Augmented reality: The future of maps?

I have no sense of direction. Seriously, I once walked around a circular plaza one and a half times before realizing that I was retracing my steps. I always imagine that functional humans have a sort of navigator in their head that allows them to orient themselves constantly and keep track of where they are now relative to where they were before. I'm not like that. I still get lost in my office building.

Which is why I love love love augmented reality, especially as it applies to mapping services.

Map/Territory from timo on Vimeo.

This would save my life!

Via Flowing Data.

EveryBlock: News visualization goes local

So... back to one of my favorite topics: visualizing news.

As I've mentioned a few times before, innovations so far in the space have been quite lacking. Often big and flashy, but of scant use to someone actually out looking to catch up on some news.

So here's a welcome change: EveryBlock is a hyper-local news site with a simple layout and visualization tools that look like they might actually come in handy.


It offers neighborhood-specific news feeds, a simple news map, and city stats such as police calls, liquor license status changes, and restaurant inspections. It's also available as an iPhone app, which I'll be sure to check out.

It's definitely a good start and I like that their focus is clearly on utility.

Not surprising therefore that it was recently sold to MSNBC, which is at least trying to come up with some creative solutions to revitalize the online news space. Check out their Spectra Visual Newsreader while you're at it. I still think it falls into the category of More Flashy Than Useful, but at least it's a step in a different direction.

Curious to see how EveryBlock will fit in.

The future of news visualization: Still waiting

Since my recent post about the inadequacies in current means of presenting news, I've stumbled upon another news site that seemed worthy of mention: MSNBC's Spectra Visual Newsreader.

And sure, it's visually intriguing, and surprisingly easy to use. It lets the user select specific interest areas, and then surfaces related news with a combination of text and images.



But still... I'm not convinced that translating news into a vortex of color-coded flashcards qualifies as a significant advancement in the field. It looks nifty at first, but it's not innovative in any meaningful way.

So yeah: no.

The future of news visualization

So I've been spending some time thinking about how news is conveyed, and I'm thinking we have room for some serious innovation...

Pick up a newspaper and what do you see, at a very first glance? Words. Black type on white. An image or two. Perhaps a big headline catches your eye and you read it; it registers in your mind as Big News. You read a few more articles. Now you know a subset of today's news, but little more.

Seems to me that a whole lot of information is falling through the cracks, and online news sources are not much better. Google News tried to create a richer news experience, by aggregating news from different sources and by organizing stories topically, but it wasn't a huge improvement.

Here are a few more interesting approaches:

Newsmap.jp I just discovered today, and it's quite smart: it displays all news on a single screen, color-coded by topic, with the biggest stories occupying the most real estate. The user can either search for a specific story, or filter based on topic, recency and geography.



Another conceptually interesting news site is BreakingNewsMap, which pinpoints breaking news on a world map in real time...

Unfortunately, despite its theoretical coolness, in practice it's too scattered and conveys information far too slowly (just one story every couple of seconds), so the user gets no sense for the big picture. I could imagine idly following it for a minute or so, but I would get frustrated pretty quickly.

What I want to see is a combination of the two... I like the idea of putting news on a map, but I want to see more stories at once, color-coded based on topic, featured more or less prominently based on how much buzz they're generating. I want to be able to apply filters to my news. I want to zoom in from national/world news to local and hyper-local news. Oh, and I want images too!

All you geniuses out there, make it happen!

Follow-up review: RjDj

So I finally caved and bought an iPhone, taking a big ole swig from the collective jug of kool-aid. Oh but it tastes so good!!

And, it gave me the opportunity for a follow-up review to my original post about that quirky RjDj app. Quick reminder:

"RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time."

That's how I had described it the first time around.

Having now sampled it first hand, I'll revise that description. It's not so much music as a stream of psychedelic-sounding repetitions, as if a sound, rather than merely being heard and registered by your brain, instead lingered there a bit longer, bouncing off the sides of your skull and creating weird reverberating echos.

So... music, no.

But it is extremely interesting and weird and fascinating. I had it running while I was unloading the dishwasher, and the clanking of dishes (among my top 10 most annoying sounds) somehow turned into a strangely fitting noise-pop soundtrack to that most mundane of activities.

There's certainly more that can be done with the app, including sampling different "scenes," which are essentially different algorithms for manipulating the sound inputs.

I'll do some more exploring and post a follow-up if I discover anything nifty.

Check out the app here, and my original post here!

Alice's Adventures in Microscopic Wonderland

Three beetles sip tea at a table made of butterfly wings, set in a field of crystallized vitamin C while aphids fly overhead, and it looks every bit as fanciful as Lewis Carroll's world beyond the rabbit hole.



This image, by illustrator Colleen Champ and microscopist Dennis Kunkel, was among the first prize winners at the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Read more about it on Wired Magazine and on the contest website, where you can see other fascinating images that blur the lines between science and art.

Robots, Love, Babies

Kenji, a third-generation humanoid robot, was originally programmed to emulate the human emotion of love, but ended up emulating dependence and fear of abandonment instead.

"After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time... Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.

...

"The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly."

Nope, looks like Kenji wasn't displaying devotion and empathy at all.

Interestingly, his behavior is surprisingly similar to the first steps of social-emotional development in babies. At around 8-10 months, babies begin to show signs of human attachment, mostly in the form of separation anxiety, and only later do they acquire the capacity of empathy and an understanding of social rules.

So maybe Kenji just needs to grow up?

The story gets funnier:

"The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

Would have loved to see that. You can read more about Kenji here.

A chain reaction across 8 cities, 6 time zones and 3 continents

Drop a coin in a gumball machine in Palo Alto and, a while later, you receive your gumball, except this happens by way of a kicking skeleton leg in Chicago, a ball bouncing off a sub-woofer in Munich, a pouring tea-pot in Shanghai, and countless steps more, involving everything from a Tickle-Me Elmo doll to a floating pillar of bubbles.

This feat of engineering is the brainchild of global design company IDEO, ranked as one of the 10 most innovative companies of 2008 by Fast Company, and it's worth checking out.

Yes, clocking in at 14 minutes, it's a bit much to watch in one stretch, but keep it running in the background and check in on it once in a while. It's absolutely fascinating.


IDEO Global Chain Reaction from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

For more on possibly the world's largest Rube Goldberg machine, check out the article on IDEO Labs.

Sci-Fi Prosthetics

A prosthetic limb that looks like it came right out of a sci-fi movie? On a girl clearly giving someone the come-hither eyes?



This may be the stuff of dreams for a certain demographic raised on fantasy books and video games. But while the urge to fill this post with thinly veiled cyber-porn allusions is great, what came to mind when I read about this is in fact the theme of this blog. This is a perfect instance of the uncanny valley phenomenon.

A whole lot of thought has gone into making prosthetic limbs look natural and lifelike, but they often remain eerily creepy. Much creepier, as it turns out, than this sci-fi inspired model, a conceptual design by Hans Alexander Huseklepp at AHO, which makes no pretense whatsoever of resembling a flesh-and-blood human limb.

The uncanny valley theory would suggest that this is because this sci-fi prosthesis is sufficiently non-humanlike, that we zero in on its human-like qualities instead. Quite the opposite occurs for traditional prostheses. Indeed, with their skin-colored plastic and fake fingernails, traditional prostheses fall right down the uncanny valley, that eerie place where making something more humanlike actually causes a distinctly more negative human response.

As of now, this design is merely conceptual, but click here to read more about the thought process behind it.

Soundtrack to your life?

This may be the moment when I finally cave and buy an iPhone.

Possibly the most fascinating iPhone app I've heard of yet: RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time.

Also amusing is the creators' shameless analogy to psychedelics as a selling point:

"The listening experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation."

Check out this video demo:

Solve Puzzles for Science

This is brilliant.

Though this is way beyond my intellect, it's awesome to think that more spatially gifted people have a means to put their puzzle-solving abilities to good use!

The use: advancing research on proteins.

Proteins are made up of strands of amino acids that curl up into 3-dimensional bundles, the structure of which is essential to the proteins' functions. Scientists are trying to understand the mechanism by which this folding process occurs, but to do so computationally is both complex and expensive.

Enter FoldIt, a site that turns protein folding into interactive 3-D puzzles that users can attempt to solve, thus contributing to the body research though their efforts.

Possible uses for this research: oh, just curing AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer's...
Sudoku, anyone?

Click here for more info on FoldIt.

Growth of Walmart

I told you I liked data visualization gimmicks... This one shows the growth of Walmart across the U.S.


I wish I some cool video to juxtapose to this. Like the spreading of a virus...

Click through to see the full animation in all its viral glory.

Visualizing Personal Audio Histories

I'm always a sucker for a clever data visualization project -- anything that turns an unwieldy mass of information into a clean and intuitive graphic. The "aha!" moment is my favorite.

I'm also a huge music fan so here's one that sparked my interest.
Lee Byon, an information designer at Facebook, created this graphic to map his listening history on Last.fm.


Unfortunately all I have is a partial screen shot, so definitely click through to the article to get a better view.

Here's how it works: imagine time as the horizontal axis; each ribbon represents a different artist, color-coded based on how long the creator has been a fan (cool blues represent old favorites, while warmer colors represent newer discoveries); the width of the ribbon represents the volume of music heard.

What I love is how much information is immediately apparent. First of all, I like this guy's taste in music, but he seems a little boring: he mostly listens to old favorites -- though he seems to have gotten more experimental since. His listening habits tend to come in phases: there are times when he listens to a lot of music and times when he listens to fairly little; he seems very into particular artists at certain times, but they seldom make a comeback once he tires of them.

Would love to see my own audio history graphic, and compare it to those of my friends. I'm imagining a whole world of music histories that flow in and out of each other like liquid, intersecting, affecting each others musical currents.

The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that as a robot is made more humanlike, the emotional response from a human to the robot becomes increasingly positive, until a point of human-likeness is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-human, then the humanlike characteristics tend to stand out, generating empathy. But if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Check out the wikipedia entry here.

The uncanny valley is one of my favorite theories. And this blog is about my own uncanny valley: that place between the common and uncommon, where things strike me as both interesting as strange.