Interesting visualization! Thank you for the sharing, Milo.
Back in the dark-ages, 1990 maybe, I wrote (for a lark) a bit of software to both test the brave-new world of high-res (640x480) color graphics on Windows 3.0 and to experimentally make a practical diagnostic for subjective observation of the real-time workings of neural nets, which tend to acquire personalities and behaviors that are hard to intuit.
In the course of that one had to cook up a variety of (toally off-the-wall) schemes and metaphors for showing a range of states and conditions and intensities in real-time on a planar 3-d surface while not letting any one area totally obscure the surrounding ones. The visual methods in your example are almost identical, as is the overall effect, particularly the shape-changing multi-color overlay ones for very big or complicated data events. This coincidence must prove something, but dunno what -- maybe that ideas are lurking everywhere, near fully formed, just waiting for someone to set them free.
Last edited by arcniz; 26th June 2012 at 00:36.