The Bocoup Data Visualization team will be at the Eyeo Festival in beautiful Minneapolis this week. We’re looking forward to learning, getting inspired, and meeting friends and colleagues from all over the world. If you’re attending too, be sure to say hello!
Meanwhile, we wanted to share some of our latest work:
In April, we hosted OpenVis Conf (our 5th!), where practitioners took deep dives into programming and process for data visualization. All of the videos from the talks can be found here. Yannick Assogba built an interactive visualization exploring relationships between talks using live transcripts and shared topics.
WebGL
We’ve been thinking a lot about performance of visualizations on the web. While D3.js has allowed us to create amazing things, most current libraries that rely on SVG — including D3.js — balk at larger data sizes. While visualizing every point on a screen isn’t always the right answer, sometimes we need to do it.
We looked to solve this problem by exploring high performance visualization techniques and technologies using WebGL in modern browsers.
Jim Vallandingham wrote an introduction to WebGL and regl, using the novel WebGL framework to enable high performance rendering on the web.
Peter Beshai continued his investigation into large-scale particle animation with his latest post on how to scale things up to 100,000 points with regl and WebGL. Be sure to mesmerize yourself with this demonstration.
Quick, Draw!
Yannick Assogba wanted to experiment with Google’s Quick, Draw! Dataset and discovered “a thousand ways to draw something.” His project uses principal component analysis to sample across the drawing space for a given category, allowing everyone to more closely examine variation between the 100,000+ sketches in a given category.
A different take on the same dataset is Jim Vallandingham’s, “How Long Does it Take to (Quick) Draw a Dog?” Can you guess?
In the Press
Between the Wires interviewed Irene Ros, who shared a bit about her background and how she’s seen data visualization technology and practice change during her career. She also shared more personal thoughts about what matters in data visualization on Medium.
UBC’s Trek magazine talked with Peter Beshai about Buckets, a tool that analyzes NBA basketball data and provides guidance and forecasting for coaches and wannabe coaches alike.
That’s it for this round up. Keep up with the latest from us on Twitter at @Bocoup. And if you happen to be at Eyeo come find us to say hi!
