World Bank opens up statistics!

The World Bank have released their substantial statistics about the state of the world to use for free.

Awesome!

Cool data for visualizations to be found here for sure:

http://data.worldbank.org/

TED Talks: Hans Rosling

Thought I would share this great TED Talk, from 2006, with Hans Rosling. Note how well the data is visualized.

Earth visualization

Nasa has done some interesting (and open source) visualizations of the earth, including beautiful information visualization. http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/demos/

Visualization in realtime computer art

As a fan of the demoscene, I would like to suggest watching a few examples of applied visualization in this artform. Demos are short real-time animations often utilizing advanced graphics and algorithms, and often procedural based content. For example, the 4 kb (yes four kilo-byte) intro Elevated shows an beautiful generated landscape. To squeeze a whole accelerated 3D graphics and audio application into 4kb, certain tricks has to be applied, as can be described in this linux-based tutorial. In the demos "1995" and Life Force, one can see example of rendering of actual medical images, in the form of a brain and a heart respectively. The algorithm Marching cubes that you learn in this course is another example of an utilized algorithm, in this case for the popular effect Metaballs.

Mentioned Demos/intros:
- Elevated (video) (more info and download)
- Life Force (video) (more info and download)
- 1995 (video above) (video) (more info and download)

Presentations

Great to read the presentations of the course participants on this blog. We would like to encourage everyone to write a paragraph of where they come from and study, and what expectations you have of the course.

To not be worse myself, I can add that I am a part time research engineer at the Human-Computer Interaction department, 26 years, grow up on Gotland, and I have a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from KTH since 2008 (I'm a D-02). I also run a spinn-off company making open source based haptic feedback enabled surgical simulators.

Lab1 - tips about unu project

In Lab1 part you're supposed to use the command
./unu project
but me and my labpartner didn't think that the description that was given in the lab instructions and by unu was clear about the usage. We found this website that gives you a good explanation.

Creaform 3D scanners

I found this interesting video demoing the handheld 3D-scanner created by Creaform. It's not a method of direct visualization but rather a method of gathering information for the visualization. They show off a whole bunch of different fields for which this technology is applicable and how the information can be visualized in those fields, enjoy!