Microsoft Car HUD

Found on arstechnica.com, this one has me really excited. I have been disappointed for at least two decades that real HUDs (Heads-Up Displays) have not become standard, or even available as a third party product for our cars. Now a US patent application from Microsoft has been published showing a possible future HUD for your car.

More than just your speed, with today's technology we should have things like incoming caller-id, compass direction, outside temperature, current playing music title, live GPS map and distance to the car in front of us showing around the edges of our windshields.

We can only cross our fingers and hope that this would some day become a reality.

VizThink Conference 2008

Early registration to the VizThink 2008 conference will end on September 15th. The conference is in San Francisco Jan 27-29. I won't be able to attend, but I hear that this is a great conference for people who make a living creating visual presentations, infographics, brainstorming sketches, etc.

Out friend David Gray from XPLANE is one of the conference facilitators (speakers).

A big THANKS to the folks at VizThink for adding a link to Cool Infographics on their VizThink Blog!

What does 16 Million colors look like?

From David Naylor's blog, a color map that includes all 16.8 million RGB colors.

Drawing Disney Characters

Silver Bullet Comics has an article for aspiring comic artists, but I found this little gem.

A very simple infographic demonstrating that characters much each have a distinctive shape that makes them recognizable even from a distance. Very similar to the “silhouette test” for good character drawings to be recognizable in silhouette.

Periodic Table of Visualization

This table is a must-see site for anyone who works creating visualizations. This website from visual-literacy.org has grouped visual methods into six categories (like Concept Visualization and Metaphor Visualization), and made it interactive so when you move your mouse over one of the specific methods it shows you an example.

This is a great resource to help inspire you to visualize your data in new ways. I find that I like trying to visualize the same data in a couple different ways to find out which works best at communicating the data to others. Ironically it's missing the visual method of laying out data into a periodic table!

XPLANE offers XPLANATIONS

XPLANE is a company whose whole purpose is professional infographics. They do a bunch of infographics for big and small companies, but also do a lot of work for Business 2.0 magazine (a favorite of mine). Check out David's post that Business 2.0 might be in trouble.

A number of infographics (called XPLANATIONS...I love it) are available free for download here.

David Grey is the CEO, and he also runs his own blog called Communication Nation.

Gapminder on Google!

Here it is! Live on Google. Gapminder is the Trendalyzer software used by Hans Rosling and acquired by Google. It's now online at Google, but it looks like an early test. I'm not sure if you can use your own data yet or not, but that is one of the goals.

Check out all of the Gapminder tools, and see more presentations using the Gapminder software at www.gapminder.org

Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.

Evolution of Apple Design

Wow! Have we come that far?!? I remember using the Apple II! The design form has really changed over 30 years (1976 - 2007).

I found this on Guy Kawasaki's Blog, but the original is at www.core77.com