Visuale

A movie-visualization of the landing on Titan. The descent of Huygens probe is reconstructed through a beautifully crafted visualization and sonification application. Put your headphones on!!! And inmmerse yourself in the experience.

Bits of explanation: the (cyclic) sounds you hear represent the rotation of the probe and the rate of the transmitted data. The musical notes are related to the section of the surface analyzed by the spectrometer.

It is a lovely example of dynamic visualization and a clear demonstration of how visualization can be a powerful tool to present, convey, and explain complex phenomena with ease (besides the usual explorative capabilities of infovis tools).

Detailed info here:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMKVQOFGLE_1.html#subhead1

[via infosthetics.com]

The SENSEable City Lab @ MIT has an interesting project about using visualization to analyze how footbol players move on the field during a match:

Information about the movement of soccer players on the field during a match can be useful for strategic and physiologic analysis, directed at improving the performance of the players and that of the team.

There are some interesting challenges like the fact that "the sensing area is large compared to the moving actors (players)" and that a strong occlusion is always present due to the paths that are most frequantly traced by the players.

There are a number of other visualizations tracking people moving in a space and, interestingly enough, they always have the same recognizable shape (you can say ah ah, this is people!) and share similar challenges. Notably, Katy Broner's work on Visualizing 3D Virtual Worlds and Their Users (some images here)

Parallel Sets is a nice interactive tool presented at IEEE InfoVis 2005. It permits to visualize categorical data, i.e., data with no inerent ordering, with parallel coordinates.

The usual problem with this kind of data is that there is no natural mapping between values and positions on the axes, and then that parallel coordinates do not convey properly the amount of data falling in each category. Parallel Sets nicely resolve the problem using bands in place of simple lines, whose width is proportional to the frequency of items.

Also, a very interesting feature of the tool is that the user can compute new dimensions from existing ones on the fly and directly manipulate them in the visual space. It also has interesting drag and drop features and animation.

See more: webpage | infovis paper | video

Yet another locative information visualization. Cabspotting tracks the position of taxi cabs in San Francisco and produces visualizations to show interesting social and economic patterns.

Cab Tracker, the main project, uses the last four hours of tracking data and presents them as lines on a map. Then it selects 10 taxi cabs and overlay them to the map showing their movements in real time.

The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible.

A beatuful web application of the cab tracker can be accessed from the home page. Time Lapse, another related project aims at revealing time-varying patterns like rush hours and traffic jams.