Visualising Data

I looked at various examples of how people have visualised data in creative ways. I picked out some which I thought were the most effective and inspiring and used them to influence my own attempt at visualising a statistic.

 

Some of the examples I came across reminded me of Radiohead's music video for 'House of Cards'. On a website exploring the making of the video it says:

'No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.'
(http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/#the-making-of)

I found the technique fascinating and I really like the look and style of the results. Even though I am unable to re-create the actual technique, I can use the style the technique produced to help influence my own examples of visualising data.

I looked for random but interesting statistics online and chose to represent 'The typical person breathes 370,000 cubic metres of air in their lifetime'

For this first statistic I decided to keep it quite simple by using solid shapes and colours to represent the data. I chose a cube to represent the cubic metres and the colour blue to represent air. I also aimed to space them out in a random sort of style to represent the nature of air as a gas rather than as a lump of something solid.