http://www.unitseven.co.nz/

Physical maps are extraordinarily rich backbones to support a host of visualizations.  A huge challenge is taking things that are not physical or not lat/long based and using a map metaphor to make it accessible to human beings.

The following map's original data was created from a reference photo of a real human brain which was used to build the 3d terrain. This digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading and to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation.

http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/
Dynamic Diagrams has a great post on how to exercise sound design and analytical principles to make Excel Charts more readable.

Before...
 After...

http://www.curehunter.com/public/dictionary.do

The United States National Library of Medicine has published a Visual Medical Dictionary.  Disease, Therapy and Bio-agents involved is depicted a a network visualization - illustrating the relationships between diseases (purple), drugs & therapies (orange), & bio-agents (green). edge thickness reflects the strength of the relationship, while alpha-transparency shows a positive outcome score.

http://www.recreating-movement.com/

I thought this was pretty novel - time and space are powerful metaphors in visualization and this visual takes frames from video and creates a longitudinal look at the action contained therein.

With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that "freezes" a particular time span in a film. By using the keyboard the viewer can browse through the sequence of frames, chose any kind of view of the sequence of frames and influence the displayed frames directly via a displayable menu bar.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/11/16/cool-stuff-star-trek-home-theater/

Someone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. Named the best theme theater installation at CEDIA 2007, this Palm Beach County, FL home features motion-activated air-lock doors with series sound effects, and a “Red Alert” button on the Crestron TPMC-10 controller to turn all of the LEDs bright red and flashing.

I just got back from seeing a customer who is doing a lot of investigation into using Microsoft technologies for Visualization.  All kinds of tools - WPF/Silverlight/Reporting Services/Excel Services - even using 3D exposed by Direct X.

While I've been taking a personal "crash-coarse" on WPF (is that a word?), I've come to a big conclusion in my own career...The world is about to change when it comes to Visualization.

Visualization has always been very, very niche - especially in business.  I always wince when someone talks about a scorecard as being a visualization tool - that's just not doing the topic justice.  Visualization as a term has been washed out - it has almost all meanings of rendering data, so it's actually lost it's original intent.

Being someone who has been involved in data visualization in one way or another for over ten years, I saw that there were two important camps of people in the field - the designers, and the builders.

Bill Buxton is an example of a designer (I am sure he can build too) - his emphasis is how do you get the information to be absorbed and useful to a task at hand.  I recently got his book "Sketching User Interfaces" and I recommend it to anyone thinking about entering the computer field or thinking about retooling for WPF or Silverlight (or Adobe Flex or Apple Core Animation for that matter).

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/103-0688961-0151038?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Bill+Buxton

A Builder is simply someone who knows how to draw a picture from data - that was me.  I can do 2D and 3D visualizations with whatever data you give me. Within the last few months I've been on a personal journey to get the designer side of me fired up and it's really hard to do that.  Why?  Because, I WANT to code and solve the problem - a designer wants to look at all kinds of comparisons - go down blind allies and throw away designs that don't work. It's important and actually makes the difference between something that works and something you love to work with.  Apple had this figured out a long time ago and Microsoft is now starting to grow a culture of design inside the company - you can see the impact in the XBOX, the new Zune Player, and especially in Vista and Office 2007.

Here's the other side of it and why I'm writing this to my blog...

The ability to build a visualization is about to "commoditize" itself - so much so that I think that super high end visualizations that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to write and only a few engineers could accomplish will now be done in a day or two and by virtually anyone.  Remember, I'm talking about the builder side - it's the designer who will be in demand - great demand.

The web has had a lot of people fixated, but while everyone was looking at HTML (the dot matrix printer of visualization) - the graphic world changed.  SGI workstations went away as $100 graphics cards replaced them.  Look at the following screens of one generation of graphics card and one generation of DirectX library work...

Direct X 9

Direct X 10

This library is now being deployed into half of the enterprises in the US (over half of the enterprises in the US have plans to deploy Vista) - and that means that the 3D abilities of WPF are going to be everywhere.  Once something is deployed, the economics change.

Here's an application that one of our partners built in a few weeks - all WPF and actually, not complicated code...getting that heart rendered was probably less than 100 lines of code.  This app is used in a hospital for documenting heart surgery procedures. You can draw and annotate the 3D surface, rotate the heart, etc.

This is used to be science fiction - it's here now and it's being deployed.  If you are a developer or a BI engineer and you don't know WPF or are not kicking it around - you will be soon - the market is going to force it.

The world is about to go through a big learning curve - the same one we experienced in 1993 when Visual Basic came out and turned lots of people into developers (remember seeing those applications with Old English fonts :) )

Designers will lead the way to new usability scenarios.

http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!9725.entry

http://advertboy.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/blend-candy-another-blue-glowing-glass-button-in-the-style-of-web-20/

LiquidBoy has a great tutorial on how to build a XAML asset that looks like those slick, black, glass buttons you see in Microsoft Media Player.  Highly recommended.

http://www.kenjikojima.com/rgbmusiclab/

Here's a downloadable application that converts the RGB (Red, Green & Blue) values of an image to chromatic scale sounds. the program reads RGB value of pixels from the top left to the bottom right of an image. 1 pixel makes a harmony of three note of RGB value, & the length of note is determined by brightness of the pixel. It's not reading your music library and then animating a non-related image and it is not an impression of paintings or photographs of a composer. it reads a score from an image data directly.

Pretty cool.

http://research.microsoft.com/users/kenh/InkSeine/index.html

Here's an interesting project that leverages ink right to search in a web service kind of way.  It's this kind of stuff that really makes you wonder about the future of search being just pages at an HTTP destination.

So, you can ink out whatever you want (kinda like OneNote)

Then you can lasso text and send it to a search engine web service, like this...

And, here's something interesting - that pie menu we keep hearing about!

Here's a movie to watch...