Sixth Sense Visual Thinking

At the recent TED conference, Pattie Maes presented Sixth Sense, a wearable device that projects images on the users' environment, opening some really cool possibilities for data interaction with real life objects. Lots of people are comparing it to Minority Report, but to me it more closely resembles the world described by Vernor Vinge in Rainbows End. After reading Rainbows End and watching this TED presentation I suspect that this concept of our virtual world overlaid on top of our reality is what where we can expect virtual reality to go. Watch the presentation below and if you're intrigued by the idea, I recommend checking out Rainbows End.

Cool Data Visualization Mind Maps

Last night I was googling and checking out web sites about data visualization. Tons of really cool data visualization stuff out there that I'll have to blog about in another post. But one of the most intriguing to me was the Web Trends mind map from Information Architects. I've seen this covered already on a few other visual thinking blogs, but I think it's cool enough to mention it again.


Visit the Web Trends map here

You can download various size, print out a big poster size or they even have it as a web page. They've been doing this for a few years ago. Personally I think I like last year's version a little better. Not quite as clean, but less data and easier to read.

Scientific Visualization Example

Another discipline of visual thinking that I think is really cool is scientific visualizations. I'm on the Apple RSS feed and that had a cool article about scientific visualizations being done at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The article is essentially a Mac promotion piece, but it has some interesting observations about visualization. The AMNH executive producer states that they view themselves as "translators for the public." I like that concept, using visual explanations to translate complex data into understandable messages.

The article also has a link to the AMNHs website to the arctic sea ice visualization video. Pretty powerful method of communicating. Reminds me of some of the examples in Tom Wujac's VizThink presentation New Technologies in Visual Thinking (way down near the bottom of the page you can see the video of this presentation).