The interface used for Cell Size and Scale [genetics.utah.edu] travels through the space from 1 meter to 1 trillionth of a meter in single, continuous scrollbar swipe, revealing the relative size of a grain of rice to that of a rhinovirus or a water molecule.

The whole website is full of interactive infographics, similar to John Kyrk's examples.

See also:
- Nano Journeys
- Nikon Universal Scale
- Powers of Ten Movie
- All the Water in the World
- Sizeasy
- Relative Planet Size

Via @congosto.

"Visualising Transport Data for data.gov.uk" is the result of about one and a half days developing new visualizations and maps based on the recently released traffic count data for data.gov.uk Developer Camp.

In an original twist of the concept of "social visualization" brought forward by Many Eyes, Swivel and the like, SourceMap [sourcemap.org] is a mapping tool meant for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. In short, the developers believe that "... people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of". Conceptualized as an online social network, any member is able to contribute to a shared understanding of "the story" behind specific consumer products. For instance, members can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using the so-called "Life-Cycle Assessment" calculator. The resulting "SourceMaps" can then be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones.

As a result, one can explore the geographical locations of the parts, and their according CO2 footprints, of products like the iPhone, a Clock Radio, an IKEA bed or a pair of Nike shoes.

SourceMap is still seeking volunteers, including "Information Visualization Experts".

Via Treehugger and Visual Complexity.

Roadtrip 2009 - Moving Home and Visiting North-Western Europe [oostring.com] is an infographic poster specifically designed to summarize and explain Ole Ostring's summer holiday of 2009, including a roadtrip/ moving house expedition undertaken from Norway to England and back. It originally started as a tool for keeping track of costs, but was developed into a full trip overview as more details were added.

Key data such as cost, distance and time are presented in various ways to create a rich data log, including the typical bar graphs, event timeline and a collection of factual, iconographic details. The poster also contains a compelling abstract spiral that is able to incorporate a lot of time-based details while avoiding much visual cluttering.

See also Escape Route and American Mile Markers.

inAir (living-environments.net) is a personal tool for sensing and visualizing indoor air quality to improve awareness and understanding of indoor air quality. inAir provides historical and real-time visualizations of indoor air quality by measuring tiny hazardous airborne particles as small as 0.5 microns in size.

A Dylos air quality monitor, a commercial air quality sensor, is used to measure particulate matter. It counts the number of particles larger than 0.5 microns within a cubic meter of air. Attached to the sensor is an iPod Touch used to render the visualizations. A line graph is updated with a data point consisting of the average of the 15-second sensor readings from the past 20 minutes. To the right, a bar graph updates every 15 seconds making it easier for current activities to be linked to air quality variations.

Participants used inAir in 2 distinctive ways: to glance over the inAir screen unintentionally when they passed by the device, and to check how their current activity was affecting indoor air quality. Participants expressed a desire to provide a more direct mapping of the visualized data to health effects and also to help interpret the overall air quality (i.e. good, poor, hazardous). Also, participants mentioned that they checked the 24-hour history of air quality using inAir less frequently. Further results from the user evaluation study demonstrate how inAir promotes greater awareness and motivates individual actions to improve indoor air quality.

I cannot stop noticing that the project is an example of a desire to "visualize" data, instead of making its meaning or causality more graspable for lay users. Many other similar examples exist, such as the popular graphs that depict water, energy and gas usage audits, or the depiction of CO2 gas emissions on utility bills.

A more detailed description can be found here (PDF).

VisWeek is a venue that joins 2 conferences and 1 symposium on the topics of Information Visualization, Scientific Visualization and Visual Analytics. This year just over 800 people met in Atlantic City, USA to discuss, present, or listen to recent research on all kinds of visualization related topics. If you want to skip our summary and see the "raw data", check out the videos captured of workshops, tutorials, panels, and paper talks. For a summary of our - of course highly subjective - experience, please read on.

The data.gov.uk Newspaper [newspaperclub.co.uk] is a tangible prototype of a potential service targeting people who recently moved into a new area, and shows information about the area, such as local services, environmental information, crime statistics, travel times, transportation options, education and healthcare.

The current project acts as a prototype / working demonstration of the creative and original possibilities that are possible when governments would open some of the valuable datasets they have currently in their position. It also hopes to encourage some more data to get opened up to the public.

Also on Nodalities. Via @blprnt.

Fifa Earth visualizes data from about 2 million FIFA 10 EA Sports soccer games played each day. The online "data visualizer" consists of 3 distinct live and interactive elements. "Fifa Buzz" shows recent Twitter messages that contain key words or hash-tags such as 'Goals', 'Fussbal', or 'Soccer', or any other number of searches such as players 'Rooney', 'Benzema', or 'Xavi' that relate to FIFA or football. These tweets are geo-located and time-coded and placed in real-time on a 3D football-shaped globe. "Live Competition" lists the total number of games played around the world (38 million and rising), number of goals, wins, losses, and draws, while it can also display the complete match history of every game played to date. Clicking through the "History" link of each team conveys a bar graph of past performance data. In "The World Plays", countries are ranked accordingly to the play data.