I put together a quick and dirty vj-looking app to talk about our Metrics Element product. It's run on a Mac Power Book, written in C++, uses OpenGL and some OpenCV algorithms.

I also integrated the WiiMote with it so you can see a real-time graph of the accelerometers. I also use the keypresses on the WiiMote to change the little b/w videos (which are all old-school footage from a GM film from the 30's on scientific measurement).

Anyway, it was a mind-trip of a piece that I think also successfully conveys some of the core ideas of Metrics and Analytics.

The whole idea was to find a way to make it exciting and interesting to talk about Metrics from an app.

I'm almost done with my Qt 4.3 and WebKit-based Internet spider.

It uses WebKit for webpage retrieval, rendering, and link extraction, and I also created a squarified treemap widget for visualization of different aspects of individual pages and the spidered pages.

Here's a preview...

Jeff Veen formerly of Adaptive Path -- now Google -- giving a talk about Web 2.0. Veen had a greatslideshow that he's been generous enough to post on his personal website (here). In this talk, he covers historical precursors to the boom-bust cycles we seem to be experiencing in the tech world over the past twenty years or so. The comparison to the tulip frenzy in Holland in the mid 17th century (Tulip Craze) was interesting but not altogether enlightening about the state of the current tech industry. Perhaps it was just that he didn't have enough time to fully develop this thesis during the talk. I appreciate the sentiment that there's not much new about "new media," but I didn't feel that pointing out market frenzies of yore (another example he cites is the steam engine) lends itself to a precise historical comparison with the state of tech markets today.

Veen argued that one of the major themes of "Web 2.0" is that of giving up control. By this I believe he is referring to the nature of interactive media that gives users control over their own data. Some examples include Digg, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, del.icious, etc. In each case, the traditional hierarchical forms of data have given way to tagging and categorization of data based on social attributes / markup. He argues that the key design concerns are how to blend editorial control and structure along with rich mechanisms for user participation.

A few provocative items from this talk:

• Build Trust -- users are peers
• 1/20th of a second is all it takes for users to develop an opinion about your brand/site's trustworthiness
• In the era of tagging, curation is done by algorithms

Although the talk was very engaging, and the slides were especially well done, I was left wishing for a little more precision of terms and academic rigour. All in all it felt more like a pump-you-up keynote than a critical examination of whatever "Web 2.0" has come to mean.

In my opinion, the term "Web 2.0" lost its meaning long ago and should be put to rest like so many buzzwords from the late 90's.

Interesting interview with Jakob Nielsen (of Nielsen-Norman Group) about Usability.

here

more...

This is a fully scriptable node-graph editor I built recently using Qt 4.3 and QSA. I have extended the DiagramItem example (ships with Qt 4.x sourcecode) to allow the user to draw the shapes (like in visio), as well as style the stroke, fill, and double-click to add labels to each node.

I then integrated the QSA engine so that you can use ECMA script to extend the interface. At the moment, you can procedurally change the formatting, size, etc. of each node or link; as well as topology checking. This means that you can write custom event handlers in the script editor (right-hand drawer in screencap) to change the color of node based on how you have linked them up. This is extremely useful for things like checking for circular, ping-pong, or other types of invalid references.

It can also read in an XML file and convert it to a nodegraph (based on a standard format). Eventually I will make it so it can also write to XML.

Many of the gestures and the overall design gestalt are drawn from OmniGraffle -- one of my absolutely favorite apps ever.

I will eventually be open sourcing this, but it'll take me a bit more time to clean it up -- especially with my job and dissertation work taking priority ;)

I recently stumbled upon an interesting blog post at Information Aesthetics about a new visualization of the French Political Blogosphere.

Really impressive and provocative research app.

A few years back I wrote a similar system as part of a research project with Jason Gallo and Eszter Hargittai at Northwestern University.

click the picture to see the demo...

I just updated my portfolio with a spiffy new Flex 3 / AS3 interface. Click on the picture to check it out.....

I've also just completed an update of my MapFlows application, which shows a heatmap-style visualization of where players are over time in the game level. It averages all available samples within a specified "bucket" range, and then generates a color value for each pixel based on its distance from all sampled player positions. It basically treats the known (i.e. sampled) positions of players as forces on the pixel where the magnitude of the vector is inversely proportional to the straightline distance to the point.

The app saves the frame images, stats about the app performance (meaning how long it took to process), and you can also print contact sheets of the frames in order to represent the flow as a static series of images.

I will post little videos of these flow-maps in the next day or so...

The MapFlows application I've been developing now has the option to generate quicktime movies of the heatmaps. These maps can either show or hide the background image of the level. For the purpose of analysis, I like to sometimes see the emergent structure of the level from the patterns of movement without having the map always in view. Below is an example of my "catwalk" map (using one of my experimental conditions) with and without the background map.

Without Background Map

With Background Map

One of the applications of this technology is to provide a visual/analog means of assessing level design, with data from real players.

For example, it can bring into high-relief when players are exploring a level in roughly the same manner, or if they appear to be wandering aimlessly. In both of the examples below, there was 1 fixed spawn point and roughly the same number of player-sessions of data. Each frame is 1 second of gameplay and the video plays at 12 frames per second.

Example 1 - Wandering Aimlessly

Example 2 - Highly-Patterned Flow Through the Level

I'm in love with NodeBox, a simple to use scriptable graphics tool (uses Python) for Mac OS X. Among many other things, you can use it to generate hyperlink graphs like this one (for www.seanzehnder.com).