Marijn Speelman

I came across an interesting TED talk by Jonathan Harris. He talked about a few of the applications he has been working on.

One of those is We Feel Fine in which new blog posts are scanned every few hours to collect the feelings of the blogger. Each time someone says ‘I feel’ (or I’m feeling, I felt, …) the emotion is logged, next to the gender, age and location. This data is then used in some really pretty visualizations. Especially the photo’s attached to some of the ‘I feel’ sentences can be quite impressive. You can play around with it at their website.

The other application that really interested me is called Universe. The idea behind it is to draw / write the persons, events, etc on the virtual sky. It’s hard to describe it correctly, so you just have to watch the video below, or check out Jonathan Harris’ website.

Together with my team mate Meindert, I’ve created a cool photo browser for the Information Visualisation course given at the University of Amsterdam. A screenshot is displayed below with the end result.

The photos are being placed around the time line, based on the moment they are taken. You can slide through the timeline and zoom in to the level of displaying seconds. The positioning of the photo’s is done using a so called force based algorithm, which is often used in graph drawing. The photo’s are being attracted to the position on the timeline that corresponds with the time the photo was created. Also, the photo’s repulse each other. These two forces result in the intuitive positioning of the images. The more you zoom, the more clear you can see where the photo should really be.

Used technologies:

• Java
• JOGL (OpenGL for Java)
• Force based algoritme for the positioning of the images.

My teacher and assistent were also happy with the result: we won the ‘First Price’ and the ‘OGL Wisselbeker’ Screensaver

Code is available on request.