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Featured in the Tech & Science category
The Polar Clock, from Pixel Breaker, version 3 is now out as a screen saver for Mac and Windows. It's also available as a Mac OS X Widget.
I don't know why, but I love this clock. I'm mesmerized watching the seconds going around. With a little practice, you can visualize the time. I won't say this is the best way to visualize the time, but it's definitely fascinating.
Speedtest.net does a great job showing you the data while testing your own internet connection speed. From locating a test server on the map, to animating the speedometer as the test runs. Without much text at all explaining what's going on, you understand the test, and the results.
Then you get the code to embed your results (see below) into a blog post, email or website. How fast is your connection?
Check this one out! The graphic above is an embedded object from searchCrystal that lets you search multiple sources for images (or other forms of information). I've preloaded it to search for "inforgraphics" from GoogleImages, Flickr, AskImages, YahooImages and MSNImages. When you dig a little deeper, you can choose the different sources you are searching from, save searches, share results with others, etc.
The arrangement shows the overlap of the results from multiple sites. Simple navigation like scrolling over images enlarges them, and clicking takes you to the source image.
Also works for video, blogs, tags, news, etc...blah, blah, blah. We only care about images don't we?
Three design firms took on the challenge of re-designing the Bloomberg terminal interface, and the results were fantastic. The challenge came from Portfolio.com. The original article is here, but the fantasy terminals are here with an interactive interface that lets you highlight and zoom in on particular features. The design above is from thehappycorp.com and is my personal favorite.
Bloomberg claims to be constantly improving their interface design, but it still looks like runs on DOS and is straight out of the 80's.
Here is the desing from IDEO.com:
And one from Ziba.com:
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.
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!
You've seen these counters on highway billboards and other websites before. The World Clock from poodwaddle.com combines many of these counters together into one dashboard.
I've added a smaller version to the bottom of the right pane here on on the blog.
Infographics don't have to be complicated. This is a very simple, real-world example of an infographic system to monitor the tire pressure on your car called Accu-Pressure Caps. A set of four gauges screw onto your tire's valve stems, and the air pressure pushes the green indicator completely out. As tire pressure begins to drop, so does the green indicator revealing a yellow indicator, and ultimately the red indicator. The key here is to buy the set of caps to match the tire pressure you want to maintain on your car.
An alternative is from aviationupgrade.com, which is a battery operated version. These always start with the tire pressure when you screw them on, and when the pressure drops by 4psi the LED light on the end starts blinking to get your attention.
Ten dimensions are really hard for most people to understand. Especially since our lives are constrained to only four dimensions. This video from tenthdimension.com does an EXCELLENT job of using pretty simple animation and illustrations to explain the 10 dimensions of our universe.
This video is really good, even if you're not a physicist.
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.
Randy