WEBGL Twitter visualisation + real life holographic installation data eye candy goodness.
The goal of CNN’s Ecosphere [cnn-ecosphere.com] by Minivegas and Stinkdigital is a real-time Twitter visualization that aims to reveal how the online discussion is evolving around the topic of climate change. More specifically, the visualization aggregates all Twitter messages on the topic of #cop17 (in case you wonder, this is an abbreviation for “The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)”.
The online visualization consists of an interactive 3D globe, described as a “lush digital ecosystem” that closely resembles the look and behavior of real plants and trees in nature. In practice, the virtual plants in the 3D Ecosphere grow from those tweets that are tagged with #COP17. Each tweet about climate change feeds into a plant representing that specific topic or discussion, causing it to grow a little more.
The result thus becomes an mesmerizing, real-time visual representation of how the world “sees” climate change (try clicking on one of the tweet messages), or… an interactive Tron-like Lindenmayer forest, whatever you fancy the most.
toxiclibs is an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing (and soon other languages). After over 3.5 years of continuous development & refactoring, the collection consists of >25k lines of code, 270+ classes bundled into 8 libraries. The classes are purposefully kept fairly generic in order to maximize re-use in different contexts ranging from generative visuals, data visualization to architecture digital fabrication, use as teaching tool in these fields and more…
More shopping smartness, this time from ASDA. Their new Price Guarantee lets you compare the price of your shop against the other supermarkets. Enter 6 set of numbers from your receipt and the system does the rest. If it’s cheaper elsewhere ASDA refund the difference.
It’s being supported by a nationwide ad campaign showing those good old ‘regular mums’ trying it out.
It’s so easy to forget about how much personal information we hand over to Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. My mind was sharply focused again today when I read today that MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale.
The truth is that we really have no idea how these companies will use our data for in the future.
Here’s a video which makes Google look a bit scary.
Lady GaGa cleaned up at the BRITS last night. Within 20 minutes this appeared on Twitter. It’s a list of the most frequently deleted tracks / scrobbles by the Last.fm community in January 2010.
Are people embarrassed to admit they like her, or is she a bit shit? You tell me.
Robert Hodgin aka flight404 posted this video of an app he’s working on for the Decode event at London’s V&A. He’s reworking his older Solar piece so that it’s audio responsive in real-time.
This is unbelievably good. Visually and sonically.
I have been working on a real-time version of the Solar piece from a couple years ago. Since it is going to be responding to people’s voices and ambient noise instead of music, I started listening to podcasts while I was developing it. I made this video to commemorate my new found love for WNYC’s RadioLab podcast. Thanks to Branden Hall and Bill Lindmeier for introducing me to it.
