying to migrate my knowledge of Processing into Java and the Eclipse development environment. This is Ben Fry’s zipcode lookup applet as described in “Visualizing Data”. There are some oddities in my implementation of it, perhaps due to my inexperience with vanilla Java and a shoddy porting of his code.

Oh well, I’ll tinker with it later.

Applet and code

So, flight404’s (robert hodgin) work as been very inspiring and influential to my own. There are many people whom I feel are pushing the envelope of meaningful and beautiful visualization and he is one of them.

The Ripples project is one the the first that really convinced me to dive into using Processing. This depicts sound as a series of ripples emanating from the center of the display. Several example videos on the flight404 site show it being used as a VJ visualization. There have been many following projects, but this one really got me thinking about generative animation and the power of Classes. It’s relatively simple, too…so reading the code helps to inform new ideas.