A log of things made by Kunal Anand
Data visualization, interface design, programming, music, and art
Tweetures
A while ago, Wired reached out about putting together a fun data visualization for Inform, an exhibition in the Adobe Digital Museum (ADM). Thomas Goetz, Executive Editor at Wired, was the curator.
I worked with Tim Leong to obtain a massive data set of ranked Twitter users - when I say massive, I mean gigabytes of many compressed text files. Within the data set, Twitter users are scored along various dimensions of reputation: trust, friendliness, interestingness, etc.
After going through an ETL process, I started tinkering with different ways to represent the dataset. While I could have implemented charts or graphs, I really wanted to do something different, something weird. When I took a step back I started seeing Twitter as this ecosystem where organisms (users) act and react to behaviors (tweets/retweets) from other organisms. I thought it would be interesting to think of each Twitter user as a uniquely colored and shaped single-celled organism, or as I call it tweeture.
The visualization was initially sketched in Cinder, an incredible C++ framework. In Cinder I wrote a minimal amount of code the generate hundreds of different looking tweetures. As a constraint, I wanted to generate each tweeture by chaining together simple shapes. The generated tweetures were stored in unique folders with an image and the respective algorithm. I then manually went through and determined the tweetures that looked appealing. Coming up the sketch was fairly straight forward. The size, flocking behavior, and animated behaviors are all a function of a tweeture's rank.
While I enjoyed hacking in Cinder, I had to move the piece to Processing so that it could run in the context of a browser. All told, I'm happy to see how fast it came together in such a short period of time. Additionally, it's a great feeling to have my work next to my data visualization heroes, like Aaron Koblin and John Maeda.
You can view the exhibition or a stand-alone version of Tweetures.
A couple of days ago, my buddy Max suggested that I write a Laughing Man augmented reality app. As a big Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex fan, I accepted the challenge. After grokking the basics of OpenCV, I hunkered down with Cinder (a C++ framework) to make a naive implementation. The app essentially does live face tracking via a camera source and affixes the Laughing Man layer in the correct position. You can see an example frame above.
Tiesto at the Las Vegas Hard Rock. And yes, there was lots of fist pumping.
I've become quite enamored by suburban construction sites as of late. The idea of building something physically seems so foreign to me. If we woke up to an electronic apocalypse tomorrow, I would be a useless contributor to society.
When Devin, Ankur, and I finish our album, we will record some video in and around this amazing installation.
An evening run with Hugo around the lake.
I'm working on a children's book, called The Janky Bears, that will be available for iPad before the Christmas rush.
Content and layout by Kunal Anand.
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My views/opinions expressed here in no way reflect those of my employer.
My views/opinions expressed here in no way reflect those of my employer.