Real-Time Data Metaphors, understanding CHANGE without reading numbers: BASHI...

Google Tech Talks
June 26, 2008

ABSTRACT

Peripheral Information Awareness through Evolving Mood Maps
Representing multivariable changes of complex data sets with beautiful developing landscapes
The idea behind the Panorama solution is to express the overall 'mood' of evolving, complex data (such as the development of the stock market) in rendered 3D animations that can be perceived and interpreted with little cognitive effort. The software application maps variables of a data set (e.g. bonds, shares, overall trading intensity or fluctuation of the stock market) to graphic parameters in a 3D simulation, such as ocean waves, sun strength, wind speed, cloud particles etc. Developments of the stock market, for example, become perceivable by cloud transformations, wave precipitations, and changes in sunlight. The result is a beautiful, developing scene in which observers (e.g. traders) can monitor several streams of background information without effort in their peripheral vision. Whenever this background information signals particular relevance in a given context, it moves to the observer's foreground attention. In this way information can become functional art instead of just a burden.



Speaker: Roberto Vitalini

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[tempestosio]

The idea is really powerful. People know how to read the weather instinctively and yet it is a really complex real-time system. Using a virtual atmosphere to express complex data change lets people live with the data or as Vitalini says, "..breathe the data"

You don't need "fucking elocution" to get that idea across.

[mclaudtt]

He speaks english not because he narrates specially for you, anglophones, but because it is international language, and non-anglophone people understand him greatly and pay no heed to some roughness.

[BASHIBATV]

BASHIBA Panorama has been built as a natural visual complement (The Big Movie) so that you and your team can share a common picture of reality and openly discuss counter-measures. If an avalanche is imminent, you dont want to lose time in discussing the density of the snow!

[BASHIBATV]

If you enter a room, everyone is busy and the BASHIBA Panorama displays a snow storm: You might feel that it is the wrong moment to ask your friends to join you for a coffee break!!!

If you re-enter that room, the room is empty AND you see the snow storm again, you might want to ALERT someone from that office... because you feel that something is happening and nobody is reacting to it! Without a data metaphor, that room was simply an empty room with many numbers on many screens (no action)!

[photodeus]

All very subjective and personal. If I go to a room with a display showing a stormy sea, I will need a sign or other person describing (in many words) what it's all about.

This system doesn't work as a generic solution...

A car's dashboard is quite good really, and so is the instrument panel in an airplane. I wouldn't wanna sit in an airplane where the pilots navigate by looking at videos of the ocean :P

[irbbellinzona]

I think you are right that many people wold like to control these elements. BASHIBA has a really cool MIDI interface that lets you control the elements via nobs and dials.

[ddcolem]

I want my own climate control office. This is brilliant. But I would want to be the one controlling the factors.

[andygavin]

Brilliant application of psychology and technology.