Art Deco meets electronic music visualization. This piece combines Art Deco designs (taken from architecture like the Chrysler, Empire State and Chanin Buildings) with elements inspired by live electronic music performances. The audio is a mash-up of the Glitch Mob's Beyond Monday and Kanye West and Jay-Z's Illest Motherf*cker Alive.
For their data visualization challenge, bike-sharing service Hubway provided data on every trip ever taken using their bikes - over half a million in all - to be used to create interesting and informative graphics.
I modeled a miniature, stylized version of Boston to serve as the backdrop for Hubway's transit data, collapsed a year's worth of rides into a single day, and then rendered stills of traffic at different hours. While the data itself illustrates high-traffic areas and frequently visited stations, I also wanted the wooden landmarks to suggest that there is a tangible aspect of information that is easily manipulated and played with digitally.
To produce the scene, I took every fiftieth trip (roughly 11,000 in all), and using scripts, mapped and animated them in Blender. An animation of the data is visible below.
Below is a scene I put together this weekend to test out how Sketchfab might be used as a platform for 3D diagrams and infographics. Click to explore the model (requires a WebGL compatible browser).
In comparison, a static render of the same scene.
Last month I attended the NASA-sponsored International Space Apps challenge here in NYC, and collaborated with a team to produce CERES, a commodities pricing tool for rural communities in the developing world. From the brief for the challenge we chose to work on:
Over the course of the weekend we developed a working solution for a regional commodities price index that could be populated and downloaded by local farmers using SMS and text messaging, in order to cope with the data restrictions in rural areas lacking internet or smartphone access. In addition, a front-end dashboard is able to quickly display pricing information online for locals, governments or bureaucrats who may have a vested interest in information regarding agricultural production.
There is also some very good empirical evidence that demonstrates how price transparency derived from increased mobile coverage in rural areas can lead to more efficient markets with higher profits for producers and lower prices overall for consumers, suggesting that a tool like CERES can have dramatic effects on local economies.
Our team was one of the two winning solutions from the New York event, putting us in the global judging along with teams from twenty-four other cities. See our video about CERES and the write-up for our project here. Since the challenge, we've been working with Opportunity International - Nicaragua, who are interested in deploying the solution on the ground.
This 2.5D isometric map was rendered in Blender, with the interactivity built in Processing.
A new pricing data visualization I have been working on is above, and you can play with a live version here (may take a minute to load).
Below is an animated spectrogram of Silencer by band RIBS, which scrolls and visualizes the sound as it plays.
The spectrogram was generated using Audacity. One cool use of spectrograms is as displacement textures - below part of Silencer is used to vertically displace blocks in Blender.
JOHN OQUIST