Idea 1 Capture of movement
The human body is one of the most chosen themes in sculpturing, capture the movement using a still is the most difficult task. For 3D Animation it is a common technique to use camera tracking and markers on persons to capture there movement. The idea is to use this data for a sculpture of the movement. Instead of expensive camera tracking the aim would be to equip the tracked person with a number of acceleration sensors and than extrapolate the movement out of this data. Especially tracking of sports like gymnastics could result in interesting images.Another idea would be to track the movement of a ball of a basketball or other ball game.
Idea 2 News
Here the idea is to show the relation between countries statistics and there relevance for the public media. So for example death statistics of every country are looked for the number of killed people and than set in relation to the number of articles found in google news.
Another Idea would be to use the possibilities of Archive research to search for general developments in use. Possible questions could be:
How is the relation of different categories region, world, politics, sport, business etc.
How is the relation between text and image?
How long are articles?
What can be found on the mainpage?
Idea 3 Who Counts?
One big problem with information visualization is that you can only show what exists. In less developed countries statistics are often not complete or even missing. But also with existing you always have to question it. For example for american census data some people claim that poorer parts of the society are excluded from the statistics to make it more positive.
One idea would be to find new ways in aquiring data for example one could create cheap devices that check the noiselevel or airpolution and store them together with the location. Later the data is uploaded to the web and can be shared with the public.
After a long time absence, I decided to give my blog a new chance. Today I passed my oral examination on the University of Applied Sciences and finnished my studies in Computer Science in Media. In my thesis I developed a visualization of the worlds air traffic. I used pdf flight schedules from the biggest the airline aliances as datasource and mapped the flights based on their start and destination airport.
The image shows more than 90.000 flights of selected airlines for August 2007. More information on this will follow on an extra project page.
In October I gave a one week workshop at the HfG Karlsruhe. Primarily designed for non-programmers, it presented an introduction to the syntax and semantics of the Processing programming language, as well as an introduction to computational aesthetics. By creating computer applications, instead of just using finnished software, the workshop should give a deeper understanding of the essential possibilities of computation. Go to the workshop page for more information.
procontroll was updated to work with the new jinput version. it is now running in a seperate thread to allow more exact event handling. with the new plug method you can register methods to be called on button pressed and released events. I also added a new cooliehat class to correctly detect this kind of button. Get more information at the procontroll site.
I have updated the proXML lib. In the new version xml files can be loaded in a seperate thread. This is usefull to load xml from other urls without causing your sketch to wait.
There are two new methods getText() and getName() on XMLElement, infact they do the same as getElement() but maybe it is less confusing. There is also a new method for removing child nodes from an Element. And there are new methods for accessing childnodes and siblings, so you can get the firstChild, lastChild, nextSibling and preoviousSibling.
I also fixed some bugs with parsing xml.
