Driving Data
As summer winds along we here at the VisualCue offices are reminded of summer road trips with our parents. Seemingly endless stretches of desert, plains and rolling hills as the entire clan packed up to go and visit relatives.
While some might moan and groan about the tradition of the family road trip everyone here isn’t too proud to admit that we secretly loved them.
It got us thinking, as most things do, about the future. For example, will there ever come a day when the family road trip, while still taking place on the road, will not have that painful stop by the gas station, or even having Mom or Dad drive at all.
That’s right road trippers, today we are looking at data surrounding electric and self-driving cars!
It's All Around You
Guess it started when, earlier this week here in the VisualCue offices, one of our data analysts was walking down the hall, phone in front of her face, completely absorbed in what she was doing. While we initially thought that perhaps she was just taking a video of our offices (they are amazing) we were all pretty amazed when she just walked right out the door.
Turns out she was just doing what over 65 million people have been doing lately- playing the latest augmented reality craze Pokemon Go.
Pretty soon the entire office had joined in and we were swapping stories about hunting down elusive Pokemon all around our Orlando offices and homes.
But it got us thinking about augmented reality- it’s a technology that VisualCue has used and continues to develop because we’re convinced that it will be an even more integral part of data visualization in the future.
So we asked around the office for everyone’s favorite augmented reality apps and games and got a list of amazing interactive experiences to share!
Data for Travelers
Ah, summer. Just thinking about it conjures up thoughts of popsicles, sports, freshly-cut grass and, of course, the family vacation. Around the VisualCue offices this week we have been talking about where this summer will find us. Some of us are staying close to home and visiting family while others are taking time to go a bit further afield.
Of course, as soon as we thought about where we wanted to go on vacation we immediately started finding some data about foreign and domestic travel and were, as usual, amazed with what we found.
So before you pack those bags for your summer getaway take a few minutes and check out some summer travel data.
The Data of Food
Maybe it’s because we haven’t had lunch yet, but today we have got food on the brain. And what happens around VisualCue whenever we can’t stop thinking about it? We scour the Internet for data visualizations.
Turns out there are a ton of visualizations out there about food! And it makes sense: everyone eats, and most of us care about eating well, so we collect data about the food we put into our bodies and visualize that data in interesting ways.
So tuck your napkin under your chin and grab those forks, this week we are looking at some of the most impressive visualizations about food!
Star Spangled Data
With the 4th of July coming up our thoughts have been turning to all sorts of data surrounding the nations that we love. While VisualCue is a multinational company this branch (in English, that is,) is based out of the United States.
With that in mind we were talking about different uses for data to give citizens insight into their nations. Of course once we started talking about it around the office we started scouring the Internet for cool examples of what this sort of data could do.
While a lot of the data was pretty controversial and divisive we decided to instead focus on the best sites that just shed interesting light on new patterns of how nations celebrate themselves.
Summer Sports
It’s one of those things we absolutely love about the summer: sports!
We’ve been following the NBA finals and are heading to a baseball game tonight.
But there’s just one thing about sports that we’ve never been able to wrap our heads around: all of the statistics. Ever since the baseball cards we collected as kids with those rows and columns of numbers we’ve never been able to see the impressive statistic or indicator of greatness.
Now we know why: it wasn’t that the statistics weren’t impressive, it’s that they were too difficult to understand!
That’s why we went around the internet and gathered some of our favorite sports visualizations to gain new insight into the players we love!
Data Visualization Maps
When you think about it, data visualization has been around for a long, long time. While we didn’t get things like bar graphs and pie charts until the 18th century (for better or for worse) when you think about it some of the smartest people on the planet have been trying to visualize information in ways that make things easier to understand for centuries.
Early maps of the stars and astronomical charts and constellations? Those can definitely be counted as data visualization- people looked up into the sky, saw patterns, and then copied those patterns down on paper for others to follow.
Or consider the age of exploration- what was one of the first things the explorers who started sailing around the world discovering new continents did? They made maps of their travels for others to follow: data visualization at its finest.
If you take the broad view of data visualization then maps and the patterns we found within them must certainly be some of our earliest, and most visually impressive, attempts to present information in a way that anyone can understand.
The Data of Nature
Maybe it’s just the impending summer months or the fact that spring is on it’s way out, but around the VisualCue offices we’ve been itching to get outside.
And, of course, pretty much anything that we think about around the offices gets correlated, somehow, to data visualization and the information surrounding that topic. What else did you expect? We’re data enthusiasts.
This Friday we’d like to share some of the most amazing visualizations dealing with nature and the outdoors that we’ve found from around the internet in celebration of outdoor summer fun!
The data... of you
We’ve written a lot about the amazing human visual system, and what a shame it is that we don’t use it more often in data visualizations.
But frankly that is just one small (albeit awe-inspiring) part of the amazing, interconnected system that is your body.
When you think about it, your body is the ultimate source of streaming data. It is constantly providing you with feedback: it tells you when it’s hungry, thirsty, tired, cold, hot or doing just fine. This data is streaming from dozens of different sources and is processed and analyzed by the best data analytics processor in the business: your own mind.
Today we’re looking at different, innovative ways that clever people out there have come up with to visualize the data that’s coming from your own body… probably right now.
People on the move
At VisualCue we have a couple of specialities: industries that we have worked with time and again and have consistent success in implementing amazing data visualization solutions for them. Sales, marketing, operations and contact centers are just a few.
But one of the industries that often yields the most amazing visualizations and consistently sees the highest return on their investment into a data visualization platform is logistics: the business of moving people and material from one place to another. We have implemented data visualization solutions in dozens of logistics companies around the world.
So believe us when we say that whenever someone moves, whether it’s themselves or a physical asset, there is a lot of data generated. And where there’s data, there’s cool visualizations.