Information
Its amazing how hard it can be to get across some information to another person who doesn't have a clue what you are talking about. I constantly battle with this in my job. I know a lot about what I do and often fall in the trap of speaking to people forgetting that they are not as familiar with the terminology associated with what I do as I am. Luckily most people stop me and ask what words mean or ask questions to try and understand more.
One of the things that I find hard to visualise in terms of information is time. At work we provide mechanisms for companies to tell stories about the products they make, this includes geographical and chronological information. We have become pretty good at the geographical information, but have never found a good way to show chronological information. That may be about to change. I stumbled on the below some months ago, I forget how now, and at the time thought it was superb. I've just re-visited it again for some work I am doing and once again was blown away.
If you have a need to convey chronological information - this is well worth looking at.
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline
The "JFK shooting" time line is very informative and a great example of how this technology can be used.
1 comment:
Yep .. that's pretty bloody cool.
One thing that does seem to be missing at the moment is linking individual events on the timeline to indicate connectivity or a relationship between those events.
It would be great if you could
categorise events somehow and then display them with that information vs the timeline.
I guess what I'm saying is that should be able to view multiple timelines on the same timeline display _and_ be able to differentiate visually between the various events in the different timelines.
Now just make it a 1st person 3D expereience and you could "drive/fly" down the different timelines .. admiring the events either side of you .. branching off or hoping across timelines as you see fit :)
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