A lot of visual information takes up time, cpu, and can often be aimed towards a certain niche in society (generally experts and designers) however in recent times, casual infovis has taken something of front position in the scheme of the information visualisation world, often taken down from the lofty to provide meaningful information to the ordinary human being in a manner that doesnt take hours, weeks or days, but if even just for a few seconds out of time.
There are three forms:
Ambient infovis: systems that sit in peripheral locations and provide abstract depictions of data can qualify under the broadest definition of infovis—they visualize information. Informative Art uses inspiration from modern art
works (including Piet Mondrian) to convey data such as bus departure
times and weather data (see Figure 1A). Colors, shapes, and positions
of objects in an electronic painting change to reflect updates in the data
being conveyed. Ambient Infovis trades reduced user interaction for
an increase in aesthetic emphasis.
An example of this includes The Ambient Orb which is a device which changes colour and hue in order to depict how good or bad the weather is, how your stock portfolio seems to be doing at this moment in time, amongst other things.
Unfortunately, some may consider ambiet infovis to not be proper infovis, due to the fact that altering data or the actual graphics seems to be beyond the scope of such an item, at the very least, its a far more interesting depiction in amassing data than just reading a numerical layout of the temperature outside or else to see how the Nikkei is doing when compared to the Dow Jones and if your shares in Apple are still worth keeping an eye on.
Social infovis:
Social information surrounds us, and takes forms that lend themselves
to being visualized. Articles are collaboratively written and images
and songs are shared, sampled, and remixed. Technology support for
tagging of digital artifacts has created spaces for collaborative web
bookmarking (e.g. del.icio.us), news (e.g. digg.com), and even public space (e.g. plazes.com, yellowarrow.org). Visualizations of social
processes, social networks, and social situations have become another
emerging and exciting domain for infovis researchers
An example that proved to be pretty striking to me was an article by Jeffrey Heer and Professor Marti Hurst which went into great detail about a piece of software called Vizster, which allows one to visually represent the friends list that one has on a social networking website, be it Facebook, Friendster, amongst others, dragging information from an XML file or from a Mysql file which will allow you to visually represent you, your friends as well as their friends and see how well and how many you have in common.
The actual final file itself is rendered as a .jar file (i.e. a java file) and can be edited as well as being manipulated with any java based software such as Processing.
The last kind that we will deal with here in this blog post is:
Artistic infovis: While at its core, information visualisation is a method of visualising information often in an artistic fashion that would not be out of place in an art gallery, although they do differ from a lot of traditional information visualisation platforms by one fundamental method, whilst traditional info vis programmes tend to be mostly functional in its production and generally rely on a fairly rigid definition of what data is, casual info-vis tends to be somewhat different and often forces the viewer to rethink their definition of what data really entails.
N. Feltron - 2008 Annual Report.
Could function as a museum piece as well as a piece of information visualisation.
