Here are a two visualizations that have been circulating around the webs. They both utilize WebGL so you will need a browser that supports it (Firefox 4+ or Chrome).
First is a visualization of google search volume by language.
http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search
Second is a visualization of world population from 1990 to 2000.
http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe
Both of these have very good use of color and is interactive. (You can spin the globe)
Wow, that's pretty cool. I think this works as a very good visualization because the color contrast makes it easy to see the data, and because all the countries are on this globe. You can also see the relative population, and it allows you to see how population changed over time.
ReplyDeleteWhat could make this better is if there was a legend or scale to show exactly the population per country, or ever give the number if the cursor hovered over a particular region. That would make this more informative than it already is.
This is absolutely amazing. I loved the first visualization. It was simple, yet interactive and beautifully showed its data. It is very to see which continents, countries and states use Google search the most. I loved the turning globe. The neon color choices on the black earth was also a good choice. The colors pop out at me. The only thing is that one can only see relative search amounts. It would have been nice if the viewer could click on a bar and see its location and number of searches.
ReplyDeleteThe world population was also very interesting and utilized the same spinning globe technology. I was a little confused by the colors on this one because all the bars were the same but after a certain height (I'm guessing population number) changed color. Once again, and as Sindhoora said, I wish there was some sort of scale to know what the exact numbers were on this graph. It gives a great general overview and even an alright detail, but the detail could definitely be more comprehensive.