Designer Christian Swinehart has parsed piles upon piles of Choose Your Own Adventure titles, and rendered them as a series of visualizations, from charts documenting how frequent "catastrophic" endings occur as opposed to "favorable" ones to animated representations of every single permutation of a given book to a digital copy of Zork: The Cavern of Doom, which tracks your every move on a visual graph.


Continue browsing the main site, because you have no sense of whimsy/had a horrifying childhood that you'd rather not be reminded of? Click here.

See your favorite childhood books, exploded into animated data sets? Click here. [via MetaFilter]

Researchers at the University of Washington's Graphics and Imaging Laboratory, which crunched a lot of the code behind the original Photosynth, have devised new algorithms that scale the photo-cloud-to-3D-model concept way, way up:

The key difference is that Photosynth was aimed at doing a single monument or landmark, which meant that it was scaled to a couple hundred or a thousand photographs, after which it became too slow. We can now process truly huge data sets — the big breakthrough here was being able to match the images fast.

To these lab-sheltered folks, fast means "about a day," in which time they were able to render all manner of scenes, from the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum in Rome, and the entire Old City in Dubrovnik, video'd above.

The best thing about this is that the U of W team doesn't have to worry about anything beyond their algorithms—once they've perfected the software that can recognize and arrange these images, they can slap together a 3D rendering of pretty much any location that Flickr users have taken a few thousand pictures of. [PopSci]

Created in part by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, this animated web toy might not render the most appealing soundscapes straight away, but it gives you plenty of tools to at least try to coax notes out of two years of topographical data collected by the Kaguya moon orbiter. There are two playback modes: Orbit, which translates the altitudes along a fixed rotational path into sounds, sort of like a phonograph needle; and Free Scratch, which lets you plot a listening path along the moon's surface with your cursor. Both modes have a slew of MIDI instrument options, as well as adjustable speed.

Fiddle as I may, I couldn't really create anything that most people wold consider listenable—the only consistent aesthetic I could achieve was "Childhood Clown Nightmare"—but that's not the point: For a certain class of aspirational armchair astronauts, anything that brings us even a micrometer closer to experiencing space, the moon, or really, anything that isn't earth in a new way, is an unqualified, unconditional Good Thing. [Moonbell via Pink Tentacle]

As you can see in the video, it's all controllable in real-time. I'm not sure what they've got running this setup and these screens, but it's certainly powerful. And yeah, all the flight visualizations are awesome, I'd really love to get a game of Call of Duty rocking on this setup. [Fubiz via NotCot]

Titled "Just Landed", Thorp's video maps the probable flights of recently-arrived Twitterers over a course of 36 hours, assuming the home locations listed in their profiles as the takeoff points, and their tweeted landing location as their destinations.

This is textbook data porn, but it's also a reminder of how mainstream Twitter is becoming. The pace of the visualization isn't immediately mind-blowing, but keep in mind that these mapped tweets had to fit the exact syntax that Thorp was looking for, were almost definitely sent from mobile phone and had to have been deemed postworthy in the first place. This is just the tiny tip of the vanity iceberg. Best viewed in HD. [BLPRNT via BoingBoing Gadgets]

Not that I'm trashing the whole "talk to you kids, keep them off drugs" message behind this project. They will still get your money when all is said and done. But this visualization of sound has wider applications. Especially if you're capable of automagically hearing a sound by looking at its waveform like I am. And the price is right. [Sound Advice Project via BBG, original concept by David Bizer]

The tech, called diffusion spectrum imaging, takes current data from MRI scans and analyzes it for the passage of water molecules along the individual neuron connections in the brain. It then processes it to spit out the 3D maps. It's possible to do on live subjects (like the human brain image above), but more detail can be achieved by scanning non-living samples for up to 24 hours.

Doctors are using the new images to better understand our brain's infinitely complicated wiring, and to avoid important neural nets during surgeries. More including 3D model animations (awesome) at: [Technology Review]