[flv:http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?file=4472.flv http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/thumb.php?id=2954%26big=true 640 480]

I recently developed an application for interactive patent database visualization and navigation. It’s still in progress but I thought I’d post a couple screen shots. It’s the standard mass/spring ball/stick network visualzation, which isn’t terribly intuituve or efficient, but it’s a start. This interactive program is written in Processing and uses various online patent databases.

Currently it allows several interesting group selection operations including tag cloud generation, date, inventor and class-based organization.

I’ll post more pictures and an online demo soon.

MyMap was awarded “best in show” at the student design exhibition Monday evening. It was a great event and a wonderful opportunity for some true cross-disciplinary conversation.

It was also quite exciting to share the project with the larger public for the first time. Some viewers were skeptical that it was a custom program. Some assumed that it was hand drawn. I was also struck by how unexposed this kind of mapping remains. While I (and others) have been immersed in the field for a quite some time, and can easily see precedent for my work, many viewers did not have that same knowledge of the precedents. It was gratifying to be able to give them a glimpse of the field.

For more info on the project, take a look here.

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This sound clips is from a program I wrote that monitors WeatherBug weather stations in real-time. It updates wind speed and direction in 2 second increments and then changes filter parameters on white noise to produce a sound that sounds like more wind. This is a sketch — a work in progress.