The Story Behind It
Once upon a time, in a filled lecture hall, there was a student sitting through an Anthropology lecture. Instead of intently listening to how Mesoamericans transitioned from egalitarian to stratified societies, he was trying to come up with a new way to visualize big sequences of 1's and 0's…
Needless to say, my visualizations have nothing to do with Mesoamerica. One of my main goals was to not have repetitive bits, like '00000', take up excessive space—simply because they're not that interesting. However, I still wanted to be able to see when these repeated sections happen.
How it works
Imagine a small rod of aluminum. Take pliers and bend it a fixed number of degrees at different spots.
101010101000001101
The program I made in Processing does just this. However, instead of using aluminum, it uses colored lines. If a bit is '1', the line is bent down; if a bit is '0', the line is bent up.
How to Interpret
Each visualization starts from a small yellow dot (sometimes it's hard to see). From there, the line gets bent around according to the bits of the sequence.
The color?
Every 8 bits, the color of the line is set to represent the byte that those 8 bits collectively represent (a number from 0 to 255).
- 0
- inbetween
- 255
What do the little nodule-like circles/knots indicate?
Long sequences of repeated ones or zeros
Big tangled sections?
Lots of irregularity in the bit sequence
Future Ideas
Visualization of Complete Hard Drives
I'm really wanting to see how all the bits on my hard drive look, but in order to do that, I'm going to need to let my computer sit unused while the program runs. I'm simply not sure if it's possible for me to handle that…
People talking about it
If you mention it on your website/blog, I'll link you here!
- Infosthetics: Bitalizer: Bending Bits into Visual Structure
- site of the day @ ecrans.fr [eng]
- xgouchet.fr - Une nouvelle façon de voir les fichiers numériques [eng]
- infowwweb - Bitalizer: visualizzazione dei bit che compongono un file [eng]
- Graphism.fr - Comment générer une oeuvre à partir des données binaires de vos fichiers (textes, images, programmes...) [eng]
- Cybunk - bitalizer [eng]
Updates
Oct 8, 2008 – v1.0 – First prototype complete.
Oct 9, 2008 (morning) – First video rendered. I took out all instances of Processing's binary() function and used bitwise operators instead for harvesting bits. It now blazes. Now I just need to allow drawing beyond the Processing window's boundaries.
Oct 9, 2008 (afternoon) – v1.1 – Fixed it so that the rendering area expands when the line reaches the boundary by breaking the space into blocks. A block is only initialized if the line tries to go through it. This way, program isn't allocating memory for all the blank, un-used space.
Oct 11, 2008 – v1.2 – Implemented some crude zooming functionality and released the code & applet.
Oct 15, 2008 – Finished the User Gallery and uploading feature
Oct 21, 2008 – Finally added some links to the "People talking about it" section, as I said I would. Also, I would like to thank the people at ecrans.fr for awarding it the site of the day!
» User Gallery » Make your Own
Contact me
Feel free to drop me a line at brianreavis@inwo.com. I would love to hear from you.