randomosity

Today I had a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion with Fernanda Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg of IBM’s Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes web­site that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launch­ing their site, they have been hard at work bring­ing us new means of visu­al­iz­ing data­sets and provid­ing a social net­work for data­heads. My earlier art­icle I spoke glow­ingly of the atten­tion to detail that the site exhib­ited and wealth of chart­ing oppor­tun­it­ies offered. I also prom­ised I would play more with the site.
In the last few months I have had an oppor­tun­ity to just that.
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Now this is very cool. Was over at the Air­bus site after the news came out that they lost the FEDEx order for A380s. Appar­ently the folks at Air­bus have been busy with their vir­tual cabin tour. If they could chan­nel that productivity…

This is a very well executed vir­tual world. The trans­itions between your nav­ig­a­tion choices are supremely well executed. The appro­pri­ate eye move­ment to sim­u­late actu­ally walk­ing down the gang­way. Well done. I really like this.

Build­ing a little index of some of my maps over time today reminded me of one of my longest pro­jects. Back in the mid 90s, I star­ted design­ing a map (a mov­ing map, ooh­hhh) of the chan­ging bound­ar­ies of Habs­burg ter­rit­orial domains. I star­ted with a series of HTML pages with maps gen­er­ated by Adobe Illus­trator. I then got the bright idea to actu­ally turn it into some­thing inter­act­ive by using Author­ware. Turn­ing it into a flash-based map was the even­tual goal. To be hon­est, it never quite made it into a fully func­tion­ing flash map. The HTML was good, Author­ware even bet­ter, but it has sat unre­fined as I got dis­trac­ted by other things.

Today when I was brow­ing about I came across Maps of War. They are fea­tur­ing a map called ‘Imper­ial — His­tory’ which is a beau­ti­ful work. There are a num­ber of other won­der­ful maps, all of which are the mov­ing map of my mach­in­a­tions. A small timeline scrolls across the bot­tom of the screen as the large, col­our­ful map is panned about to show ‘who has con­trolled the Middle East’ from 3000 BCE to today. It is won­der­fully executed, even let­ting you jump from date to date on the timeline. The changes in imper­ial ter­rit­or­ies are gradual and smooth. Bril­liant execution.

I don’t nor­mally click thru for adverts and the like, but after wtch­ing an epis­ode of zeFrank today the pro­du­cer sof the movie The Last Kiss had clev­erly bought some space. Why did I click? Well, lately zeFrank’s been pretty enter­tain­ing and I figured why not sup­port the site. I am glad I did. The site for the movie is quite a nice piece of flash. Nicely open page, lots of white space and a very smooth and, in my mind, thought­ful nav­ig­a­tion wid­get. Small popup from the bot­tom tied to the movie’s theme, but very user-centric. Works for me. Try it your­self. The incent­ive was to hear the soundtrack and it hap­pens to strike me as appeal­ing and is run­ning as a loop in the back­ground as I write this. All in all I was struck by the value of this click thru and sim­il­arly by the path from a pod­Cast I sub­scribe to to this movie which pre­sum­ably has some thought given to demo­graphic tastes in just such a clickthru.