Visuale

Here is a video of an invention to enhance the visualization of the hockey puck in ice rinks. Since the puck (the small black kind of ball) is very fast, it is often hard to follow its trajectory on the field. The system tries to overcome the problem with visualization.

The idea is to cover the field with a bed of actionable tiles which turn on when the puck passes over them. The visual effect is really impressive. Each light has a slow phase out that creates a perfect effect to follow the trajectory: when the puck runs fast, the trajectory is long, when the puck is slow, the trajectory is short.

The end of the video is really impressive!

[via FXDS Blog]

A good thing about criticizing something is that your critic can be criticized too. Obvious, right?

Robert Kosara posted and interesting response to my post of few days ago about Visual Poetry, where I argued that even if it was a very pleasing picture, it was nothing really interesting in terms of visualization.

He criticizes my point observing that in fact it is not a visualization but just a way to create a beautiful image to put on the cover of a book. I found interesting his idea of considering the context in which a visualization is used and also I liked his parallel between visual mapping and bijective/injective functions. Visual mapping, in this case, can be considered a sort of hash function: you cannot return to the original object but still you can recognize the unique visual id it generates (like if it was a fingerprint).

I think Robert is right. The purpose was not to analyze data but to create a beautiful and unique image out of it. Given that, however, I still think there is a too common practice of visualizing data just for the sake of it, without worrying too much of potentially better designs. Especially on the web, one can find thousands of little visualizations that are just beautiful and nothing more.

I don't consider myself a purist of visualization, a great designer neither, but I still think it is far too easy to get some data and give it "a" shape, whatever it is. Visualization is careful design, resources are extremely scarce and must be used with parsimony. In commenting the Visual Poetry I was guided by the feeling of frustration I often have when seeing novel visualizations that are just nice. It feels like a whole bunch of knowledge is mistreated or just neglected.

There is a second point. The relation between art and visualization is a very interesting one. One can argue that when visualization is used for artistic purposes it should not necessarily convey useful information. I am not sure about that, but I am sure the best case for visualization, especially when used for artistic purposes, is when staring at the picture one can discover subtle information or relationships, create new associations, and experience one of those rare "ah ah!" moments that let us vibrate. It stimulates curiosity and exploration ... it's a much much richer experience! And an artistic one! Martin Wattenberg's art page is a good example of what I am saying.

In the end what I really thought about the Visual Poetry is that it was a real pity it was designed like that. I strongly felt that if it was designed a bit differently it could retain its beautifulness and still be informative. The current design reduces this opportunity, resources are wasted, and in the end it limits the experience a viewer can get out of it.

Intelligent Icons use visualization and mining techniques to convey information about the content of files by means of small informative icons. Icons are built in a way that files with similar content share similar visual appearance and positioning, thus enabling comparison and grouping.

There are several interesting features in intelligent icons:

• Different color scales or layouts can be used to accommodate and distinguish between different file types, so that they don't get mixed up.
  
• The icons can be used at different resolutions so that they can scale to any default icon size provided by the operating system.
  
• A generic model is devised to permit the comparison of new file formats (through the development of novel plug-ins). The examples in the paper provide mechanisms for: dna data, time-series, pdf files, games.
  

The thing I like the most of this work, however, is the original approach and the paradigm shift from typical infovis tasks and scenarios. And this seems to be a specific purpose of the paper! In the authors' words:

The vast majority of visualization tools introduced so far are specialized pieces of software that are explicitly run on a particular dataset at a particular time for a particular purpose. In this work we introduce a novel framework for allowing visualization to take place in the background of normal day to day operation of any GUI based operation system such as MS Windows, OS X or Linux. By allowing visualization to occur in the background of quotidian computer activity (i.e. finding, moving, deleting, copying files etc) we allow a greater possibility of unexpected and serendipitous discoveries.

I like the idea of escaping the traditional infovis scenario: "get some data + give it a shape + provide interaction + let's go hunting for new knowledge!". I am sure the type of tasks that can be enabled by infovis and the different scenarios that can be covered go far beyond traditional data exploration (even if I think there is yet a lot to do in the traditional case), and this is a very good example.

For more information see the paper:

Intelligent Icons: Integrating Lite-Weight Data Mining and Visualization into GUI Operating Systems. E Keogh, L Wei, X Xi, S Lonardi, J Shieh, S Sirowy - ICDM 2006.

For some background info see also:

VisualIDs: automatic distinctive icons for desktop interfaces. JP Lewis, R Rosenholtz, N Fong, U Neumann - ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2004.