The time taken to add your ‘data’ to Dopplr is something you really don’t mind as the benefits outweigh the ‘cost’.

What if you could record data about anything and visualise this in a personal report?

Nicholas Feltron has been doing just that for quite a few years – collecting everything any and every piece of mundane information and visualising them beautifully in his annual Feltron reports.

Daytum was created as a way for Nicholas to store all of this information. You sign into site and add a ‘thing’ with an ‘amount’ – cigarette : 1

This then gets logged into the system with a timestamp and as you smoke you keep updating the site. A mobile twitter interface is thankfully on hand as updating your data via a website is a chore upon a chore. Now you just have to tweet your ‘thing’ with your ‘amount. A similar system called your.flowing.data created by Nathan Yau is entirely built on top of twitter to store your data.

These are systems for the committed – You have to be in the mindset to fire off a tweet to record that thing.

Can objects we naturally interact with start to share the data they store?

The Wifi body scale is automated and is single minded in what it records.

Another great example is the Sleep Cycle iphone app – It is an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are in the lightest part of your sleep cycle. It does this by monitoring how you are moving while you sleep – the phone accelerometer registers your motion and figures out the best point you can wake up. Aside from sleeping better,  the app produces a variety of graphs to help you understand your sleep cycle.

So can we automate the collection of any data without changing our normal behaviour?

Poyozo could be the development that does this ->

Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.

So if we could be generating our own automated annual Feltron reports. What insights could they offer? Could they offer insights into our behaviour and moods

I was having a lovely lunch time chat with Mike Stenhouse about this very subject – He has been exploring a lot of these ways to visualise connections between data at trampoline systems and also in his own time. He started explain some of the prototypes he had built, gave some brilliant examples i’d never heard of and we chewed over some other random scenarios.

Did you gain weight one week (wifi scales) because you ate at a certain restaurant (foursquare) or you went on a business trip (dopplr). Were you sad at work  one day (twitter), listening to incredibly depressing music (last.fm) and searching for a new job (bookmarks) and buying something to cheer youself (purchases). Could the report then identity that you were the happiest on a certain day or offer some insight into why.

Would be eventually be drowning in data from our lives and eventually be finding patterns with no meaning? Maybe so, but I for one would love to try it and see.

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Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.

Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

Via Spime

Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?

What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?

An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.

Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.

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The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.

As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.

As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.

The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.

It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.

The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.

The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.

Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.

The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.

The exhibition is open till April 19th.

More high quality photographs on the Creative Review blog.

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So back to OpenFrameworks. I met Joel Gethin Lewis last year when we were building the Christmas Card Making Machine and he introduced me to how he was doing face tracking and all this sexy stuff.  He was writing everything in OpenFrameworks and I was astounded to learn this wasn’t some fancy custom solution he had used when he was at U.V.A, but a free open source system.

To explain what OpenFrameworks is, I’m going to be a bit simplistic so bear with me – It is basically a way of wrapping up all the really really nasty bits to do with programming graphics, sound, interaction etc and opening this up so with a few lines of code you can load in images, have them move around, control them etc. It was astoundingly simple.

Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson the lead developers of the project have created community which was born out of a desire to ease new comers into the complexities of programming. The other beautiful part of this equation is that the community actively develop and put code back into the eco-system. Open source programming is not a new thing, but it is incredibly interesting to see this in more competitive artist circles (as generally OpenFrameworks is used to create installations and art projects) and along with Processing there is a whole new breed interactive artists doing great work.

The course was held at UCL and was setup by Ruairi who runs the excellent Interactive Architecture site and Joel and the multi talented Memo Atken were running the course. The ratio of architects on the course was very high and this was really interesting to find out what they are doing with code when it comes to designing buildings – They are all very keen on generating whole buildings from code. Little snippets of a process can be fed into a generative loop and out will pop a whole building – This is staggering stuff and for them incredibly liberating. Let’s just hope they don’t become too seduced by the computer as buildings need that irrevernce that lifts them.

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Guardian – Open Platform – The entire guardian newspaper (and many years of archive material) all available to use via an API.

Guardian – Data Store – An incredible resource of data – Everything from ‘Champagne imports’ to ‘Swine Flu cases’. All available as Excel Spreadsheets.

New York Times – I believe they were the first newspaper to open their content via an API.

Wattson – If you’ve ever wanted to know how much electricity you consume then the Wattson is for you – You clip it to your electricity supply and it collates all the usage info. You can then interface with the API to start to play with the data.

Pachube – Taking the Wattson to a much higher level – Pachube is a dataset collated from buildings – Lots of environmental data to play with – building temperatues, humidity, lights. Building 2.0 here we come.

Last.FM – The API has exposed a mass of user data regarding music usage.

Flickr - Photographs on tap with a very comprehensive API. Very well documented.

Programmable Web – A great resource of APIs and datasets.

Trynt – Lots of APIs to use including an IMDB API.

Open Government Data – An initiative led by Microsoft publishing data from governments.

Timetric.com – Lots of data with an API.

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Processing – The environment of all the experts – I think processing is very easy to pick up and learn but you will need to work at writing code. The forthcoming ‘Beautiful Data’ book might be a good way in.

Many Eyes – A very usable way to create quite straightforward datavisualisations – Created by IBM.

Flare – A set of libraries for Flash which let you prototype visualisations – you do need Flash knowledge for this.

Arduino – Linking physical objects to the internet a la ‘Physical Internet’ has really started to interest me and there is a growing crowd of people ‘Doing it with others’ – The Arduino is a very simple to use piece of electronics that can be flashed to control devices or transmit data to the internent. Thanks to Make and Instructables – There has never been an easier time to break out the soldering iron and get building.

Yahoo Pipes - Even non coders can start to play with data – Using Yahoo pipes you can take all sorts of data feeds and aggregate them together to manipulate them.

Flowing Data – Nathan is a curator of data and  stats – Flowing data is a superb resource for more traditional forms of data vis. He also created ‘your flowing data’ which is a system of capturing data through a mobile interface and twitter. Sort of like daytum.

Serial Cosign -A great resource.

Visual Complexity – A great resource.

Infosthetics – A great resource.

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Karsten Schmidt – Karsten is an incredible coder and designer – His ‘Social Collider’ project with Sascha Pohflepp starts to reveal relationships between conversations on Twitter.

Marius Watz – A great fine artist in his own right – Marius has explored ways of rendering data as physical forms – his wood etchings are beautiful. When exploring visualising stock data for the Knight Capital Group, the end result have an aesthetic of an atom bomb going off. He also runs the generator.x generative art site, vimeo and flickr groups where you can spend hours taking in the work.

Aaron Koblin – The incredibly brave and beautiful Radiohead ‘House of Cards’ promo brought a lot of attention to Aaron and the data vis scene as it was generated entirely by data – Not one to rest on his laurels, he has been quietly plugging away with some bizarre subversions of the Amazon ‘Mechanical Turk’ system. ‘Dollar bills’, ‘George Bush’ and even ‘Daisy Daisy’ go through the crowd sourced blender.

Jer Thorp – If anyone can make beauty out of the new york times then Jer can – His use of the NY Times API as a dataset has started to reveal some inspiring visuals. If you want to get your hands dirty then there are two tutorials to play with – one for the NY Times and one for the Guardian. His recent work ‘Just Landed’ shows how twitter can be mapped to location.

Jonathan Harris / Sep Kamvar – Gleaning emotion and sentiment from the internet and displaying this is a damn hard thing. Making an emotive art piece out of this mass of information is even harder and Jon and Sep continually do this. ‘We Feel Fine’ and ‘I Want You To Be Me’ are two examples of how they visualise emotion scraped from the ether.

Advanced Beauty – Matt Pyke curated twenty motion pieces exploring ‘synasthesia‘ – visualisaing sound. Many of the pieces are based on generative art processes and are showcases for cutting edge motion graphics artists.

Jason Bruges – Jason Bruges heads up an architectural design studio exploring visualising data created in realtime by physical interaction. Some very simple interactions such as wind powering lights or displaying the latent imprint of lift usage by hacking into the building lift interface – Very exciting stuff.

Ben Fry – In my opinion one of the founding fathers of modern data vis and co-created processing – His body of work is staggering and he currently heads up the Seed Media Group.

Casey Reas – Also co-created processing with Ben Fry and has exhibited many generative art pieces in traditional gallery spaces.

Robert Hodgin - I’ve been a massive fan of Robert for more years than I can remember as he is a leading experimental flash designer and coder. He creates pure beautiful eye candy.

Golan Levin – Another artists exploring visualising emotions – ‘The Dumpster’ was a great piece. It scanned the internet for comments about relationships breaking and then visualised them. His physical interaction pieces are hilarious – check ‘Snout’.

Ear Studio – I first encountered ‘Listening Post’ last year at the Science Museum – it was hidden in a dark corner and it was just transfixing – It was a bank of small screens that spoke back snippets from the millions of posts on chat rooms across the internet – effectively giving the internet a spooky synthesised voice.

UVA – A great design studio playing with light, sound, space and architecture.

Marcus Wendt – Marcus and the field.io team are not classical data vis but they are doing some stunning generative artworks.

Pitch Interactive – A really interesting interactive design agency doing some some great vis work.

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This allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people I had admired from afar as we used data visualisation, generative art, motion and code to start to explore this space – honestly we’ve got a lot more exploration to do. So in my travels I worked with some exceptional people and also made contact with a whole scene and started to see the ‘scenes within the scenes’.

I don’t believe that data visualisation is just the expression of a static data set in a graphical way to try and glean an insight – To me it is taking any data set – static or realtime and expressing this is any other way in any medium.

So lets talk about people (who I think are exploring interesting visualisations with code and interaction), data (what datasets are out there to use), and tools (how to get your hands dirty).

People

Data

Tools

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1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.

2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.

3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.

Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.

Tweet when you toot!

An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.

Social Networking for My Toaster

Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.

Kickbee

A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.

Botanicalls

Forget to water your plants? Wish they would tell you when they need a drink? Well they now can.

NewsAlarm – wiring in to the NYT NewsWire API

Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.

Ideal also for perking up your dog.

Tweeting Cat Door

Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.

I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.

Digit’s Ear

Want to tell the world your office is quite as a mouse – well why not create a digital ‘ear’ that can monitor sound levels and tweet the changes.

Digit’s Ear from Digit on Vimeo.

If you have any more examples of electronic/api mashupery then send them my way.

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