Autodesk TED BigViz
I'm a big fan of TED conference talks. In most cases the presenter are very smart people, which know how to tell a story and make inspiring presentations. My favourit talks include Hans Rosling talk about "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, Golan Levin about "The truly soft side of software", Joshua Prince-Ramus about "Designing the Seattle Central Library", Seth Godin about "Sliced bread and other marketing delights", John Maeda about "Simplicity patterns" or Jonathan Harris on "The Web's secret stories".
In this years TED conference AutoDesk made a technology experiment called BigViz. The experiment is an exploration in the visualization of the Big Ideas presented on the TED conference. David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, two visual cartographers, captured more than 700 sketches highlighting memorable quotes, great questions and unexpected connections. All this was done on wacom tablets and transfered simultaneously to the Autodesk BigViz system for later exploration. The BigViz system is an interactive system that allows to record scratches and work on them in a visual collaborative environment, which can be used intuitively. Combined with a multitouch display, the system demonstrates how future collaboration could look like. The visualizations are also available as 200 pages pdf download.
The visualization looks amazing and I really would like to get my hands on such a device. See the BigViz Interactive Demo in action:
Nevertheless this device reminds me heavily on the demonstration of Microsoft's Surface Computing presentation in may last year.
- http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
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