barackobama.com

change.gov

The first truly vis­i­ble change brought about by the Obama Administration is the exchange of Gotham for a more tra­di­tional, serif type­face. Compare the campaign’s web­site to that of the tran­si­tion team, and note that, while almost all col­ors and struc­tural ele­ments remain the same, the typog­ra­phy is very dif­fer­ent. Gotham, sadly, is nowhere to be found. Was all this talk of change for naught? Will the age of pro­gres­sive typog­ra­phy that we envi­sioned together be aban­doned for just four more years of the same Times New Roman, 12-point, single-spaced, default-font style gov­ern­ment to which we’ve become accustomed?

Disturbing facts from today’s Times arti­cle “Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe”:

• No US President has ever used email while in office.
• No US President has ever used a lap­top com­puter while in the oval office.
• For the first time ever, the weekly Democratic radio address was deliv­ered in a new, so-called “mov­ing pic­ture” for­mat. (Obama’s speech was video­taped and posted on YouTube, see above.)

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this new admin­is­tra­tion uses mod­ern tech­nol­ogy to com­mu­ni­cate, inform, and influ­ence the pub­lic. (Will Obama still TXT me? Can I sub­scribe to an exec­u­tive orders feed? Will Malia and Sasha write guest posts on a White House blog?)

On another note, update your book­marks from barackobama.com to change.gov, the tem­po­rary web­site of the Obama-Biden tran­si­tion team. Note, too, the URL’s brand exten­sion of their cam­paign. Clever.

Image from Flickr by Torley

I attended a cap­ti­vat­ing talk last night by Jeremy Bailenson, direc­tor of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Their research focuses on manip­u­lat­ing social inter­ac­tions in vir­tual envi­ron­ments, thereby test­ing sub­jects’ reac­tions to sit­u­a­tions that could not occur in phys­i­cal real­ity. For exam­ple, in vir­tual real­ity, my avatar could be made to main­tain eye con­tact with yours at all times, even though in phys­i­cal real­ity, I am avoid­ing eye con­tact. Creepy, right?

I highly rec­om­mend watch­ing the lab tour video, but if you don’t have time, here are some of their most inter­est­ing find­ings he presented:

• Although con­stant eye con­tact makes sub­jects extremely uncom­fort­able, the result is greater engage­ment and increased learn­ing. This has sig­nif­i­cant impli­ca­tions for teach­ing via VR envi­ron­ments. Imagine if each stu­dent per­ceived that the teacher’s avatar is look­ing at them.

• When study par­tic­i­pants’ avatars were made to be 10 inches taller than their co-participants, they felt more con­fi­dent and were always more able to con­vince the “shorter” per­son of a cer­tain point of view. Same goes for more attrac­tive vs. less attrac­tive avatars. Also, the con­fi­dence that appeared in users with taller or more attrac­tive avatars was main­tained out­side of the vir­tual envi­ron­ment for at least an hour. (No lon­gi­tu­di­nal stud­ies have been done yet, but maybe repeated expo­sures to tall, attrac­tive, vir­tual selves could increase feel­ings of self-confidence. VR is already being used to treat var­i­ous pho­bias, like the fear of fly­ing, but per­haps it could be extended for more gen­eral treat­ments of men­tal health.)

• There are almost no obese avatars in Second Life, where prej­u­dice against obe­sity is as preva­lent as in real­ity. Subjects who spent 10 hours a week using Second Life with obese avatars did not enjoy it, and their decreased self-esteem actu­ally extended beyond the game and into their real lives to a degree unex­pected (and unde­sired) by the researchers.

• Similarly, play­ers in World of Warcraft advance more quickly in the game if their avatars are tall and “attrac­tive,” even with all char­ac­ter skills being equal. Short, “ugly” char­ac­ters progress more slowly.

• The lab has devel­oped soft­ware that can track facial expres­sions using a reg­u­lar web cam and relay that infor­ma­tion to remote par­tic­i­pants. Imagine video chat, but with a 3D on-screen avatar whose face mim­ics your actual facial expres­sions. (Watch the video. It’s eerily well-done.)

Side note: The talk was free, and pre­sented by Café Scientifique at SRI. There are lots of local “Café Sci” groups all over the world. Check out their web­site to find a local group and tons of inter­est­ing speak­ers. The SF group, for exam­ple, has an upcom­ing talk on “How Computers Look at Art.”

Also, if you’re in the Bay Area, note that SRI is also pre­sent­ing a sort of Doug Engelbart ret­ro­spec­tive in December.

Launch the project >

That’s not the catchi­est head­line, but it’s what this post is about. I’ve finally solved the prob­lem I’ve been work­ing on since September: how to take a bunch of cir­cles of dif­fer­ent sizes and group them around a cen­tral point, while pre­vent­ing any over­lap. See this illustration:

This turned out to be much more com­pli­cated than I had expected. If all the cir­cles were of the same diam­e­ter, it would be easy to cal­cu­late reg­u­lar posi­tions and space them evenly. But I have a project with cir­cles of all dif­fer­ent sizes, and I needed them to be near each other, maybe even touch­ing, but not over­lap­ping. I knew it was pos­si­ble, because I’d seen it done before, such as in visu­al­iza­tions on Many Eyes.

I started by try­ing to solve the prob­lem using trigonom­e­try. Measuring radii, tan­gents, and such seemed to be the answer, but got very com­pli­cated very quickly. Then I turned to the Traer Physics library for Processing. My idea was to have a cen­tral point of “grav­ity” that would attract the cir­cle objects, but then make each cir­cle repel the oth­ers, so they would sort of come together and then space out. JohnG, on the Processing boards fig­ured out a way to do that, but his exam­ple used objects of uni­form size and mass. With a vari­ety of sizes, again, it got more com­pli­cated, and was using more com­pu­ta­tion power than I needed. After all, I didn’t need cool, fluid-like motion. I just needed to arrange things properly.

My answer came from Mike G. (thanks, Mike!), who sug­gested using a square-spiral approach, no trigonom­e­try involved. Take cir­cle A, placed at cen­ter. Then place cir­cle B at cen­ter as well, but move it to the right one pixel. Then check to see if it’s col­lid­ing (over­lap­ping) cir­cle A. If so, move it down one, then left one, two, then up one, two, then right one, two, three, and so on. Keep “spi­ralling” out­ward along a pro­gres­sively larger square path, and even­tu­ally you will find a point where the two cir­cles no longer overlap.

This was a major break­through, and I got pretty close to fig­ur­ing it out myself, but had to call in Mike for help. He sent me some code this morn­ing for spac­ing out three cir­cles. Things got more com­pli­cated the more cir­cles I added, but I man­aged to get it work­ing, finally, this after­noon. Give it a shot, and play around with adding/subtracting cir­cles and see­ing how the clus­ter is recal­cu­lated. As a bonus, I fac­tored in a spac­ing vari­able, so you can have the cir­cles sit far­ther apart or closer together. The next step is to inte­grate this into my iTunes visu­al­iza­tion.

Launch the project >

A New York Times inter­ac­tive fea­ture run­ning today cap­tures the moods of its vis­i­tors. It’s sim­ple and typo­graph­i­cally beau­ti­ful, and reminds me of Simon’s emotion-related projects. You can even fil­ter by McCain and Obama sup­port­ers, to com­pare their states of being. (I’m the “exhausted” one at lower right.)