Implicit metadata

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting article which discusses "implicit metadata," Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web. O'Reilly cites Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data by Jer Thorp who scraped Twitter for the phrase "just landed." Here's Thorp's experiment visualised as an animated map rendered in Processing:



Note: Also cool (via a Thorp Twitter) is ToneMatrix, a sound toy by Andre Michelle.

Aaron Koblin on data visualization

Aaron Koblin, a young designer doing data visualization, hit big with Flight Pattern (composited with After Effects) while at UCLA and bigger when he was tech director for the Radiohead music video House of Cards. Now he's Technology Lead of Google Creative Lab in San Francisco, a newer marketing unit that promotes the Google brand and products (see video below). Here are 2 recent interviews, and 2 videos:

• At Processing.org, Aaron Koblin Interview: This email interview, with questions from Casey Reas, took place from 1 – 21 Apr 2009.

• At BBH Labs, “I’ve always been interested in microscopes”: an interview with Aaron Koblin

Flight Paths over the southwest US from Aaron on Vimeo.

Google Creative Sandbox '09 - New York (caution: bad music & hard sell)

Processing 1.0 launched

Processing 1.0 has been launched, and promises breakthroughs in workflow efficiency for the creative process across work in print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile:

"Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing's growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics."

For more on projects using Processing, check out a previous note on a Robert Hodgin talk on Flocking with 3D Perlin noise, and Processing Blogs and Create Digital Motion.

iTunes new visualizer is Magnetosphere

Venture Beat confirmed that the new visualizer in iTunes 8 is Robert Hodgin’s Magnetosphere, which was earlier postulated by Allen White, and picked up by Create Digital Music (which doesn't share all content with Create Digital Motion).

For more on Hodgin, see an earlier post Flocking with 3D Perlin noise, which was born from mistaken identity of Trapcode Klangfarbe and AlphaOmega iTunes visualizer (in Mac beta). Not coincidently Trapcode leverages Perlin Noise expertly.


Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo.

Flocking with 3D Perlin noise

Robert Hodgin of The Barbarian Group (makers of iTunes visualizer Magnetosphere), presented a movie (pictured left) at "Flash in the Can" in Toronto earlier this year.

He talks about the Processing environment and his use of 3D Perlin noise for flocking. Flash people were quick to experiment after an earlier presentation on Perlin noise; here's one, Animated Perlin Clouds in Papervision3D.

There's a bunch more generative processing stuff around beside the recent video by Radiohead. Toolbox is a node-based generative editor app that was featured recently on Create Digital Motion, which also features regular write ups on Processing projects. You can find demo movies of Toolbox on Vimeo, where the programmer links to Vector Field animations that do not use Perlin noise (implemented in After Effects in the Fractal Noise filter).