Thoughts about Initial Scenes in IM-TEL worlds
This morning I was thinking about how to illustrate a virtual world used for Immersive Intelligence. It was a familiar topic that usually gets lost in a blizzard of details. However, it occurred to me that the first design choice is to define the nature of the virtual space. This definition then determines the dimensions used in the initial scene. In other words, the space is like the canvas upon which the data (info-objects) will be painted (rendered). Hence, we will refer to this initial scene as the “canvas”. Here is a list of possible...
read moreInteractive Dynamic Systems
We have concentrate on data visualization too much! That is, visualizing data that has been collected, processed and stored into some database. But, what about data that is generated from equations? How can we visualize this type of data and especially the behavior emerging from the equations? Check out this video by Bret Victor. Simple and thoughtful! Note how the multi-touch user interface (of the iPad) enhances the interaction with a complex set of differential equations.I like the intuitive way that he manipulates the equations to learn...
read moreBoulder Virtual Worlds & Gaming Folks – Tidbits from November 29, 2011
An informal group has convened at the local lunch place about once per month. Great discussion… Lots happening… Here is a quick summary of discussion topics. The Jibe discussions on Google Groups has some great links. Check out these examples of virtual worlds created by students to invoke specific emotions. The multi-user worlds were done using Jibe from the Reaction Grid on top of Unity3D, while the single-user examples were plain Unity3D. Check out Autodesk 123D. Totally unexpected offering from Autodesk — well designed and free!...
read moreBoulder Virtual Worlds & Gaming Folks – Tidbits from November 4, 2011
An informal group has convened at the local lunch place about once per month. Great discussion… Lots happening… Here is a quick summary of discussion topics. 1) Anders is using Avaya web.alive (http://www.avaya.com/usa/product/avaya-web-alive) for some of his weekly Train For Success and for private meetings. 2) Anders has a great line-up for the weekly Train For Success talks at 10:00am on Thursday. See http://www.facebook.com/TrainForSuccess for details 3) The serious game Fold-It (http://fold.it/) is making waves! We are going...
read moreGlobal Picture of Money
Earlier this week, I wrote a blog on GigaPan, a Carnegie Mellon project that artfully displayed time-elapse high-resolution images so that you could surface the embedded stories. Today, I read a blog by Nathan Yau of Flowing Data about a static high-resolution infographic about our global economy. Randall Munroe of xkcd meticulously created comparison charts of money nested in units of trillions, billions, and millions. Fascinating! Zoom and pan! Enjoy! What insights did you discover? Note the contrast of GigaPan with Munroe’s giga-money...
read moreVisualizing with GigaPan
Traditional barriers for rich information visualization are crumbling weekly. The latest was noted in a short article on the Scientific American website about “Seeing the Big (and Small) Picture“. The article highlighted the research group called GigaPan Time Machine at Carnegie Mellon, leaded by Illah Nourbakhsh and Randy Sargent. Go to About and watch the second video (7:04) for a quick intro. A recent conference paper describes the approach of GigaPan. Here is a quote from their website: Each Time Machine captures a...
read moreSQL versus Hadoop versus SciDB
At the recent Teradata Partners Conference, there was much talk about MapReduce and Hadoop, along with the SQL-MapReduce of the acquired Aster Data company. The O’Reilly Strata Conference, which occurred the previous week, popped up several times. So, I scanned the Strata conference schedule and some slide presentations that were posted. One of the Strata talks that caught my attention was Big Data and Big Analytics: SciDB is not Hadoop by Paul Brown, Chief Architect for Paradigm4 and SciDB. Brown’s slides are here. What is SciDB?...
read moreWSJ Notes Gamification of the Workplace
In today’s Wall Street Journal (October 10, 2011 on page B11), an article Latest Game Theory Mixes Work and Play by Rachel Emma Silverman surveys the ways that game theory/design is changing everyday business tasks, making them more engaging. By using reward of points and badges, friendly competition is encouraged. Gartner estimates that 70% of large corporations will use workplace gamification by 2014, while M2 Research predicts revenues of $938 million for gamification software and services by 2014. Gamification vendors, such as...
read moreStanford AI Course in the Global Village
This morning I received an email from David Fliesen at Sonalysts reminding me that TODAY was the start of the Artificial Intelligence course taught by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University AI Group and Peter Norvig at Google Research. I had enrolled a month ago and bought the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Third Edition) from Amazon (for $129 – ouch! – but well worth it if you study the text!). Check out the course at http://www.ai-class.com/. You can ENROLL at no cost… It is free! This is amazing...
read moreRoaming Around Mammoth Cave
In a previous blog, I discussed the Mammoth Cave project and the need for a lite-weight scene in Unity3D as a framework to build mesh inspection and diagnostic routines. So, here is an initial attempt… Caution! Unity3D novice driving! This was my first attempt that creating a scene from scratch (albeit a very simple scene). Your comments are appreciated, especially suggestions for extending this cave fly-through. Create a New Unity Project Let’s start. Install and execute Unity3D. In the main menu (upper left), click on...
read more