Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, leaders of the Google “Big Picture” visualization research group in Cambridge, MA, recently unveiled a project that shows a fluid, time-lapse animation of wind speeds across the U.S. According to the artists, “An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us–energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future…This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now.”
The “wind map” is updated hourly by the National Weather Service, using surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database, and shows the patterns that wind makes as it blows around the continent – the stronger the winds, the denser the flowing white streaks – and you can home in on the wind maps of particular regions. The resulting kinetic art is eerily beautiful—indeed, Viégas and Wattenberg sell static visualizations of the real-time data maps which are “exported at the highest possible resolution. Special interpolation algorithms are used in order to preserve the original lineforms. The images are then reproduced at true 2880 resolution as museum quality giclée art prints. Each print is signed and numbered by the artists. Museum quality giclée prints of the wind map are available for $450” (source).
Apart from the sheer beauty of the resulting patterns, the potential usage of such data is tantalizing. Professor Emeritus Waldo Tobler picked up on this at once: “Look at the history (gallery) file too. To be able to do this with commuters, migrants, cell phone tracking, welfare payments, etc. in ‘real’ time; wow! Could the US DOT show the simultaneous urban commuting pattern from 6 AM to 8 PM every 5 minutes for the entire USA in this same way? Or just all of the GPS tracked movement? A ‘challenge’ project” (source: email to the editor, November 2, 2012).
Viégas and Wattenberg state that “We’re committed to a rigorous understanding of visualization, informed by academic research. (Fernanda has a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab; Martin’s Ph.D. is in mathematics, from U.C. Berkeley.) The scientific side of our work includes both design of new visualization techniques and the study of how they are used in practice”…”Before joining Google, the two founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the ‘history flow’ project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia” (source).
“In a similar project, NASA recently created a visualization of ocean and sea currents over a two-year period: “NASA has released a computer visualization project called ‘Perpetual Ocean’ that presents a data-created time lapse of the Earth’s ocean and sea surface currents over a two-year period. The animation shows the globe slowly spinning as white swirls curl and move in the water around landmasses. It looks as if Vincent van Gogh had painted into the oceans — from the Gulf of Mexico to the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea. Using NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean Phase II, scientists simulated the world’s oceans and seas’ surface flows from June 2005 through December 2007. Typically, NASA uses ECCO2 to model global ocean and sea-ice to better understand ocean eddies and other current systems that move heat and carbon in the oceans. The end goal is to study the ocean’s role in future climate change scenarios” (source).
Editor’s note: Many thanks to staff member Bernadette Weinberg for bringing this material to our attention on October 30 when the Wind Map became viral on the internet.
Article by Bill Norrington
Editor’s Favorites sandy.oct.30.png<|>604<|>Wind Map print of Oct. 30, 2012 – Hurricane Sandy{|}windmap.pb.png<|>400<|>Museum quality prints of the artists’ work cost $450; smaller limited edition prints of each view are available, signed and numbered by the artists, for $75-$150{|}windmap10Nov.png<|>1280<|>Screen shot of today’s wind map across the continental U.S. (November 10, 2012){|}wind near SB.png<|>1280<|>Screen shot of wind currents in the Southern California area, November 10, 2012{|}siggraph_currents_STILL2.15402_web.png<|>320<|>NASA computer visualization of ocean currents in the Gulf Stream (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio){|}header-danae.jpg<|>490<|>“The art of reproduction” was a different project by Viégas and Wattenberg which dealt with the perils of WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get” – or is it?). “Type ‘Danae Klimt’ into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair. Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes” (http://hint.fm/projects/reproduction/)
