Project Update

I was really impressed with how helpful the people at Publix were. I emailed the main headquarters last week and on Friday I got a phone call from the store manager of the Publix next to my house. He told me he got my email and asked me to come in. I went into the store today and he gave me a paper copy of the map of the store from when they do store sets. This is not usually made public to shoppers but he was more than happy to give me a copy. I made a digital layout to match.

the map is a good outline but it doesn't have the detail I'm looking for. I then went to the store and made aisle outlines. They are taking forever!!! Here is one.

I also started to work on my website design. I just got the look of it down. It's really simple because I hate websites that are hard to navigate.

Virtual Reality-collage

In the Digital Nation Broadcast of Douglas Rushkoff, I listened and read about the time children spend with Electronics, whether it be Web, Internet, Games, Entertainment, etc. I believe the statistics of 53 hours per week children spend, besides their use of computers for academics or homework, this is just unbelievable. Personally, I think that children should be given opportunities for real life experiences, such as playing sports in teams, or music in bands, etc. Of course what's nice about discussing those issues is that recommendations are being made for schools and parents to direct usage of computers toward a creative way, and not just let be the children passive consumers of entertainment.

So here is this little girl, falling asleep doing her homework, but her eyes are still watching, her eye glasses symbolize her dreams, her virtual life that keeps staying awake, even when her real body is physically asleep. The collage is only on the eyeglasses, but it's making a whole new meaning to the Homework to be done, with an eye on the book, virtually speaking.

twitter visualizations with augmented reality

Visualization and subjectivity

Reading through our book, I have come to realize that for the one creating the visualization it is a scientific process. However to the public that will be exposed to our creation, it might mean that the results will go through the lenses of everyone eyes. Since taking this class I am more sensitive to hindered message. I have also asked some friend to interpret things that I encountered...interpretation are always different when the message is abstract. Think about the collage in class.

My question is: How do we account for the subjectivity factor when working on a project?

Facebook Event to submit Travel Application Ideas

I created a Facebook event to collect travel application ideas. Anyone can join and post there ideas. Please join the event Facebook Travel Application. If you could get some of your friends to participate that would be terrific. The more feedback I get, the better the end product will be. I appreciate everyone taking the time to post their ideas.

Reflection

This is the planes I brought last class but with two circles. When I photograph it, it reflection was capture. I think is interesting to span on it.

Ward Shelley

Who Invented the Avant Garde?

Shelley's work is hard to categorize but it fits very neatly within our field of study. Instead of trying to explain it I will use his own words:

Shape of Understanding

My paintings/drawings are attempts to use real information to depict our understandings of how things evolve and relate to one another, and how this develops over time. More to the point, they are about how we form these understandings in our minds and if they can have, in our culture, some kind of shape.
Usually I choose topics from art or cultural history, such as the arc of an artist's career and its influences, or the effect of particular ideas in an aesthetic or political movement. They are "wide-screen", with all information available to the interacting eye at every moment.

Although his work covers many areas from installation and performance to sculpture and painting (and you can see some here) I want to focus on his mylar oil paintings obviously inspired by the work of Tufte and the Wall Chart of World History of Edward Hull (1890) .

Click on the image titles to see them in large size, they are a lot of fun and you can see more HERE.

Rock Genres

All historian's are editors. As such, they must face the problem of throwing the baby out with the bath-water. This is even more my problem. These diagrams are radical reductions of written history for which I have had to choose who and what to include, who not. Incredible amounts of information are jettisoned.* Even the people and works I use are reduced to symbols. But, in their coming together in this different form, new information is revealed, and nearly always a new insight for me.

Ward Shelley

OOPS!

Thanks Ashutosh for the math. Play with the code! Make sure to remove the comment tag at /*the beginning and at the end */ which I had to add to prevent blogger from nagging!

/*int NO_OF_CIRCLES = 10;

float[] theta = new float[NO_OF_CIRCLES];

float[] deltaTheta = new float[NO_OF_CIRCLES];

float [][] nextXY = new float[NO_OF_CIRCLES][NO_OF_CIRCLES] ;

//int [][][] colorOFCIRCLE = new int [NO_OF_CIRCLES][NO_OF_CIRCLES][NO_OF_CIRCLES] ;

color[] colors = new color[NO_OF_CIRCLES] ;

void setup()

{

size(400,400);

//setup first case then the rest

theta[0] = 0 ;

for (int i = 1 ; i <>

theta[i] = theta[i-1] + 15 ;

//setup first case then the rest

deltaTheta[0] = 0.01 ;

for (int i = 1 ; i <>

deltaTheta[i] = deltaTheta[i-1] + 0.05;

//offseting individual circle translations. Could be time based or random

deltaTheta[1] = 0.07;

deltaTheta[2] = 0.09;

deltaTheta[3] = 0.05;

deltaTheta[4] = -0.04;

deltaTheta[5] = 0.03;

deltaTheta[6] = -0.06;

deltaTheta[7] = 0.01;

deltaTheta[8] = -0.08;

//assign random colors to all circles

color c1 = color(102, 102, 0);

for (int i = 1 ; i <>

{

colors[i] = color(random(255),random(255),random(255), 125) ;

}

}

void draw()

{

float siz = random(255);

background(0);

nextXY[0][0] = 200; //mouseX;

nextXY[0][1] = 200; //mouseY;

smooth();

noStroke();

fill(0,0,255,126);

//draw first circle

ellipse(nextXY[0][0], nextXY[0][1], 60, 60); // Gray ellipse

theta[0] += deltaTheta[0] ;

//now draw the rest

for (int i = 1; i <>

{

fill((color)colors[i]) ;

nextXY[i][0] = nextXY[i-1][0] + 60 * cos(theta[i-1]) ;

nextXY[i][1] = nextXY[i-1][1] + 60 * sin(theta[i-1]) ;

ellipse(nextXY[i][0], nextXY[i][1], 60, 60);

theta[i] += deltaTheta[i] ;

}

try{

Thread.currentThread().sleep(10);

}catch (InterruptedException ie) {}

}

collage gone wrong

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich is a blog that must be seen to believe.

My sketchup house

This is my dream house LOL! I need to add doors and windows. I had fun discovering sketchup. One thing I discovered about the components on the warehouse is that some are really easy to add to my own but others are an headache; it all depends on the designer, of course !

Update on project status

I felt at the beginning of this semester like a bottle of uncorked champagne with ideas bubbling over. I feel now that the carbonation has worn off a bit and it it time to start doing. I am in a bit of a slump between the idea part and the doing part though as the bridge between the two is not entirely clear to me yet. I have the ideas, the parts and some designs now i need to begin implementing while simultaneously learning the tools since coding and electronics is still somewhat alien to me. Anyways hope the rest of you are well on your way of project implementation!

Before and After

I'm making a rather large presentation tomorrow for one of my other classes. While doing research, I came across some before and after photos I thought were amazing. They're beautiful in the art sense of photography, but I guess I'm struggling with what type of art it is. If the photographer made it look like that (or at least similar to it) right out of the camera, then it's photography. But, if SO much post-production work was done to it, then that's not photography, right? That's photoshop art. Anyway, I still thought they were beautiful images.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crashmattb/sets/72157612362286896/

Universal Real-time Online Visualizer 1.0

I changed my project again. Now I want to create a universal Real-time Online Visualizer. It will be an online system that allows to instantly visualize any words using free online image-sharing sites like Flickr and google/images. Ideally, the user should be able to quickly go through the list of key words for a presentation/performance and the images that correspond to the key words will be visualized on the screen using different effects like fade-in/fade-out/random-placement/smooth-transition/e.t.c. The platform for the project is a browser on the client side, and a server software based on j2ee. Potential users are any people who want to visualize certain words/ideas during a performance without spending time looking for the images and creating M$ powerpoint/Openoffice impress presentations.
I hope that it is not too simple to be considered as a project....

Alternative Visions

Paul Bach-y-Rita

Paul Bach y Rita once said "We see with our brain, not with our eyes...", this insight led him to design extraordinary devices that clearly demonstrate that principle. He was one of my heroes and for years I thought I was going to meet him one day.

My personal interest in vision stimulation, distortion and alternative ways of "seeing" was probably a result of a lucky accident I suffered as a kid, when a playmate threw a piece of glass that neatly sliced my left eye and greatly diminished my vision. I say it was a lucky accident because my professional career as a cinematographer was really enhanced due to such accident, for reasons beyond the nature of this post. It was no coincidence though, that I became interested in everything visual, and even more in the possibility of modifying that vision.

Chair used by Paul Bach y Rita to experiment with tactile vision

Artist rendering of the chair contraption

Department of Orthopedics & Rehabilitation

Copyright © 2008 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Very early on I was fascinated by the work of Bela Julesz, a Hungarian neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who developed the first Random Dot Stereograms (you might know of them if you have ever seen the Magic Eye series of books) and many studies in the field of vision, perception, pattern recognition etc. But most important for me was the reading of his book Foundations of Cyclopean Perception (I considered myself some sort of Cyclop since I could only see "properly" with one eye:-)

Autostereogram. Read the instructions HERE to know how to view it

This book(which totally freaked me out, even to this day) led me to experiment with some of the concepts suggested in it and to understand from a psychophysical point of view some of the effects that I had become very familiar with due to my work in special visual effects. That is why, when I first heard about Paul Bach y Rita work from one of my Mexican friends (Bach y Rita studied at the UNAM in Mexico City) I was totally taken by his ideas and by their implementation, this last part being the most important I think.

Tongue device for tactile visual substitution

All photos of Paul Bach-y-Rita and his work, courtesy of Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison

So here I would like to share this video which shows a little about the result of this genius work and hopefully expand our concept of Visualization as we progress through our projects.

BrainPort is a product by Wicab, a company founded by Paul Bach-y-Rita

Visualizing Words

After seeing Francesca's post on word frequency of the Hobbit, I remembered a tool to create word art like used in that clip. It is called Wordle. The site describes Wordle as a "toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

My Hymns Title-page Collage

I put on the top left the "Hymn of Joy", whose music is taken from Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

In the bottom of the tree:

"A Mighty Fortress is our God"

On the Statue of Jesus the Redeemer

in Brazil, in light blue is the

"Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty"

Underneath the same is:

"O Worship the King all Glorious above"

On the Palm trees picture, at right, "Let

the Whole Creation Cry Alleluia"

With light blue on the dark blue sky

above the white dove
"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

Underneath the dove, in black on white bacgroud of the cloud:

"Stand up and Bless the Lord"

I'm thinking of making this the

design logo for my project.

All your comments are

welcome. Please let me know if you like this.

See you tomorrow,

Laila

COllage

I redid my collage. I think this is more of what Arturo was talking about.

Aidan Chopra (sketchup for dummies)

In the field of education, there is a debate going on about the best teaching practice according to one's preference. It seems that after evaluation, articles are being published showing that there is few evidence that someone that would be visual will actually benefit from visual materials. I am wondering what kind of evidence would be needed to support either assertion. I have been playing with sketchup and couldn't figure it out (I was only able to draw some boxes) until I came across some videos b Aidan Chopra the author of sketchup for dummies. I don't have the book but they were still useful. If you do a search in youtube you will be able to find them. I will post my modern accomplishment later...it's kind of fun!

Hello, just wanted to post my collage since I don't think anyone got to see it last class.

word frequency in The Hobbit

In my searching for creative data visualization I found this:

HBO Multimedia

Hey guys,

Here's the link to that HBO site I showed in class the other day.

http://www.hboimagine.com/#/the_affair/

Also, just wanted to thank everyone for their input. Anymore ideas anyone has will always be appreciated. Thanks!

Real object to 3D Model

We talked about objects in real world mapped to virtual world today. And while browsing I found this 2009 work by someone in University of Cambridge of a fast way to model your object and use the real object to interact with your virtual object..which can be whatever you want..with different textures. For people who want to see the video before the details: here's one on youtube. And here's : link to university for further reading.

Simulating illusary self motion

Some scientist experimented with floor projection in a virtual immersive environment, tried to study illusion of vection- self motion.

For people who do not know, vection refers to the perception of self-motion induced by some visual stimuli. The most familiar example of this sensation is that if one is seated in a train parked at the station while the train next to it pulls out from the station, one may have a sustained sensation that one is moving in the opposite direction.

So anyways, coming back to them scientists and their floor projection.This kind of projection helped them manifest linear vection, but not circular vection- the "real" illusion in our known world :)

So they tried a new thing- curvilinear forward vection which turned out to be more convincing experience. If you want to read further: CMU Research Paper

Here's what it looked like:

and,

Collage 2.0

Visualizing Space

one of my collages

Irvika's collage

My collage is an attempt to modify a map of Haiti showing how mother nature conspire to destroy Haiti. Regions that are replaced are the one of Artibonite destroyed in 2004 by Hurricane Jeanne. And of course the earthquake of 2010 ! At the same time I introduce the notion of Randomness like playing in a casino. The zero is green as it was "mother nature" playing and deciding.

My Collage

Collage

Sorry for the late post but here is my collage juxtaposing some of the ideas I am working with for the projects in the class. This is the same pic I showed in class of the work in progress, the collage is now finished but i haven't managed to get pics of it onto my computer yet. (when i get them on here I will swap out the pics).

Another example of creative representation of information

Harry Beck showed a radically different approach in making map for London's railway network. He realized that geographically correct map was almost useless for travelers. So he created a topological map preserving "relative" position of different train stops rather than actual scaled distance. This was the paradigm shift in creating route maps and ever since Beck's revolutionary idea, almost all railway and bus route maps are made preserving topology rather than scale.

Map to scale:

Beck's idea:

Art in Information Visualization

It was a delight reading about "Cyclogram" - a narrative of Salyut 6 space flight by russian cosmonaut, in chapter 5 of Tufte's book.
It is a masterpiece in visualization. So much information- multi dimensional information, all packed so nicely and presented on a piece of paper where one can choose to get the "bigger" picture at a glance or navigate through the details. Complete view, layers of informations, all connected through various dimensions of time and events, again in a mere 2-D paper!! Almost in the same spirit as Hans Rosling did with animated (3D) statistics in the TED video we saw in the class, or perhaps what Google is doing with Google stories.

Collage

Okay. This is my first (and maybe last) collage.
Actually, I don't know the rules here. Should the idea be
hidden or be obvious? Should it have several "lines"?
Can I use photos made by me? (Actually I used one. Guess which one).

Interactive Tourism Application

Last week I wrote a long post about the reading, this week I decided to focus my post on our project. For my project I was originally planning on doing an interactive tourism environment that was almost game like. Then a few days ago, I read an article (the link is below) about Apple’s plan for their new tablet. It made me consider a few good points about creating the project. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Use resources that are available to you.
You should be filling a void in the market. I discovered through research there were environments that did exactly what I intended to do already available. Additionally, I discovered that Facebook doesn’t have any really good travel applications. The best one available is Going Places, which only has a few hundred users (less then 200 active users). Thus, creating an interactive travel application for Facebook would fill the void in the marketplace.
Products can have multiple uses. These uses can be from educational to fun. I realized that what I create should be interactive and fun while still having some educational value. Having a product with multiple uses will expand the market of people who would be interested in the product.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703405704575015362653644260.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Mark Tansey

I thought it would be good to include another Mark Tansey painting. This one is a favorite of mine, called The Innocent Eye Test. This is another painting in which Tansey comments on art in a rather absurd way.

Comfort Women

This post is in response to Jeremiah's collage and his last post. Also, this relates somewhat to Francesca's project.

I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with Comfort Women. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, young women were forced to perform sexual services on Japanese military in "comfort stations." Skip to today: The surviving women have recently started speaking out after 50+ years. They are demanding an apology from the Japanese government. Japan refuses to acknowledge any wrong doing. I lived in Korea for 2.5 years and every Wednesday the survivors and other supporters would peacefully demonstrate outside of the Japanese Embassy. They vowed to be there every week until the Prime Minister issued a formal apology.

Amnesty International supports the cause and last year created an interactive website where people could also show their support. Donations were accepted as well, but mainly it was just to show support. People were directed to a program that allowed you to create your own butterfly for the Comfort Women. (Here is the website) You chose the style, color and also controlled the swirl pattern using your mouse. After, people were asked to set the butterflies as their facebook or myspace...etc. profile picture. This was the butterfly I made last year. This article talks about the outcome of the project.

Jeremiah - Collage

So, I've been working with images for a while, but I actually have never put together a collage, nor do I posses any great photoshop skills as I strive to show my work as honestly as possible.

For me, this represents a few of the problems when it comes to dealing with poverty issues, primarily how the more well-off people usually get their way while the poor have no voice and must make do by whatever means necessary for survival.

It's certainly a more literal interpretation of the idea, but I think it gets across.

Also, I'm really struggling to find a way to relate my project how I view it. Especially when it comes to what type of medium I'm going to use. If anyone has any ideas or opinions, I'd love to hear them.