Andrew Wirtanen » Information Visualization

CRISTAL: Control your living room with your coffee table

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:00:53 +0000

Researchers at the Media Interaction Lab of Upper Austria University have demonstrated an alternative use for Microsoft Surface tables. It’s called CRISTAL: Control of Remotely Interaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces. In the demo video, you can see how the interactive table controls the entire living room, from the TV to the Roomba. It’s a pretty cool idea that is aimed at improving the living room user experience by consolidating remote controls and making devices more interconnected.

My concerns are that interactive tables are very pricey and the angle of control could be awkward for the user. Also, you can’t exactly keep magazines on your living room table any more, and kicking your feet up on a $10,000 multi-touch computer just doesn’t seem like a good idea… maybe someday these things will be more affordable and CRISTAL will be a reality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Wired via Gizmodo]

How to remove a sticker from your baseball hat

Andrew Wirtanen — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:09:53 +0000

Craig Robinson continues to amaze me with his baseball infographics (see my older post). Here’s one of his latest:

Oh, and what town do MLB fans probably want to avoid living in? Turner, Montana.

[Flip Flop Fly Ball]

Redesigning an ineffective healthcare flowchart

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:40:43 +0000

Republican John Boehner recently presented a very ugly chart that outlined the Democrats’ health plan. From a graphic design standpoint, it is a disaster. Intentional or not, the chart clearly evokes negative feelings into the reader who most likely will be overwhelmed by words in ALL-CAPS, different and competing colors, shapes, and sizes.

Over on Flickr, a graphic designer took it upon himself to write a letter and redesign the chart. Much better.

[flickr.com via information aesthetics and washingtonpost.com]

Chroma-Hash makes confirming your password easier

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:53:56 +0000

One of the most frustrating things on the Internet is when you have to type in a password twice. Sometimes, a website will force you to hit the “submit” or “log in” button before it tells you that the passwords don’t match! Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that securely generations a color bar for each password field. If the color bars don’t match, then the passwords don’t match.

I love this idea, but of course it wouldn’t work as well if you are color blind (or blind, for that matter).

[Chroma-Hash Demo via information aesthetics]

Baseball Infographics

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:39:33 +0000

Craig Robinson has created a set of amazing baseball infographics over at Flip Flop Fly Ball. One of my favorites is “Home Team Dugouts” (below) which shows the side that MLB teams use as their home dugout. Before seeing this graphic, I thought the home dugout was nearly always on the on the first baseline… but it’s more common than I thought! Some of my other favorites are “2009 Ticket Prices”, “Ballpark Orientation”, “After Jackie”, and “Major League Fields”.

[flipflopflyball via information aesthetics]

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Book Store

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:14:07 +0000

This is a delightful must-read fictional short story that is available for free online or $0.80 on the Kindle. It’s about a peculiar book store, Google book scanning, information visualization, and immortality. The author is Current TV‘s Robin Sloan.

Hopefully the Kindle platform and/or other quick online publishing solutions will encourage more short stories like this one.

http://robinsloan.com/2009/41/

Designing for Big Data

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:43:32 +0000

Jeffrey Veen (Small Batch, Inc.) gave a great talk on data visualization at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco recently (March 31-April 3, 2009). He provides a history of usage of visualizations, including the first subway map (the tube map) and John Snow’s map that is credited with ending the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, London. He then talks about how visualizations have changed from telling a story, to allowing users to discover their own stories.

It’s a clear, concise (20 minutes), and modern look at information visualization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Veen.com via Waxy.org Links and information aesthetics]

If the World Could Vote?

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:51:43 +0000

The President of the United States has a large global influence, yet the world has no say in who we elect president. If the world could vote? is a website that detects your location based on IP and let’s the whole world vote (albeit, entirely unofficially).

http://www.iftheworldcouldvote.com/

Olympic Medal Visualization

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:03:27 +0000

The New York Times continues to impress me with their online visualizations. For the Olympics, they created an Olympic Medal Count Map, which shows results from the first Olympic games of the Modern era (1896) to the 2004 Athens Olympics.

[via Neatorama via Digg]

Manny’s 500 Home Runs Charted

Andrew Wirtanen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:49:19 +0000

Manny Ramirez is one of the most consistent hitters of all time. I would love to have him on my fantasy team (but I’m doing quite well with my Pirates: Nate McLouth and Xavier Nady). Manny is fun to watch, because you never know what he is going to say, and he seemingly wakes from the dead every time a ball is hit to left.

What else does Manny do that amazes us? He hits home runs to every corner of the park. Check out this awesome visualization of his 500 HRs from The Boston Globe:

(thanks Katelyn!)