:MeetPi

Here’s a small applet I created in Processing which shows a visualisation of Qantas flights for a 24 hour period on the 11 March 2008. The data is scraped directly from the Qantas timetables on their web site and saved into a text file. The applet then loads to text file and interprets airport destinations and departures as cartesian coordinates that correspond with the relative position of the airports. These do not represent the actual flight paths of the aircraft (I don’t have that data) – instead it assumes a straight line of flight between airports. For this scale it’s probably close enough.

Only flights between major airports are plotted – there’s no data here for the myriad regional flights that happen every day, and there’s no international flights – it’s all domestic Qantas flights only. Some time in the future I’ll probably expand this to plot in real time over a map with more flight data.

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Some time ago (almost a year ago, I think) I was playing with some ideas about manipulating video. My thinking was that video could be conceived as a volumetric texture. In other words, each frame of video could be stacked to create a 3D volume. Passing an arbitrary projection plane through this volume would lead to some interesting effects. Because the depth (z) dimension of this video is effectively time, an arbitrary plane of intersection would allow you to play with time and space on a 2D area (the screen). I was hoping this might allow people new sensory access into time and space, and thus allow for the development of a different appreciation of reality.
Of course, as with anything that has become programmatically trivial, this idea is not new. My favorite example of slicing video volumes is the Khronos projector project, which lets you deform a z axis-aligned projection plane interactively. Talking about some of my ideas with Mitchell revealed that his brother had also been toying with ideas about video volumes and intersection planes. Indeed, even before digital technology, photographers were playing with slit shot photography. In fact, here’s a page listing around a dozen projects that do similar things.

So anyway, the ‘Net’s nothing if not replication and redundancy, so here’s my contribution. I wrote a small program in C that runs as a command-line application to process image sequences (it does not work with video files, so you need to export them to image sequences before processing, which is a pain). The program’s pretty simple and should compile on windows, Mac or Linux assuming you’re configured the FreeImage library right. You can download an executable for PPC Mac 10.4 here, or grab the source code here (.cpp and .h – you’ll also need FreeImage). Go have a look at the full page for a more expanded description, screen shots and video examples of the process in action. It’s fairly mind bending stuff.

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One model for human/computer interaction I’ve been thinking about for some time involves the idea that the human mind is an integral but often ignored component of a computation triad made up of software. hardware and wetware. I’ve just started fiddling with TAMS Analyzer, an open source qualitiative coding program for the Mac and Linux.

Coding is the process by which you mark-up text with codes that represent information within text. It’s a way of essentially annotating text in a highly structured way so that themes and ideas in the text can be highlighted and analysed. The problem is, this task needs a wetware processor. Only a human being can read an email and extract the nuances from the text. It’s one of those tasks that computers absolutely suck at doing.

Here’s another example. MS Word is a sophisticated word processor, but without human input it won’t write anything. Again, it’s the wetware that adds a vital component – that of writing. So what? That’s all pretty obvious, I agree. But maybe if we start thinking of the human operator as an absolutely essential part of processing tasks instead of as a clunky meat-thing that’s prone to clicking the “wrong” buttons, we can design software that takes more thorough advantage of software, hardware and the incomparable processing capacity of the human brain.

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