For Californian Artist Jen Wang the pre-flight safety routine “performed” by cabin staff is the most exciting about flying. It reminds her of maiko dance routines. Have a look at the beautiful sequence of drawings she has created to depict this.

See the drawings and more information at her web site.

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Ingo Guenther’s “Worldprocessor” project that started in 1988 has created some of the most outstanding globes. Currently there are more then 300 different designs visualizing world statistical data as globes.

This project has been going for quite some time but the online catalog with hundreds of globes is still worth a look. We have selected a few of the globes for the image below.

More information at the Worldprocessor web site.

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We normally don’t like online quizzes or surveys because you never know what happens with the data on the other end of the line. But Goto Quiz has created a few funny ones that will still pass for a good time waster and some smiles.

Their currently most popular quiz is What American accent do you have? so we were not lazy and asked one of our South African friends to fill it out online. While at it he filled out the How Canadian Are You? quiz as well.

He must have been lying to us for quite some time about his origin because it looks like he secretly made it over to the Great Lakes from Canada and now lives somewhere in Wisconsin - at least that’s what the results from the quizzes said.

Have fun.

Two gadgets no office warriors or couch potatoes should be without. Both objects are created by French designer Matali Crasset who worked for Philippe Starck before opening her own studio in Paris.

Available online from Made in Design for about EUR 33.

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Outstanding temporary street painting

Photos: Max Borge via Flickr

To create this list we have been looking at dozens of data visualization, image mapping and picture mosaic solutions plus piles of descriptions. To make the list most useful we came up with the following criteria for the tools:

• Should be online and actively maintained by the site owner
• Should be interactive
• Should use photos / images for visualization
• Should use online data

We’ve seen many great projects and fantastic work that has been done but is not being updated anymore. Also there are quite a few stand-alone solutions that require to install software packages on your computer, do some development or create your own databases. Others just exist as screen shots.

All those we have not included but we are happy to point you to them.

While we were working on the list it became clear that there are some excellent projects that provide similar solutions so we clustered the results as following:

• Web Search including Social Networks
• Art and Beautiful
• Flickr
• Amazon
• News
• Virtual Worlds and Maps

We tried out all the sites ourselves. In our opinion there is a lot of potential for new solutions in some of these fields and they are evolving quickly.

screenshots and links after the jump

continue reading »

Photo by Ben Patio

via Abroath

If you recently seen strange messages been projected onto people’s backs during a concert or on the streets of London these have potentially been done with the SMS Guerrilla Projector by Troikart.

Troika Communications a sister company of Troikart has recently been hired by Warner Music to project messages written by one of the band members during a concert onto people and objects. The audience seemingly liked the idea very much.

…The SMS Guerilla Projector is a home-made, fully functioning device that enables the user to project text based SMS messages in public spaces, in streets, onto people, inside cinemas, shops, houses…

To receive and project messages from other people, the battery operated device contains a mobile phone. It is made by recombining available technologies.

Contact Troika Communications if you are interested to use the SMS Guerrilla Projector.

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info via: Red Ferret

Two often overlooked but beautiful games are the Cloud game and flOw. Both are great examples of flow in games or visualizations. Watch the introduction video of Cloud online or play flOw just to let you calm down by the music.

Jenova Chen who worked on the creation of these games has some background information on his web site. Both games can also be downloaded for offline playing.

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Click on the image for the jump