Archive for June, 2009

I dunno if I should be happy to have this as a resource, or somewhat depressed. This guy today just launched his website which is kinda like what I’ve been discussing roughly for thesis. Its totally static and not interactive in anyway, but several of his ideas are exactly what I’ve been talking about executing. Seriously last night I was thinking it’d be awesome to show the flight patterns of a major league team and compare them with their winning percentage. Oh well guess I have to come up with something cooler than him now.

Flip Flop Flyball

Here’s a presentation from Stimulant Design at UXWeek. Rather than showing their own work, they go over all the things they’ve learned while developing new, mostly multi-touch interfaces. Really interesting and most likely helpful. I’ll definitely be watching this again.

Darren David & Nathan Moody | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Here is a project I found using a multitouch table as a tool for a data vis program. Overall its kinda cool but its SUPER boring. Why does data vis always end up being this boring? Also, is anything gained really from the whole multitouch thing or are they just doing it cause its cool?

Ok so this is going to be the first post of hopefully a whole lot pertaining to exactly what I want to do for thesis. I have a lot of ideas about the types of things that I want to investigate from both a technical and conceptual standpoint, and I think that putting these all down will be a great step in working towards realizing exactly what I want to do for thesis.

Areas of Research/Domains:

The main domain of research that I want to research as of now is sociological internet based research. What I mean by this is finding/recognizing and visualizing social patterns which exist on the internet today, as well as giving people a unique, interesting, and enjoyable way to interact with the data that is collected. While the internet will be the main catalyst for data collection, the data does not have to specifically pertain to the virtual world of the internet. Some examples of things I would love to explore are:
-Baseball, through both a statistical perspective as well as the social interactions and mindsets of the fans. How do people associate their happiness with how their team performs? How do fans from different regions interact? How do people associate their cities and themselves with their teams?
-I am very interested in the recently available New York Times API and how the plethora of information available through this new service can be used for data visualizations, as well as how this information can be arranged in a way that is useful and beneficial to everyone.
-Along the lines of data visualization, I am also very interested in how data can be used to create more abstract, visually pleasing interactions, as well as how it can be used to generate abstract visual and audio systems that people can interact with.

Technical Interests:
The technical things that I would really like to explore during the thesis process are more concrete, and I feel like they can all be used to create something great after a solid, cohesive concept has been established:
-Computer vision/projected interaction for installation display
-Multi-touch: Both touch tables and iPhone applications. I think this is the main area I’d like to research and create something that works across both platforms
-Data parsing, storage, scraping, etc. to get the information that I will need and organize it in a way that I can make it both useful to myself and possibly open to others

This is a lot to think about for now, and I’m currently writing this post from China, but I intend on investigating all of this as the summer goes along and hopefully I can have a solid idea to begin working on as the new semester begins.