visualize

Watch the HD video below and you'll see a beautiful visualization of how 880 iPhone users moved around Europe in April.

The video, produced by European Web site CrowdFlow, shows iPhone positions as points of light on a map of Europe. CrowdFlow got the data by convincing volunteers to upload iPhone logs, which periodically show iPhone locations. CrowdFlow's points of light fade and spread out the longer it's been since an iPhone's position was recorded at a particular spot.

The project takes advantage of an iPhone feature that collects the location of nearby Wi-Fi and cell networks. This feature caused a stir when it came to light in April that iPhone users were being tracked without their knowledge.

CrowdFlow is combining data from iPhone logs to create an open database of Wi-Fi and cell networks. The goal is to make it easier to visualize how these networks are distributed. This video showing iPhone locations flickering like fireflies is one result. … Read more

Video games tend to be more enjoyable on a large screen, but what happens when you harness the power of a 20-foot-wide multitouch display that runs at 8,160x2,304 resolution? Some incredible pew pew.

Fleet Commander, designed by computer science grad student Arthur Nishimoto and developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago, is perhaps the most tantalizing "Star Wars" concept game ever made.

Under development for several years, it currently harnesses the power of a giant multitouch LCD wall to "explore how a real-time interactive strategy game that would typically rely on complex keyboard commands and mouse interactions [could] be transferred into a multi-user, multitouch environment," according to EVL. Fingers are tracked via TacTile software. … Read more

By sending signals that it's inclined to move Windows 8 coding toward HTML5 and JavaScript, and away from more familiar programming tools, Microsoft has "horrified" developers, according to a post at Ars Technica.

Citing a demo of Windows 8 given by Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green at the recent D9 conference, Ars Technica author Peter Bright called attention to a comment several minutes into the video. Pointing to a new app in the upcoming Windows 8, Larson-Green said that "this application is written with our new developer platform, which is based on HTML5 and JavaScript."… Read more

Excuse us for not getting to this yesterday--E3 and Apple's WWDC keynote kept us a tad busy--but MetroPCS sneaked out a little announcement of its own yesterday by unveiling a visual voice mail service.

Like the services available on other carriers, MetroPCS' visual voice mail will enable customers to listen to individual voice messages without having to scan through their entire lists. Voice mails will show up on the phone's display along with the contact's picture and they can reply to the message by calling back or by sending a text message or an e-mail.

The … Read more

It didn't take long for Samsung to strike back at Apple, with the company yesterday filing lawsuits of its own in three different countries.

If you're scratching your head about what's at stake and where things are being filed, or if you're looking for a breakdown of the issues, intellectual-property watcher Florian Mueller has put together a handy chart (similar to the one he created for Microsoft and Motorola's legal spat), which does a good job of breaking down exactly what courts are involved and the specific claims from both parties.

The chart (embedded below) … Read more

The latest member of Microsoft's Visual Studio family is one step closer to a final release.

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is … Read more

The Academy Awards aren't really the place for high technology; the subset of awards commemorating film-industry engineering are relegated to a separate ceremony and only briefly acknowledged, after all. Consider last year, for instance, when James Cameron's 3D adventure "Avatar" lost out to "The Hurt Locker" for Best Picture and for Directing. Digital innovation can only really claim one category as its own: Achievement in Visual Effects.

Christopher Nolan's film "Inception," a film that managed the dual feat of being both technologically impressive and thematically brainy, took home the Visual Effects … Read more

"I'm not of the mind that someone who pirates one piece of content is never going to purchase another piece of content."

That statement was made a couple of months ago by Quentin Boyer, a spokesman for adult-film company Pink Visual. Los Angeles-based Pink Visual has eschewed filing copyright suits against alleged film pirates in the hope that it can strike some kind of balance in a world where unauthorized digital photos, books, movies, and music are so easily passed around the Internet.

This year, a growing number of porn studios, including such top triple-x filmmakers as … Read more

Google has thrown its support behind a contest that searches for ways to map out the U.S. government's esoteric spending patterns. Called "Data Viz Challenge," the contest has been assembled by the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, a digital-arts collective headquartered a stone's throw from Google's Manhattan satellite office, and promises $5,000 to the entrant who can best "visualize how your individual federal income taxes are spent."

Winners will be announced, fittingly, on April 18--the day that tax returns are due. The data is to be sourced from WhatWePayFor.com, a … Read more