Visualizing the Future in Three.js: The Long Walk

Screen grab of "The Long Walk" 

The journey to describe and build the next generation of data visualization apps will be a long and circuitous one. [Is this part of what makes the journey so enjoyable?] On the journey, on occasion, we must stop looking at mere numbers and just look out and see see what we can see.

All this is to say that the weekend before last, I participated in the Art Hack at GAFFTA. The idea was that small teams could develop new artisticky apps. I was predestined to join Tony Parisi's team but no particular job had been decided. My role ended up as being "technical artist". My task was to bring over data created by designers and display it in the web app we were building. This ended up by necessitating the conversion of OBJ files into JSON files and then embedding these into a Three.js files in order to create a scene.

While I was able to accomplish this task, the results were not particularly gratifying. Subsequently I've learned quite a bit more about the topic and present a little demo here with.

The demo is on GitHub and is titled The Long Walk.

Jaanga WeB3D Real-time R3 Takes Off

Jaanga WeB3D Real-time R3 displaying every stock on the SP500 

As promised at the recent WebGL San Francisco Meetup, the first portion of the code that I presented there is now available on GitHub.

Jaanga Web3D Real-time R3 is ready for you to bang on (ever so lightly, please):

Live demo page
Source code repository

The Economist has Us Drowning in Numbers - Again

The Economist has yet another excellent video on the 'deluge of data'. This time we are drowning in numbers. The short take is that there are more and more numbers – so much so that we need to learn new names to track the numbers: Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta and Yotta - the last being a number with 24 zeros.

The video, however, makes no recommendations as to how we are to understand those numbers, come to grips with what they mean and to use them in productive manners. But then that is what this website is for.

Sound As An Element in Visualizations

When I consider the word 'visualization', deep down I want this word to mean something much broader than merely interacting with one's eye-balls. I would like your full body to be involved. There should be touching and whole body movement. After all interacting with the computer should be healthy and not just about sitting there. At some stage in the future there should be smelling and tasting involved as well.

Magazine = iPad That Does Not Work

This video will show you why static, printed images will become 'quaint' within a generation.

Jean-Louis Constanza posted this video of his daughter playing with an iPad and leafing through several magazines. He titled the video A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work and describes its implications:

Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person : a baby. 

Muriel Cooper: A Genius in 3D Visualization

Muriel Cooper (1928-1995) set up a group at MIT called the Visible Language Workshop. She was a graphic designer so you might think the title should have been the Graphic Design Workshop, but her life seems to be all about double-clicking into processes and procedures and coming up not only with new designs but new ways of thinking.

Jaanga weB3D Road Map: Complex and Contrary

3D holographic image from zebraimaging.com

The Jaanga weB3D released last week is an initial proof of concept or demonstration of ideas that I have been working on for about 15 years. There's a lot more in the offing, but let's start with what there is now.

What has been shown? Five selected, disparate features include:

• Low latency response to huge amounts of real-time data
• It just works: no plug-in, no install, no user intervention required
• Multivariate analysis in full six degrees of freedom 3D
• No rocket science. No servers: All code entry-level client-side JavaScript
• Entirely free, open source software (FOSS)

Future directions include applying the tools to alternate data sets. This means not just to other exchanges or markets but to entirely alternate data sets such as weather and other biophysical phenomena, or sports and other human activities and, perhaps, also non-real-time data that is so sufficiently massive that historical tools could not process such data elegantly.

Jaanga weB3D Pre-Release Launched

Screen capture of portion of Jaanga weB3D

Jaanga weB3D is now available for your inspection, comments and suggestions.

You can say its name as "web 3D. or "we be 3D". Your choice.

Please note that this is the high end, top-of-the line version of Jaanga and requires a high-end, fast computer. You will a latest browser that supports WebGL such as Firefox 4 or a recent update of Google Chrome. Internet Explorer will not work without installing a special plug-in from Google.

Jaanga web3D begins to show some of the features that this web site promotes as the future of complex data visualization:

• Data is updated in near real-time.
• Variables are viewed as three axes with color and shape adding two more
• Time is incorporated as the 4th dimension.
• Views can be manipulated with six degrees of freedom. 
• A heads-up display provides real-time updates as you mouse over data points.

This is only the beginning.

Jaanga geeDoc: S&P 500 Motion Chart

Features

At last, every symbol of the Standard & Poor 500 index displayed in a single motion chart - Jaanga geeDoc SP500.

You can view the instant instant replay of the last 15 to 20 minutes of trading simply by dragging the slider bar at the bottom of the screen.

The S&P 500 is the reference standard of market indices, so it feels appropriate to use this index as the reference standard for Jaanga development. The standard that needs to be achieved is to display as many of the activities as possible of 500 different organizations in as close to real-time as possible while still open to as much technical augmentation and human interaction as possible.

Putting it another way, you must forget how you do it on paper. The current way of proceeding is to look at an entire market (or whatever data set) but only to be able to see one symbol at a time. It's like having some weird camera pointed towards many people walking up and down a sidewalk that can only show you one person at a time.

The Jaanga camera wants to show you everybody - all the stocks - so you can see just how everybody moves together. Everybody avoids that hole in the pavement. They all stop when the light turns red. Real-time data behaves the same way. The era of looking at one item at a time must come to an end. We must begin to see markets and other data as moving swarms. This is the only way to readily identify outliers or black swan events.

About Jaanga: John Tukey + Exploratory Data Analysis = Awesomeness

John Tukey - courtesy Wikipedia

John Wilder Tukey (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician.

I am not a statistician and, as yet, have only the vaguest notion of the history and development of statistics and the visualization of data. Therefore there may well be even more wonderful figures in the world of statistics to honor. But for the moment John Tukey provides me with more than enough delight and inspiration.

Why is Tukey so cool?

Tukey invents the computer terms: "bits" and "software". Actually there's a byte more than that.