Frame from a pong game controlled by the Kinect

Pointless Pong with Processing and the Kinect

I did a quick excursion using the Microsoft Kinect in Processing with Daniel Shiffmans excellent Kinect library. Source code for Kinect Pong is here.

Eurostat treemap

Visualizing Eurostat data with the JIT

A small visualization hack for the Eurostat Hackday on december 16.

Social Media in the Swedish Public Sector

Andrew Krzmarzick, Govloop community manager, asked me which swedish government agencies are using social media to communicate with citizens. The twitter message space is too short for an answer so here is a more thorough reply. I will specifically look at Twitter which seems to be gaining popularity in the swedish public sector.

Slitscan soccer

Slit-scan Photography (Stockholm Geekmeet presentation)

Last night, Robert Nyman hosted yet another successful Geekmeet in Stockholm. I got one of the lightning talk slots and decided to skip my planned presentation and instead show some of my experiments with slit-scan photography. The presentation slides (in swedish) are available (8 Mb PDF) here.

Re-enacting Video Transition Effects

Please note the video progress bar. Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.

Applet screenshot

Visualizing web site interlinkage using Processing

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry (of MIT fame) and Casey Reas (UCLA Design). From the processing.org web page:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I have been dabbling with it for a while and have come to like it’s simplicity. The downside is that it sometimes demands a lot from your computer’s processing power.

How it works

The link data for this sketch was collected with a Python script. 250 government web sites were crawled and links to other web sites on the list were recorded. This generated some 2000 links which were fed to the Processing sketch.

Web site links animation snapshot.

The resulting visualization applet can be viewed here. Please note that it will require some processing power to get it running smoothly. You can also view a screenshot of the sketch in action.

Every site starts out as a small disc at the bottom of the screen. More incoming links makes the site grow. Larger sites float to the top of the screen. Smaller sites move out of the way for larger sites. Hovering with your mouse over a site highlights outgoing links from that site to other sites.

Findings

The next step is to try PyOpenGL and see if speed can be improved when drawing hese simple 2D primitives. Initial tests looks promising.