This semester, I’ve been using E15 to visualize data from Facebook. Whether you like Facebook or not, it is one place that can offer a lot of social data related to you, and the data is unique for individual user. Thanks to E15 using Python, we can easily interface with Facebook using PyFacebook. Anyway, the Facebook visualization is still not done, but it will be posted when it is. This is a video I made for a class that shows the initial Facebook visualization.

There were numerous features that did not exist in E15 which had to be implemented for the Facebook visualization. Kyle already mentioned the threading issue. There’s now a method called settimeout and cleartimeout which can execute methods with a delay, much like JavaScript’s window.setTimeout() and clearTimeout(). Also, E15 did not have any facilities to move to an object in the environment nor a way to move the object’s coordinates once inserted.

Now both of these features are implemented. There is an elem_moveto() method which can animate any element into a new location in space. The camera can animate to fit an element into the viewing space by calling camera_goto().

Another feature attempted was using the accumulation buffer to create a trailing effect when elements moved. Given that E15’s native view size is 1600×900, when the accumulation buffer was enabled, the frame rate dropped to a point of uselessness. It does look cool though…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.