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Visualizers

posted 02/16/08 by Rick Webb

We make visualizers. We have only begun to scratch the surface. There is so much here. It was a medium who had a lost decade. Everyone forgot about them. Well, in terms of music visualization, anyway. Data visualization has been thriving. We believe in both. We believe there is a lot going on here.
How do we explain this… let’s see. Okay. Let’s take this angle. Jakob Neilsen said ““The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling
medium; it’s a buying medium. It’s user-controlled, so the user controls the user experiences.” We have always ranted and raved about the internet being a two way conversation, right? You talk, users talk back.
What is a visualizer? A visualizer is the visual representation of data. That data can be sound – as in a music visualizer, or it can be, say, number of complaints responded to, number of locations of a restaurant chain, or number of unhealthy snacks we have gotten off the streets. Looked through this prism, the potential value of a visualizer, as a visual reresentation of a two way conversation, the power becomes clear. You can see, right there, in black and white, that something’s happening. And not just in black and white, but in color, and 3D, and in real time, vivid movement. Transparency and information as marketing.
Then there’s the interactive side of it. A visualizer can be user-controlled. The user can tweak the parameters, and parse the data in a way that’s most relevant to them. This has ramifications not just in two-way marketing and transparency, as above, but in entertainment.
What have we been railing about constantly when it comes to marketing on the web? That it needs to be interactive. That it’s two way. That the user has control. What’s our pet peeve about online video? It’s not two way. It’s one way. You are making a sequence of images and showing them to the user in a single order. We’ve seen some ways that this can be expanded upon for interactivity in some of our interactive video work like the Subservient Chicken, Method Come Clean, Samsung Anyfilms and the Motorazr project. But what if the actual frames were generated dynamically based on user input, not just which frames? Then you’re talking about a visualizer. Andrew Bell
Andrew Bell
Andrew Bell

Visual Architect : New York

topics: Agile and Scrum, Animation and 3D, Content, Visualizers, and Video Production

had been experimenting with this generative work in some of his traditional video work at Method Studios prior to joining The Barbarian Group, and you can see some on his personal blog. And this is where Robert
Robert Hodgin
Robert Hodgin

Co-founder, Partner Emeritus : San Francisco

topics: Design, Barbarian History, Visualizers, Art Direction, and Barbarian Labs

has been treading for a year now. One visit to his site will start to show you the boundless untapped potential in this area. This is Marketing R&D discoveries, ripe for the harnessing for commercial benefit. The time is nigh.

Here are some recent posts from our employees about Visualizers:

ruby-processing

posted by David Wicks
David Wicks
David Wicks

Developer : San Francisco

topics: Processing, Internet Culture, Art, and Flash

 on April 26, 2009 at 10:49 PM
filed under: Visualizers

I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing . It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. Im going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasnt writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Rubys syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home@,$,and:prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isnt inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. Ill probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and thats what is really important).

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Musical Things, UPDATE!

posted by Nick Bonadies
Nick Bonadies
Nick Bonadies

IT Specialist : Boston

topics: Internet Culture, Technology Industry, Barbarian Labs, Alcoholic Beverages, and Ruby on Rails

 on February 03, 2009 at 05:07 PM
filed under: Visualizers

So I got a few comments on this Musical Things post asking how we made that little visualizer. Honestly I don’t know who made it! But I do understand how it works! Basically the cathode-ray tube was hacked to be an oscilloscope. This is something that can potentially be done to anything that has a cathode-ray tube.
Here is a nice little video by a teenager on how to make something similar:
Disclaimer: cathode-ray tubes retain high voltage charges even after they are turned off and unplugged, you can get seriously injured if you touch the wrong things. Do not attempt anything like this unless you know basic electronics.
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Musical Things

posted by Nick Bonadies
Nick Bonadies
Nick Bonadies

IT Specialist : Boston

topics: Rock and Roll, Alcoholic Beverages, Microsoft, Games, and Technology Industry

 on December 19, 2008 at 11:25 AM
filed under: Visualizers
Ruby and I recorded a little thing yesterday. I played the nord and he recorded, added some beats, edited the video, and uploaded it! thanks Ruby!
here’s a little pic of the setup
UPDATE: you asked, i listened there is a tiny guide on how this visualizer was created.
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Music listening habits and visualization

posted by Sabih Mir
Sabih Mir
Sabih Mir

User Experience Designer : Boston

topics: HTML, Design, The Internet, Architecture, and User Interface

 on November 18, 2008 at 06:14 PM
filed under: Visualizers
One thing I realized quickly when I got to TBG is that most people here are really into their music (I’d venture to say that over 60% are “active” musicians in some capacity). I think one of the first things I did when setting up my computer was to add the iScrobbler plugin for iTunes so that all my tracks would update my last.fm account. We even have a Barbarian Group last.fm group!
My musical tastes aren’t extremely erratic, but I really like the notion of having a glimpse into what I’ve been listening to since I started tracking my music. Last.fm gives you some cool ways to see what you’ve played, but nothing as visually striking as LastGraph does.
LastGraph lets you explore your last.fm listening history.
And you can generate gorgeous PDF graphs like so:
You can snoop/visualize any Last.fm user’s listening habits by plugging in their username and giving LastGraph a few moments to gather the data. Look’s like Rick listened to a lot more music in September then I did!
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