Week 11

Dynamic Data & Animation



Dynamic Data

The data being analyzed may not be a static database - it may be a constantly flowing stream of data that you are dipping into to look at the current state at this instant, typically in the form of a dashboard.

There is a wide variety of data and tasks here:

Importance of context


Often very important not just knowing the current value (e.g. position, price) of an entity, but also the recent values of that entity, to show how it is changing (e.g. value increasing or decreasing, moving N / S / E / W, etc)


How do the characteristics and recent history of this entity compare to other similar entities (airplanes, currencies, stocks, etc) at the current time? Is there a larger pattern or is this one an anomaly.


How do the characteristics of the current data compare to the expected / common / average / historical data?



And as usual when we look at statistics for different states, cities, and countries it is important to know how many people live there and what is the rate per n people, not just the raw numbers. And it is important to know what was the rate yesterday, and the week before to know if things are getting better or worse, and at what rate.


Another example is what is happening in the stock market. Google Finance is a nice example - lets see how apple and amazon and microsoft are doing individually and compared to each other. Some events may only affect one company, other events may affect all of them, and the current context for the day can be related to news items.

link

and how they compare to other tech companies and US stocks in general. The history gives us some context, the news tab gives us some more context.



If you are working in shifts then its very important to effectively hand off control to someone else (air traffic controllers, nurses.)

What is the current general situation?

What are the most important points of interest that someone should keep track of?




How can the visualization draw the viewers attention to a new important event? (from Schneiderman)


What happens if multiple parts of the visualization are trying to get your attention at the same time?

It can be helpful to put these under user control so the user can set the thresholds or manually label interesting entities.

If the alert is very important then the visualization should continue trying to get the user's attention until he/she acknowledges the event.

How do these things work in real life - e.g. the 'done' signal on your clothes washer and dryer vs your stove

Similarly on your phone - what is the right level of importance for interrupts? which ones generate sounds or vibrations or bring up notifications?





Flight tracking software is a good example of this. There is similar data for buses in Chicago , and many other types of vehicles. This kind of data tends to be rather small though, there may be many entities.

We looked at the Chicago traffic data in graphic form when talking about uncertainty

We can also look at in a map form and that form may be better to show recent accidents or lane closures that explain why travel times have suddenly changed and give more accuracy as to where those events may have occurred (i.e. where the road turns from red to green.) Google maps and other services also nicely update the colour of tracked road in something close to real-time. Here are the traffic conditions around UIC on February 3rd, 2022 at 4:30pm. In the future fixed sensors communicating to a central server will likely be replaced by auto to auto communication systems for more timely communication.

Google Maps showing
      traffic around UIC

Other sites allow you to track individual entities

A classic version of this that started to show the possibilities was the Exploratorium's Cab Tracker from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49B2J_v5mco

CTA Bus Tracker:
http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/map/displaymap.jsp

CTA Bus Tracker - Halsted

or the CTA train tracker - http://www.transitchicago.com/traintrackermap/

While buses and trains follow fixed paths, automobiles do not. If you are looking for a ride from a ride sharing service on your smartphone the location, orientation, speed, and movement of the vehicle are important as it gets closer. From our knowledge of the location we can tell if the car is stopped at a light, or arriving from the opposite side of the street, etc. making it easier to meet the driver efficiently.


and of course today there is not only 'official' data but also data that people contribute through apps like Waze which can give more immediate unfiltered unverified data with the pluses and minus that brings to drivers.
https://www.waze.com/livemap


People also track slower things like whales, which bring up additional issues of certain people using this kind of data for purposes that the original visualization designers would not approve of, so additional levels of security may be needed to keep the things that you are tracking safe.




People also track fast things like the international space station  https://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544



and a bunch of other live maps

lightning - https://map.blitzortung.org/
airline flights - https://www.flightradar24.com/
marine traffic - https://www.marinetraffic.com/
earthquakes - https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes

and the solar system - https://www.theplanetstoday.com/




back to the chaos that is twitter looking at what is trending now related to what was trending recently:

showing recent trending topics in the US
https://trends24.in/united-states/
or in Chicago
https://trends24.in/united-states/chicago/



We can look at air quality data for Chicago https://urban.microsoft.com/air/city/chicago

or data for the building we are in such as the current local 'weather' data in EVL: https://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/TEMPS/evlTempF.html

or data for the classroom (temperature, luminosity, humidity, CO2, VOC, PM2.5, spoken words) :http://shiny.evl.uic.edu:3838/continuum/




or current data for the computer we may be using.

Its pretty common for people to visualize the current state of their computer (CPU, network, battery, temperature, etc.) In the old days of the 70s and 80s you could listen to the hard drive or the modem and know what the computer was doing. Even today with our almost silent computers you can often hear the fans turn on if the CPUs are really working hard but most often we need to visualize the data from multiple sensors to know what is going on. Are things slow because the CPUs are in use, or because there is no more space on the drive, or because the network is slow, etc.

How much data do we want available at a glance in the menu bar, and how much data do we want when we bring up an application to show us more detailed information?


or current data about ourselves through watches and fitness trackers. What data do we want to have easily available at a glance without interacting, and what data do we want when we bring up a specific weather app or health app on that device.
 


Animations


Animations can be an end product of an analysis, and can also be used within a visualization and analysis tool as we have seen in the class projects.

Animation allows us to look at the pace of change in the data (velocity), and changes in that pace (acceleration). In visualizations with many entities it helps us follow the path of individual entities rather than just seeing 'snapshots' of static positions. In many cases the original phenomena being studied was continuous but was discretized when it was sampled / measured so animation can bring us back to a more 'natural' representation of the information. One must be careful that any interpolation done for an animation remains true to the original data.

Initially animation can be used to get a sense of dynamic data, and also to see if entities suddenly appear or disappear suggesting potential data loss, or an interesting event in the data.

Multiple animations can be used in an ensemble to show data over n months or years to look for similarities and differences.

As an end product animations allow their creators to focus attention on particular facets of the data. The animations can also include explicit text and imagery highlighting important features and events for context.

In terms of the lie factor, here you need to be careful of how time appears to progress. You should have an indication of the current time, and you should not change the speed that time passes or cut out sections of time without informing the viewer in an obvious way.

As our computers get faster it is becoming more common to create these animations in real-time, giving the user control over the parameters, the viewpoint, the zoom factor, but data is also increasing in size and complexity, so interactive animations that can be run in a browser and pre-packaged animations that can be placed on YouTube will both remain useful. Pre-packaged animations in a common video format will also be likely playable for longer into the future as they can be converted to the latest video codecs.



Some examples

At the beginning of the course we started with a video on Gap Minder by Hans Rosling. His 20 minute Ted talk from 2007 is still one of the best and worth your time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Some other nice examples:

CodeSwarm out of UC Davis looking at the evolution of Python - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E

airplane flight patterns across the US - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ystkKXzt9Wk
and worldwide http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBwjQsOEeg


an interesting Canadian advertisement using animated graphics and real objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6YhXnnYbNA

Another nice one taking the worlds population and scaling it to 100 people to better get a sense of different statistics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFrqTFRy-LU

A nice use of animation to show scale in the universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Kgf9dCgME&t=65s

Another nice one shows global air traffic centered on the Atlantic Ocean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US4mKjYeklM


NASA Goddard Space Flight Center makes some very nice high resolution animations:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

2005 hurricane season animation - 27 storms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjwNuJf2luM

Arctic Sea Ice 1984 to 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtWTZIFgL_w

Global TemperatureAnomalies from 1880 to 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayuqSfljSyg

Perpetual Ocean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmTY0PKGDs


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last revision 2/8/2022