April 25, 2012
This is a mirror of the web site we launched during construction of our visualization. The main site is currently hosted at http://www.jdfproductions.com/blog and will be up until final grades are received. This site has been tested and should contain full functionality as a static version of our original WordPress driven web site.
April 19, 2012
If we had five words to sum up our team, it would be "Do we have to stop?" This was an incredibly rewarding journey and the more we learned the more we wanted to integrate it into the project. There were emails back and forth every day on some new article or some new research. The more we discussed the easier it became to work with one another and in the last few weeks we put together an amount of work that none of us would have thought possible at the beginning of the semester.
With 12 hours to go on the deadline we had to wrap it up and submit it for a grade. We think that we exceeded our original proposal but really wish we could have had just a few more days to add more features.
This was a great team with great people and we are all happy to have gotten to work with one another and put together this visualization.
March 19, 2012
Tonight we wrapped up the final project and discussed how well we felt we accomplished our objectives. We were extremely happy with the way the project turned out but felt we could have added so much more functionality if we had more time. By using an IDE and really focusing on an object-oriented model we had a design that scaled much better than our expectations.
We sought to find one view that a user could explore to find out more information on the planets discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. When we started working with Tableau we found a couple of interesting views and the TF said that if we could toggle back and forth in our main visualization it would be a neat feature. Instead we gave the user the option of changing the X or Y axis to any metric gathered about the planet. We also gave them the option of displaying the data with a logarithmic scale applied. So instead of having the option of a few fixed views the user can choose from several different combinations.
To use the visualization you mouse over the plots and the information on the planet shows in an information box. To change what is being graphed on the X and Y axis you click on the label and the graph will change accordingly. We chose a black background and brightly colored dots to maximize contrast. Our project involved outer space so a black background was also thematically important.
There were several things that I think we would have liked to have implemented but just ran out of time. If we had a few more days we would have liked to have added an animation effect of the plots moving as the user switched encoding on the X and Y axis. We would have liked to have color be an encoding that the user could choose, rather than it be fixed to temperature. We would have also like to have the option for the user to change the dot size for another encoding.
April 18, 2012
April 15, 2012
We have our first non-interactive visualizations produced in Proclipsing. The different drawing were made my changing properties, everything is very easy to adjust so these are some of the examples that we could show in our main visualization.
Next we need to create a legend, add interactivity by displaying more information on each planet with our "info box" and allow the user to make changes to what is encoded on the main visualization.
This first visualization shows how color is adjusted. Confirmed planets appear RED, being followed on GREEN, candidates GRAY. All planets are mapped according to their coordinates.
This visualization uses the same coordinate system but the colors are based on the color of the star the planet orbits. We will be refining the color encoding, this is just a test.
It is also easy what the axis represents. Here we chose to map how the planets gravity compares against its distance to the host star.
April 12, 2012
After a series of discussions the framework for the visualization is complete. We decided that to make the visualization easier to develop we would take an object oriented approach to the visualization. However the Processing editor was not a great way to construct a multi-object visualization.
Pankaj found a tool called Proclipsing that would allow us to use Eclipse to write Processing applications. Using an IDE would allow us to better manage the code that was being created.
The project is broken into 5 packages each of which contain classes and enums that are used to build the visualization:
Keplerplanets: Sets up and draws the visualization
Keplerplanets.datareader: Reads in all the data to our visualization
Keplerplanets.graph: Creates objects for each planet and draws them on a graph.
Keplerplanets.settings: Stores all the settings for the visualization