Archive for November, 2007

essential code #5: pacing

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

[this example is a prototype I made for an internal design discussion at UW DUB. Only works in FF ... that's right, prototypes are exempt from browser compatibility etiquette!]
Stasko and Hudson wrote a great introduction to coding for animation. In this article, I want to explore some ways to apply one of their abstractions, pacing, [...]

essential code #4: curves

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Bezier curves are one of the truly unifying concepts in 2d graphics. Points, lines, and “curves” are all beziers. This article covers a few topics I’ve found useful related to beziers: making splines in limited graphics systems (like Flash), and fitting curves to a point set.
For more bezier code, including splitting and pseudo-parallelizaton, see the [...]

essential code #3: noise

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Noise can add “life” to a visualization. Life is texture and rhythm. For example …
C.E.B. Rea’ project on rotating squares shows that movement itself can take on form.
The tendrils on this scientific taxonomy draw viewers’ eyes into the words. It’s interesting that the authors view the organic layout as a weakness. In terms of presenting [...]

essential code #2: 2d range lookups

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

What’s in the box? isn’t just a question for Christmas; it also comes up when rendering and selecting, two of the most common graphic operations. Like for 1D intervals, there are datastructures to index 2D boxes for efficient lookup.
Unfortunately, they are not well integrated into graphics APIs, so this article will develop a few of [...]

shake down & tunnel

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

essential code #0: mapped texture in any graphics system

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Chances are that someday you’ll want to have an image visually stick out of the screen. Not only is it in, it brings your system a step closer to an immersing experience. This article will re-invent something a friend once showed me: a simple routine to map an image onto a quadrilateral. With this [...]

Usability starts here …

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

I think both Shumin Zhai and Henry Lieberman are right. The most playful aspect of their arguments, http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/zhai/papers/EvaluationDemocracy.htm and http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Misc/Tyranny-Evaluation.html, respectively, is that, though they ostensibly take different sides, they are actually describing the same intent, from different vantages. Shumin argues that HCI researches need to reconcile intuition with reality, using evaluation, to produce better [...]


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