Are you looking to add the z-axis to your simulations? Well I’ve tried thinking in 3D, but it still escapes me. Box2D is an open source physics engine written primarily for games. As the name suggests, Box2D is a purely 2D engine. However, Box2D has grown beyond it’s humble box simulating roots, and can now handle convex polygons and other shapes coming soon.

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Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present. Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.

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The FutureBoston Competitive Edge Landscape is an experimental tool to explore the factors that make or break a city in today’s competitive global economy. It integrates data on economics performance, innovation, population, and quality of life to help the user see where and what is happening in the Boston region. This tool is a proof-of-concept. It is intended to demonstrate the early stages of what a more advanced tool could do, i.e., better understand the complex dynamics that effect people’s lives and help them make better decisions.

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This application allows you to interact with demographic data and visualize it in an easy to use manner. It’s flash based and is a Microsoft Virtual Earth mashup. It allows you to browse U.S. census data by county, population, age, ethnicity, election results, and income. There are many applications for a website like this, as they say on their site, “For any business to be successful, they must take into account both their customers and surrounding areas. Using Visual Fusion Client and Visual Fusion Server, our Demographics Visualizer allows you to pinpoint components of a region to determine where and how your business can be successful. This application allows the individual user to set their search criteria and cater the results for various uses.”

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Walk2Web is a new way to explore web sites from a specified starting point. You type in a starting point-like http://www.blogschmog.net-and you see a page with a screenshot sample of the site and the first two levels of a search network, with sites as nodes. There are no more than six at a time, split between incoming and outgoing links with options to display more in either direction. The network grows as you explore, allowing you to make use of some simple directional tools to navigate the part of the World Wide Web you are manually crawling.

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The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked of the space race. Since then mankind has sent more than 150 missions to explore outer space. The Newsweek captures all 150 world wide space flights in an easy to use timeline format. The visualization is sortable by year, timespan, planet and country. When you roll over a timeline point you get additional information about the flight. Additionaly, if you click on the Inside Sputnik tab you get a visualization of Sputnik 1 and all of its parts. Very fun and easy to use.

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The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. New data and an improved interpolation algorithm has led to revised depictions of air traffic over the U.S. and Canada. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment, and the frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

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“clickdensity is not another statistics or web analytics tool – instead it allows you to analyse the user experience and identify usability and information architecture issues that would have been impossible to identify without it. The clickdensity heat map shows at a glance the relative popularity of components on your pages. Getting similar data from standard web analytics tools can be impossible, or at best complex and time consuming. The visual quality of clickdensity reports makes them ideal for presentation to non-technical audiences. When your marketing department asks for a report on the benefits of a recent change you’ve made, what could be better than to show them before and after heat maps?” There is a free trial, unfortunately, it is a paid service.

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I’ve looked at many AJAX and Javascript calendar applications over the last few years, and I find MooMonth to be one of the best downloadable versions I’ve seen. MooMonth is a full calendar application written in javascript. Heavily configurable and customizable. It features smooth sexy transitions between different views. Still in alpha stages though, it will be several weeks before ready to be tested in production. As an added bonus, MooMonth is available under the CC-GNU LGPL license. So your free to download an use however you like.

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“The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world.” I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site.

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The new “Incident Report & Analysis Tool created by UniversalMind is a great example of how data visualizations can affect our lives. I live in the SOMA district in downtown San Francisco and if this tool was live I could see all of the crimes, incoming calls, and live video feeds from all of the police officers in the city. While this visualization is just a prototype at this point you can instantly see the benefits. Every major city should implement this technology now to give it’s citizens a real-time view of crime in their city.

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This site converts bitmap images to vector art – it’s an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and they will vectorize it for you. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves. The site is currently tuned for tracing logos and photos.

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Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces. The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia’s Flash, in which this demo was implemented, does not reconize mouse buttons so we have to use the keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use.

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